CHARLES D. HUDSON TRANSITIONAL CENTER

Last updated September 13, 2026.(DS)

Charles D. Hudson Transitional Center is a close-security men's facility in LaGrange, Troup County, operating as a transitional center at Rutledge State Prison. It houses approximately 154 people under Correctional Superintendent Charles M. Fleming, who has led the facility since 2021, with Deputy Warden Katrina Louise Thompson. The record at Hudson is thin but pointed: a CERT Team assault on a resident in 2025, a six-figure state liability payout tied to a 2023 incident, and a single GPS-tracked death — all set against the structural failures GPS has documented across the Georgia Department of Corrections, from officer vacancies near 50 percent to food-service sanitation breakdown and infrastructure past its service life.

A CERT Team Assault and a Coerced Statement

On April 6, 2025, CERT Team officers at Charles D. Hudson Transitional Center assaulted resident Michael Schullerman, according to GPS reporting. The assault left Schullerman with a split lip requiring 12 stitches. GPS's reporting further describes accounts that Schullerman was coerced into falsifying a statement about how he was injured — a detail that recurs across multiple GPS-authored accounts of the incident, indicating sustained reporting on this specific event rather than a single passing mention.

The coercion allegation is the analytically significant half. When a resident is beaten and then pressured to misrepresent the cause of his injuries, the incident record itself becomes compromised: the paper trail that oversight bodies would later review has been authored under duress. GPS has documented this dynamic systemwide, where use-of-force incidents are underreported or mischaracterized in official documentation. At Hudson, the sequence alleged is a documented injury followed by an alleged attempt to rewrite what caused it.

A Six-Figure Settlement Tied to the Facility

The State of Georgia paid $200,000 to settle a liability claim brought by Brenda Etheridge, tied to an incident at Charles D. Hudson Transitional Center on April 6, 2023. The payout appears in the Georgia Department of Administrative Services Risk Management settlement ledger, obtained through open records — a court-verified, corroborated record of state liability arising from this facility.

That a six-figure payout was authorized for an incident at a transitional center holding roughly 154 people is itself a data point. Settlements of this size reflect a determination by the state's risk-management apparatus that the liability exposure warranted a substantial payment rather than a defense at trial. The Etheridge settlement and the Schullerman assault are separate incidents — one in 2023, one in 2025 — but together they establish that Hudson has generated both documented state liability and documented violence allegations within a two-year window.

Staffing Collapse as the Structural Backdrop

The incidents at Hudson did not occur in a vacuum. GPS has documented that officer vacancies in Georgia's prisons have run between 49.3 percent and 60 percent systemwide for multiple years, against a national standard of no more than 10 percent. At Valdosta State Prison the rate reached 80 percent by April 2024. The hiring pipeline cannot close the gap: acceptance rates run under 15 percent, and 82.7 percent of new hires leave within their first year. Georgia ranks last of 50 states for correctional-officer pay.

The October 2024 DOJ findings letter concluded explicitly that "the leadership of the Georgia Department of Corrections has lost control of its facilities" and faulted GDC for placing "too much blame on gangs and insufficient emphasis on understaffing." Tyler Ryals, a former GDC sergeant forced out in 2024 after whistleblowing, told GPS he had personally been the only security person on the entire Telfair compound of approximately 1,250 maximum-security inmates — on-record testimony that corroborates the vacancy figures at the level of a single shift.

This is the environment in which CERT teams operate. Correctional Emergency Response Teams are deployed precisely because routine staffing is insufficient. When a CERT deployment ends with a resident needing 12 stitches and an allegedly coerced statement, the incident reflects not only individual conduct but the structural conditions that make such conduct possible: understaffed facilities, undertrained personnel, and accountability mechanisms that have demonstrably failed.

Food, Infrastructure, and the Conditions of Confinement

GPS has documented that GDC spends approximately $1.69 per person per day on food as of 2024, with $1.60 per day proposed for FY27 — under 60 cents per meal — against the FDA Thrifty Food Plan estimate of roughly $10 per day for an adult man's nutritionally adequate diet. The state spends approximately 14 times more on medical care for incarcerated people ($432 million) than on their food. The Marshall Project independently corroborated the pattern in May 2026, reporting rats in kitchens, insects in food, moldy trays, and visible malnutrition across Georgia facilities, and quoting GPS connecting chronic underfeeding to the violence pattern the DOJ documented in October 2024.

GPS has also documented a systemic pattern of food-service sanitation failure across GDC kitchens that Department of Public Health inspection scores systematically fail to capture: tray-sanitizing dishwashers broken for sustained periods, sustained roach and rodent infestation in kitchen and serving areas, and meals served on visibly contaminated trays. The pattern is hidden from DPH scores because inspections are scheduled walkthroughs that do not assess equipment under load, and because GPS has documented professional overlap between inspectors and facility staff in small-county settings. High DPH scores at GDC facilities coexist with sustained witness reports of equipment failure and food contamination — the contradiction at the center of GPS's investigation "Dunked, Stacked, and Served."

Most GDC facilities are 30-40+ years old, with documented patterns of deferred maintenance that have produced systemwide infrastructure failures: broken cell-door locks, inoperative surveillance and fire-alarm systems, mold and water failures, broken kitchen sanitization equipment, and pest infestations. The DOJ October 2024 findings, the Guidehouse 2024 assessment, and Commissioner Oliver's public "end of life" statements all corroborate the pattern. GPS treats infrastructure collapse as a force multiplier for the violence, classification, gang-control, and mortality crises documented at the facility level.

Sexual Violence as a Systemic Pattern

The October 2024 DOJ findings letter concluded that sexual assault in GDC facilities is "rampant" and that GDC does not reasonably protect incarcerated people, including LGBTI individuals, from sexual harm. Of 456 sexual-abuse allegations recorded in 2022, only 35 were substantiated — 7.7 percent. GDC's own consultants, PREA Auditors of America, reviewed 388 PREA investigation files in May 2022 and found that not one met the law's standards. Georgia has never submitted a PREA certification of full compliance to the U.S. Department of Justice in the law's two-decade history.

Specific clusters include the DOJ-documented at-knifepoint sexual assaults at Pulaski State Prison, the 2020 Smith State Prison case in which an incarcerated person was waterboarded and sexually assaulted by his cellmate, and at least four staff arrests for sexual assault since 2020 at Lee Arrendale State Prison, Georgia's largest women's facility — including the November 2024 Cameron Cheeks plea, a hire-fire-rehire case that GPS treats as an artifact of the staffing and hiring-standards collapse. GPS has also documented three women strangled in Lee Arrendale's A Unit between 2022 and 2024 — Sherry Joyce, Hallie Reed, and Angela Anderson — a figure exceeding the entire BJS-recorded national women-in-state-prison homicide total across 2001-2019.

The Mortality Record at Hudson and Its Host Facility

GPS has independently tracked 1,890 deaths in GDC custody since 2020. At Charles D. Hudson itself, GPS's mortality records show one death since 2020: Mickey Skyles, who died on June 24, 2025, at age 62, with the cause listed as unknown or pending. That single recorded death — against the backdrop of the host facility's far larger toll — reflects both Hudson's smaller population and the reality that GPS's mortality tracking is a floor rather than a ceiling, given GDC's roughly two-month reporting lag.

The host facility carries a much heavier record. At Johnson State Prison, GPS records multiple in-custody deaths in 2020 alone, including Leroy Walker Brown (January 13), Robert Michael Stanfield (February 25), George E. Robbins (April 9), Anthony Termayne Wilson (May 8), Michael Edward Anderson (May 9), Ulysses Wiggins (June 12), Jesse William Spriggs (July 18), and Michael Lee Strickland (August 15). David Henegar was killed by his cellmate at Johnson State Prison on October 16, 2021, at age 44, after staff allegedly ignored safety concerns — a homicide that echoes the systemic failure of protective custody and classification GPS has documented across GDC facilities. Johnson State Prison has also generated its own food-safety record, with a documented inspection failure involving contamination in December 2023 and reports of contaminated food-service trays and diseased conditions in April 2026.

Sources

This analysis draws on GPS-authored investigative reporting and systemic findings; the Georgia Department of Administrative Services Risk Management settlement ledger obtained through open records; the October 2024 Department of Justice findings letter; the Guidehouse 2024 consultant assessment; on-record testimony from former GDC sergeant Tyler Ryals; and independent reporting by The Marshall Project. Inmate and family accounts collected by GPS staff inform the editorial framing of the documented evidence.