CHARLES D. HUDSON TRANSITIONAL CENTER

Last updated August 23, 2026.(DS)

Charles D. Hudson Transitional Center

Charles D. Hudson Transitional Center is a close-security men's facility in LaGrange, Troup County, operating as a transitional center under Rutledge State Prison. The facility holds a population of 155 and is led by Warden Charles Fleming, with Assistant Superintendent Katrina Thompson, Chief of Security Lonesca Carlton, and Business Office staff Karen Owens. GPS's records document one confirmed incident at the facility — a CERT Team assault on a resident — alongside a state liability settlement, and the facility sits within a correctional system whose structural failures have been documented at length by federal investigators, independent consultants, and GPS's own reporting.

A CERT Team Assault and a Six-Figure Settlement

The most serious incident GPS has documented at Charles D. Hudson involves a CERT Team assault on resident Michael Schullerman. According to GPS's intelligence records, CERT Team officers assaulted Schullerman on April 6, 2025, beating him and splitting his lip badly enough to require 12 stitches. The records further indicate that Schullerman was coerced into falsifying a statement about how the injury occurred — a detail that, if accurate, points to an effort to obscure the use of force rather than merely to inflict it. GPS's records describe the assault as having occurred without justification.

The facility also appears in the State of Georgia's own liability records. According to a settlement ledger maintained by the Georgia Department of Administrative Services Risk Management division and obtained through open records, the state paid $200,000 in 2023 to settle a claim brought by Brenda Etheridge tied to an incident at Charles D. Hudson Transitional Center on April 6, 2023. The settlement is a court-verified, corroborated record — a six-figure acknowledgment of state liability connected to this facility. The two April 6 dates, two years apart, are coincidental; they represent separate incidents in the facility's recent history.

Staffing Collapse and the Loss of Facility Control

Charles D. Hudson operates inside a system where officer vacancies have run between 49.3% and 60% systemwide for multiple years, against a national standard of no more than 10%. GPS's systemic findings document that the hiring pipeline cannot close the gap: acceptance rates run under 15%, and 82.7% of new hires leave within their first year. Georgia ranks last of 50 states for correctional-officer pay. The October 2024 Department of Justice findings letter concluded 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."

The consequences of that collapse are not abstract. Approximately 31% of the system's roughly 49,000 incarcerated people are validated members of 315 different security threat groups — more than double the national average. Both the DOJ and the Guidehouse 2024 consultant assessment independently concluded that gangs effectively run multiple GDC facilities, controlling access to phones, showers, food, and bed assignments. 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 roughly 1,250 maximum-security inmates. GPS treats staffing collapse and gang assumption of facility control as an integrated structural finding that explains the per-facility violence, classification, mortality, and infrastructure-failure narratives documented across the system.

Food, Infrastructure, and the Conditions of Confinement

The physical conditions inside Georgia's prisons compound the staffing crisis. GPS has documented that most GDC facilities are 30 to 40-plus years old, with deferred maintenance producing 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's 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.

Food service is a particular point of failure. GDC spends approximately $1.69 per person per day on food, with a proposed $1.60 per day in 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 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. GPS has also documented a systemic pattern of food-service sanitation failure 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.

Sexual Violence as a Systemic Condition

GPS's systemic findings identify sexual violence in GDC facilities as pervasive. The October 2024 DOJ findings letter concluded that sexual assault 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%. 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 documented by the DOJ include 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. GPS treats this pattern as the analytical center of any GDC violence or staff-misconduct narrative, not as facility-isolated incidents.

Sources

This analysis draws on GPS's own intelligence records and systemic findings, including documentation of the CERT Team assault on Michael Schullerman at Charles D. Hudson Transitional Center; a State of Georgia liability settlement ledger obtained through open records from the Georgia Department of Administrative Services Risk Management division; the October 2024 Department of Justice findings letter; the Guidehouse 2024 consultant assessment; reporting by The Marshall Project; and GPS's own investigative coverage of GDC staffing, food service, infrastructure, and sexual violence patterns.