CHARLES D. HUDSON TRANSITIONAL CENTER
Facility Information
- Current Population
- 153
- Active Lifers
- 8 (5.2% of population) · Jun 2026 GDC report
- Address
- 100 Jim Hester Road, LaGrange, GA 30241
- Phone
- (706) 845-4018
- Fax
- (706) 845-4109
- County
- Troup County
- Operator
- GDC (Georgia Dept. of Corrections)
Leadership & Accountability (as of 2025 records)
Officials currently holding positional authority at this facility, with deaths attributed to GPS-tracked records during their leadership tenure. Inclusion reflects role-based accountability, not legal findings of personal culpability. Death counts shown as facility / career.
| Role | Name | Since | Deaths this facility / career |
|---|---|---|---|
| CORRECTIONAL SUPERINTENDENT (facility lead) | Fleming, Charles M | 2021-01-01 | 1 / 1 |
| CORRECTIONAL ASST. SUPT (facility deputy) | Thompson, Katrina Louise | 2022-01-01 | 1 / 1 |
About
GPS reporting documented a CERT team assault at Charles D. Hudson Transitional Center in April 2025: resident Michael Schullerman was beaten, his lip split requiring 12 stitches, and he was coerced into falsifying a statement. The incident, directed by Chief of Security Lonesca Carlton, illustrates a broader pattern of
Mortality Statistics
1 deaths documented at this facility from 2020 to present.
Deaths by Year
- 2026: 0
- 2025: 1
- 2024: 0
- 2023: 0
- 2022: 0
- 2021: 0
- 2020: 0
Food Safety Inspections
No inspection records are on file with the Georgia Department of Public Health for this facility. GPS has filed an open records request asking where these records are maintained.
What the score doesn't measure. DPH grades kitchen compliance on inspection day — food storage, temperatures, pest control. It does not grade whether today's trays are clean. GPS reporting has found broken dishwashers at most Georgia state prisons we've documented; trays go out wet, stacked, and visibly moldy — including at facilities with recent scores near 100.
Who inspects. Most Georgia state prisons sit in rural counties — often with fewer than 20,000 people, several with fewer than 10,000. The environmental health inspector lives in that community and often knows the kitchen staff personally. Rural inspection regimes don't have the structural independence you'd expect in a city-sized health department. Read the scores accordingly.
Read the investigation: “Dunked, Stacked and Served: Why Georgia Prison Trays Are Making People Sick”
Analysis written on June 21, 2026.
Charles D. Hudson Transitional Center, a close-security facility in LaGrange operated by the Georgia Department of Corrections, held 153 residents at last count under Warden Charles Fleming and Chief of Security Lonesca Carlton. In April 2025, GPS investigative reporting uncovered an incident at the center that raises urgent questions about the deployment and oversight of the state’s Correctional Emergency Response Teams.
A CERT Assault and a Coerced Statement
Georgia Prisoners’ Speak (GPS) reporting documents that on April 6, 2025, CERT officers from the adjacent Rutledge State Prison entered Hudson Transitional Center and assaulted multiple residents. The incident was directed by Lt. Lonesca Carlton, who serves as the facility’s chief of security. Among those targeted was Michael Schullerman, who was beaten without justification, suffering a split lip that required twelve stitches. GPS’s account further indicates that Schullerman was coerced into providing a false statement about how he sustained the injury, obscuring the role of the CERT team. The reporting, based on sources inside the facility, describes a planned punitive operation rather than a response to any immediate threat—a deployment of force that left physical and evidentiary scars.
The details of the Hudson assault cannot be viewed in isolation. GPS has documented a system in which CERT teams, originally designed for emergency response, are regularly used as instruments of control and retaliation. At Hudson, the fact that the facility’s own chief of security ordered the action and that afterward an effort was made to falsify the record suggests a breakdown of internal accountability. The Department of Justice’s October 2024 findings letter, which concluded that “the leadership of the Georgia Department of Corrections has lost control of its facilities,” speaks to the environment in which such incidents occur: understaffed, under-supervised, and with few consequences for officers who resort to violence.
Systemic Underpinnings: Staffing Collapse and a Culture of Impunity
The assault at Hudson is embedded in a statewide crisis of staffing and violence that GPS has tracked across multiple facilities. Statewide correctional officer vacancies have averaged 50 percent, with the hiring pipeline unable to close the gap—more than 80 percent of new hires leave in their first year. The DOJ’s investigation found that severe understaffing has permitted gangs to assume de facto control of many Georgia prisons, managing access to phones, food, and bed assignments. In such an environment, the pressure on remaining staff to resort to coercive, paramilitary tactics intensifies.
GPS’s systemic findings chart a related pattern of staff-on-prisoner abuse and official cover-up. The DOJ concluded that sexual assault is “rampant” in GDC facilities, and of 456 sexual-abuse allegations recorded in 2022 only 35 were substantiated—a 7.7 percent rate. Georgia has never submitted a PREA certification of full compliance to the U.S. Department of Justice in the law’s two-decade history. The Hudson assault, while not sexual in nature, reflects the same dynamics: inadequate staffing, a CERT team deployed punitively, and a coerced false statement designed to conceal what happened. When a facility’s own security chief directs a beating and the victim is pressured to lie about it, the line between state action and illegal violence blurs.
A Transitional Center Within a Hostile System
Hudson Transitional Center is a small facility, a close-security site operating at Rutledge State Prison. Its population of around 150 men makes it far smaller than the system’s troubled maximum-security prisons, but the April 2025 CERT assault demonstrates that transitional centers are not exempt from the violence that permeates Georgia corrections. GPS has received accounts of staff use of force at the facility and of retaliation against those who report it, underscoring the gap between the formal rehabilitative mission of a transitional center and the reality of punitive transfers and assault.
The facility’s leadership structure—Warden Charles Fleming, with direct security command held by Lt. Lonesca Carlton—places the individual who ordered the CERT operation in immediate operational control. GPS reporting offers no indication that Warden Fleming or any higher authority intervened to stop the assault or disciplined those responsible. In the absence of transparent investigation, the Hudson incident stands as an example of how a compromised chain of command can allow violence to proceed without consequence.
The April 2025 assault, detailed and corroborated by GPS’s own investigation, joins a growing body of evidence that Georgia’s prisons operate in a space beyond meaningful oversight. As the DOJ noted, the state’s leadership has lost control; at a small transitional center in LaGrange, that loss took the form of a split lip, twelve stitches, and a falsified record.
Sources
This analysis draws on investigative reporting by Georgia Prisoners’ Speak (GPS), which documented the April 2025 CERT attack through multiple corroborating witness accounts; GPS’s systemic findings on GDC staffing, violence, and loss of control; and the October 2024 findings letter from the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division.