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
On April 6, 2025, a CERT team under Lt. Lonesca Carlton assaulted resident Michael Schullerman at Charles D. Hudson Transitional Center, splitting his lip and coercing him into a false statement, per Georgia Prisoners' Speak reporting.
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 May 31, 2026.
A CERT Assault and a Coerced Lie
On April 6, 2025, a Correctional Emergency Response Team (CERT) from Rutledge State Prison entered the Charles D. Hudson Transitional Center in LaGrange. According to reporting by Georgia Prisoners’ Speak (GPS), the team — acting under the direction of Lieutenant Lonesca Carlton, who serves as Chief of Security at the facility — assaulted multiple residents without justification. One of those residents, Michael Schullerman, was beaten so severely that his lip was split open, a wound that ultimately required twelve stitches. After the beating, GPS’s reporting documents that Schullerman was coerced by the CERT officers into signing a statement that falsely described how the injury had occurred.
The incident illustrates a dynamic that GPS and federal investigators have identified across the Georgia prison system: the use of tactical teams not as emergency responders but as instruments of routine force, operating in an environment where chronic understaffing has broken down normal chains of accountability.
Staffing Collapse and the Use of Force as Policy
The assault at Charles D. Hudson did not happen in isolation. Georgia’s correctional system has operated for years with officer vacancy rates hovering between 49 and 60 percent statewide — more than five times the national standard of 10 percent or less. The U.S. Department of Justice, in its October 2024 findings letter, concluded that “the leadership of the Georgia Department of Corrections has lost control of its facilities” and placed significant blame on understaffing. That staffing vacuum, the DOJ found, has allowed violence to flourish and has enabled incidents where staff force is deployed against incarcerated people outside any meaningful oversight.
GPS has documented the systemic architecture of this collapse: a hiring pipeline that accepts fewer than 15 percent of applicants and loses 83 percent of new officers within their first year, pay that ranks last among all fifty states, and a consultant assessment (Guidehouse, 2024) confirming that gangs effectively control multiple facilities. In this context, CERT teams — originally conceived for emergencies — become roving enforcement squads whose actions, when challenged, leave victims like Schullerman facing pressure to recant or invent cover stories.
Lieutenant Carlton’s simultaneous role as the facility’s Chief of Security and the officer who directed the team that assaulted residents raises fundamental questions about how use-of-force incidents are investigated and reviewed internally at a transitional center. GPS’s reporting indicates that Schullerman’s coerced statement is one data point in a broader pattern GPS has documented: assaults followed by pressure on victims to falsify accounts, a practice that short-circuits institutional accountability and leaves incarcerated people with no safe avenue for reporting abuse.
This analysis draws on Georgia Prisoners’ Speak’s own investigative reporting on the April 2025 CERT assault at Charles D. Hudson Transitional Center, as well as systemic findings developed by GPS and the United States Department of Justice.