CHARLES D. HUDSON TRANSITIONAL CENTER

Last updated October 4, 2026.(DS)

A Transitional Center Inside a Prison System in Crisis

Charles D. Hudson Transitional Center sits in LaGrange, in Troup County, and holds 154 men at a close-security classification. It is a transitional center — a reentry facility — and GPS's standing record describes it as operating at Rutledge State Prison, the host institution. Its leadership is stable by GDC standards: Charles M. Fleming has served as correctional superintendent since January 2021, with Katrina Louise Thompson as correctional assistant superintendent since January 2022. That stability is the facility's most favorable public fact. Almost everything else in the record — a state liability payout, a death, and a documented use-of-force episode — has to be read against the systemwide conditions GPS has documented across Georgia's prisons, because a 154-bed transitional center does not exist outside the department that runs it.

A State Liability Payout Tied to the Facility

The clearest documented accountability event in the public record is financial. According to the Georgia Department of Administrative Services Risk Management settlement ledger, obtained through an open records request, the state paid a $200,000 liability settlement in the matter of Brenda Etheridge, tied to an incident at Charles D. Hudson Transitional Center in 2023. The ledger entry records the incident date as April 6, 2023. Settlement ledgers of this kind record that the state paid and that the payment was tied to a specific facility and date; they do not, on their own, establish what happened, who was involved, or any admission of fault. What they do establish is that a claim arising from this facility was serious enough, and sufficiently supported, that the state chose to resolve it with a six-figure payment rather than litigate it.

The CERT Team Assault on Michael Schullerman

Separately, GPS's intelligence records document a use-of-force episode at the facility involving the department's CERT team — the Correctional Emergency Response Team. According to those records, CERT team officers assaulted resident Michael Schullerman at Charles D. Hudson on April 6, 2025, leaving him with a split lip that required 12 stitches, and then coerced him into signing a false statement about how he was injured. GPS's records describe the assault as unjustified and describe other residents as having been beaten in the same episode. The date is notable: April 6, 2025 falls almost exactly two years after the April 6, 2023 incident date recorded in the Etheridge settlement ledger — a coincidence of calendar that carries no evidentiary weight, but which underscores how thin the public paper trail is on this facility. GPS has received recurring accounts of CERT team use of force at Charles D. Hudson, and the Schullerman episode is the most specifically documented of them.

One Death in the Registry

GPS's mortality registry records a single death at Charles D. Hudson Transitional Center since January 1, 2020. Mickey Skyles died June 24, 2025, at the facility, at age 62. GPS's registry lists the cause as Unknown/Pending — meaning GPS does not yet know the cause and does not assign one. The registry is a floor, not a ceiling: GDC reports deaths roughly two months late, and GPS separately holds 791 deaths from 2015 through 2019 from the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project series, which are not included in the since-2020 count. Across the whole system, GPS has independently tracked 1,896 deaths in GDC custody since 2020.

Staffing Collapse and the Conditions That Reach a 154-Bed Facility

The conditions that produce events like the Schullerman assault are systemwide, and GPS has documented them as a single integrated structural finding rather than a set of isolated facility problems. Officer vacancies in Georgia's prisons have run between 49.3% and 60% systemwide for multiple years, against a national standard of no more than 10%; at Valdosta State Prison the rate reached 80% by April 2024. The hiring pipeline cannot close the gap — the acceptance rate is under 15%, and 82.7% of new hires leave within their first year — and Georgia ranks last of 50 states for correctional-officer pay. The October 2024 DOJ 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." Roughly 31% of the system's approximately 49,000 incarcerated people are validated members of 315 different security threat groups, more than double the national average, and both DOJ and the Guidehouse 2024 consultant assessment concluded that gangs effectively run multiple 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. A transitional center with 154 residents and a superintendent in his fifth year is not exempt from any of this; it is downstream of it.

Infrastructure, Food, and the Force Multipliers

GPS treats infrastructure collapse as a force multiplier for the violence, classification, gang-control, and mortality crises documented at the facility level. Most GDC facilities are 30 to 40-plus years old, with documented patterns of deferred maintenance that have produced systemwide failures: broken cell-door locks (a 2012 Hays audit found roughly 42% non-functional, confirmed by Guidehouse in 2024), 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.

Food service is a related failure. GDC spends approximately $1.69 per person per day on food, and has 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, about $432 million, than on their food. The Marshall Project corroborated the pattern in a May 16, 2026 investigation by Schwartzapfel, "Rats, Insects and Mold," independently 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 DOJ documented in October 2024. GPS has separately documented a systemic pattern of food-service sanitation failure that DPH 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; that contradiction is the analytical center of GPS's investigation "Dunked, Stacked, and Served."

Sexual Violence as a Systemwide Baseline

Sexual violence in GDC facilities is systemic, and 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. The documented clusters 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, including Cameron Cheeks's November 2024 plea — a hire-fire-rehire case 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 to 2019. The Ashley Diamond litigation established the constitutional baseline and launched the DOJ investigation. None of these events occurred at Charles D. Hudson; they are the systemwide conditions under which a 154-bed transitional center operates, and GPS treats them as the analytical center of any GDC violence or staff-misconduct narrative rather than as facility-isolated incidents.

What the Record Does and Does Not Show

Charles D. Hudson Transitional Center's public record is short: a $200,000 state settlement tied to a 2023 incident, a documented CERT team assault on Michael Schullerman in April 2025, and one death — Mickey Skyles, June 24, 2025, cause Unknown/Pending — in GPS's since-2020 registry. GPS has received recurring accounts of CERT team use of force at this facility. What the record does not contain is any public GDC acknowledgment of the Schullerman episode, any explanation of the Etheridge settlement, or any cause determination for Skyles's death. That absence is a gap in what GPS holds, not proof of concealment — but it is the gap a reader should notice.

Sources

This analysis draws on the Georgia Department of Administrative Services Risk Management settlement ledger obtained through an open records request; GPS's mortality registry and intelligence records; the October 2024 U.S. Department of Justice findings letter; the Guidehouse 2024 consultant assessment; GDC and DPH records; The Marshall Project's May 16, 2026 investigation by Schwartzapfel; on-record testimony from former GDC sergeant Tyler Ryals; and GPS's own systemic reporting on staffing, infrastructure, food service, and sexual violence across Georgia's prisons.