CHARLES D. HUDSON TRANSITIONAL CENTER

Last updated October 11, 2026.(DS)

A Transitional Center Inside a Prison System in Crisis

Charles D. Hudson Transitional Center sits in LaGrange, in Troup County, operating as a transitional center at Rutledge State Prison. It holds a close-security population of 154 men. Charles M. Fleming has served as correctional superintendent since January 2021, with Katrina Louise Thompson as correctional assistant superintendent since January 2022.

Transitional centers are the system's reentry tier — the last stop before release — and the public record of what happens inside Hudson is thin but not empty. It includes a six-figure state liability payout, a single death recorded since 2020, and accounts of a tactical-team assault on a resident. Read against GPS's systemwide findings on staffing, food service, infrastructure, and sexual violence, those discrete items describe a facility embedded in a department the U.S. Department of Justice concluded had lost control of its prisons.

A $200,000 Settlement and a CERT Team Assault

The most concrete accountability record at Hudson 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 case of Brenda Etheridge, tied to Charles D. Hudson Transitional Center and an incident dated April 6, 2023. The payout is a court-found liability — the state's own ledger records the money leaving the treasury — though the settlement documents do not, in the record available here, describe the underlying facts of the Etheridge matter.

A separate episode is documented in GPS's intelligence records. On April 6, 2025, CERT Team officers assaulted resident Michael Schullerman at Charles D. Hudson Transitional Center, leaving him with a split lip that required 12 stitches. The same records describe officers coercing Schullerman into a false statement about how he was injured. GPS has received recurring accounts of CERT team use of force against residents at this facility, and the Schullerman episode is the specific, named instance GPS's records carry.

The two events are not connected in the record — different years, different subjects — but they point in the same direction: a facility where the state has both paid out for harm and where residents have reported being injured by the officers assigned to control them.

One Death, and What the Registry Does Not Say

GPS's mortality registry, which tracks deaths in GDC custody from January 2020 forward, records one death at Charles D. Hudson Transitional Center in that period. Mickey Skyles died June 24, 2025, at Charles D. Hudson Transitional Center, at age 62. GPS's registry lists the cause as Unknown/Pending — meaning the record does not yet establish why he died, and this analysis does not speculate.

The registry's yearly breakdown shows zero deaths at Hudson in 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2026, with the single death falling in 2025. That count is a floor, not a ceiling: GDC reports deaths to the state roughly two months late, so recent deaths may not yet appear. The absence of recorded deaths at a 154-bed transitional facility is unremarkable on its face — transitional centers hold smaller populations than the state prisons that dominate GPS's mortality data. What matters analytically is that the one death on the books is coded Unknown/Pending, which is the registry's way of saying the cause has not been resolved in the records GPS holds.

Staffing Collapse, Gang Control, and the Conditions Hudson Inherits

Hudson's 154 residents live inside a department whose structural problems GPS has documented at length. Officer vacancies across Georgia's prisons have run between 49.3% and 60% systemwide for multiple years, against a national standard of no more than 10%. The hiring pipeline cannot close the gap: the acceptance rate is 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 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. DOJ and the Guidehouse 2024 consultant assessment independently 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.

GPS treats staffing collapse and gang assumption of facility control as the integrated structural finding that explains the per-facility violence, classification, mortality, and infrastructure narratives across the system. Hudson, as a transitional center, is not exempt from the conditions that finding describes — it draws its staff from the same depleted pool and sits inside the same department the DOJ faulted.

Food, Sanitation, and the Gap Between Inspection Scores and What Residents Report

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 ($432 million) than on their food.

The Marshall Project corroborated the pattern on May 16, 2026, in reporting by Schwartzapfel ("Rats, Insects and Mold") that independently documented rats in kitchens, insects in food, moldy trays, and visible malnutrition across Georgia facilities, and quoted GPS connecting chronic underfeeding to the violence pattern the DOJ documented in October 2024.

GPS has separately documented a systemic pattern of food-service sanitation failure across GDC kitchens 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 — the contradiction at the center of GPS's investigation "Dunked, Stacked, and Served."

Infrastructure, Sexual Violence, and the System Hudson Belongs To

Most GDC facilities are 30 to 40-plus years old, with documented patterns of deferred maintenance that have produced systemwide infrastructure 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 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 in GDC facilities is systemic. 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 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, 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 2001–2019. The Ashley Diamond litigation established the constitutional baseline and launched the DOJ investigation.

What the Record Shows

Charles D. Hudson Transitional Center is a small facility with a short public record: a $200,000 state liability settlement tied to a 2023 incident, one death since 2020 coded Unknown/Pending, and a documented 2025 CERT team assault on a resident that left him needing 12 stitches. None of that, on its own, describes a facility in crisis.

But Hudson does not operate on its own. It operates inside a department the DOJ found had lost control of its facilities, with officer vacancies near 50% or higher, gangs controlling movement and access at multiple prisons, food spending under 60 cents a meal, and a sexual-violence reporting system that substantiated 7.7% of allegations in 2022. GPS has independently tracked 1,896 deaths in GDC custody since 2020. The question the Hudson record raises is not whether a 154-bed transitional center has its own crisis, but whether the conditions the DOJ documented stop at the gate of a reentry facility — and the accounts GPS has collected suggest they do not.

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 facility records; GPS's own investigative reporting on staffing, food service, sanitation, infrastructure, and sexual violence across Georgia Department of Corrections facilities; the October 2024 U.S. Department of Justice findings letter; the 2024 Guidehouse consultant assessment; and reporting by The Marshall Project.