Last updated November 8, 2026.(DS)

Patten Probation Detention Center: A Small Facility, a Thin Medical Matrix, and Two Deaths on the Record

Patten Probation Detention Center sits in Lakeland, in Lanier County, and operates as a probation detention center — the kind of facility GDC's own accreditation spreadsheets group with "probation detention/ITF" institutions rather than with the state's medium- and close-security prisons. It holds men. Its leadership is stable on paper: Jacob T. Bell has served as correctional superintendent since November 22, 2023, with Candice Brooken as correctional assistant superintendent since the same date. What follows is not a story of a facility in open crisis. It is a story of what the public record for a small facility actually contains — a contracted medical staffing matrix with almost nothing on it, an audit calendar that shows the institution being inspected on schedule, and two deaths GPS has recorded since 2020, one of them coded by the Department as natural and one as suicide.

The Physical Plant and What the Record Says About Programming

Patten's standing profile in GPS's facility records is sparse, and that sparseness is itself a finding. The facility is a probation detention center operating under GDC, holding a male population, in Lakeland. Beyond that, the public record GPS holds does not describe housing units, dormitory configuration, segregation capacity, or a program roster in the way it does for the state's larger prisons.

What the record does show is the policy architecture that governs programming at every GDC facility, including this one. GDC's Standard Operating Procedures establish faith- and character-based initiatives in designated dormitories and facilities, with minimum program lengths of twelve and twenty-four months respectively (SOP 503.01, Faith and Character-Based Initiatives). They establish religious accommodations — worship services, clergy access, dietary accommodation, religious literature and grooming (SOP 106.11, Religious Accommodations). They establish High School Equivalency and GED testing through contracted adult education centers (SOP 108.04), and special education services for incarcerated people under 22 with disabilities, including Individualized Education Plans (SOP 108.03). Whether Patten runs each of these at scale is not something the public record GPS holds establishes. The SOPs describe what the Department is obligated to provide; they do not document what a given facility delivers.

A Contracted Medical Matrix With One Counselor and No Dentist

The most concrete documentary record of what Patten offers the people held there comes from GDC's mental health and dental contract with MHM Correctional Services, released to GPS through an open records request (R032595-101926, fulfilled October 2026). The contract's staffing amendments are unusually specific, and for Patten they are unusually thin.

MHM Amendment 9 lists a Mental Health Counselor allocation of 1.00 FTE — forty hours per week — at a FY23 annual cost of $75,071.91. That single counselor is the entire mental health allocation: the amendment's total mental health figure is the same 1.00 FTE at the same cost. Amendment 13, the later staffing matrix, lists the same position at 1.00 FTE, 40.00 hours per week, at a rate card of $36.09, for an annual cost of $75,072, and again a Total MH figure of 1.00 FTE.

The dental line is blank. Amendment 9 records Patten's total dental allocation as 0.00 FTE at a FY23 annual cost of $0.00, and Amendment 13's staffing matrix lists no Dentist, no Dental Hygienist, and no Dental Assistant FTE for the facility. Whatever dental care is delivered at Patten is not delivered by contract staff allocated to Patten on the state's own matrix.

The medical side of the contract tells a different and more complicated story. Centurion's staffing matrices for Amendments 4 and 5 list, for Patten, a day-shift LPN at 40.00 hours, a day-shift NP/PA at 20.00 hours (0.50 FTE), a day-shift RN at 40.00 hours, and an RN Administrator at 40.00 hours. The contracted-versus-worked workbook for July through December 2025 shows Patten's LPN line running well above its contracted hours — 329.75 hours worked against 177.14 contracted in July 2025, 342.50 against 177.14 in August, 318.50 against 171.43 in September. The quarterly rollup for 2025 Q3 records Patten at 3.5000 matrix FTEs and 3.4489 worked FTEs, a fill rate of 0.9854, with no penalty assessed. Read plainly, the contract data shows a facility whose nursing coverage was met and whose mental health and dental allocation was, on paper, one counselor and nothing else.

Audits on Schedule: Accreditation, PREA, and Internal Review

Patten appears on GDC's audit calendars with a regularity that is worth stating precisely, because it frames what the inspection record can and cannot tell a reader.

GDC's FY2022 ACA accreditation audit schedule lists Patten. The FY2022 PREA audit schedule lists Patten as scheduled for a PREA audit on April 12–13, 2022. The FY2022 internal audits calendar schedules an internal audit of the facility in June 2022. The FY2024 internal audits calendar lists a Patten audit on January 9, 2024. The FY2026 audit calendar schedules Patten on both August 18 and August 19, 2025. And GDC's spreadsheet of probation detention and ITF facilities with accreditation schedules lists Patten among them.

None of these entries tells a reader what the auditors found. A schedule is a schedule. But the pattern matters analytically: Patten is a facility that gets audited — for accreditation, for compliance with the Prison Rape Elimination Act, and internally — on a recurring cycle. GPS's broader reporting has documented that inspection and audit scores at GDC facilities can coexist with conditions that inspection protocols are not built to capture, particularly in food service, where scheduled walkthroughs do not assess equipment under load. The same caution applies here: Patten's presence on audit calendars establishes that oversight occurred, not that conditions were adequate.

Two Deaths, and What the Cause Coding Can and Cannot Tell Us

GPS's mortality registry records two deaths at Patten Probation Detention Center since January 1, 2020.

Johnny Lee Dale died February 23, 2020, at Patten; he was 46. GDC's custodial mortality dataset lists him under GDC #793445 and codes the cause of his death as "Natural."

Robert Dewayne Coleman died August 13, 2022, at Patten; he was 32. GPS's registry lists the cause as suicide.

Those are the two deaths GPS holds for this facility in the 2020-onward registry — a floor, not a ceiling, since GDC reports deaths roughly two months late. GPS separately holds 791 deaths from January 2015 through December 2019 in its wider mortality series, the Department's own cause coding obtained by open records request rather than autopsy findings.

The cause coding deserves scrutiny on its own terms. GPS's analysis of death records indicates that at Patten, GDC's "Natural" cause-of-death coding was not based on an autopsy finding — a pattern GPS has documented across the state's mortality data, where the Department's administrative coding and the underlying medical record do not always rest on the same evidentiary footing. Across roughly 200 records where GPS already held a cause of death, GPS's records and the UCLA Law Behind Bars dataset agreed on cause about 84.5 percent of the time. That is a high rate of agreement, and it is also a reminder that the disagreements cluster somewhere — and that a "Natural" code is an administrative classification, not a pathology report.

A Small Facility Inside a System Under Strain

Patten's own record is thin, but it does not sit outside the system-wide conditions GPS has documented, and those conditions bear directly on what a probation detention center can be expected to deliver.

GPS has documented that officer vacancies in Georgia's prisons have run between 49.3 and 60 percent systemwide for multiple years, against a national standard of no more than 10 percent, and that Georgia ranks last of 50 states for correctional-officer pay. The October 2024 DOJ findings letter concluded that GDC's leadership had "lost control of its facilities" and faulted the Department for placing too much blame on gangs and insufficient emphasis on understaffing. GPS has documented that most GDC facilities are 30 to 40-plus years old, with deferred maintenance producing broken cell-door locks, inoperative surveillance and fire-alarm systems, mold and water failures, and pest infestations — a pattern the DOJ findings, the 2024 Guidehouse assessment, and Commissioner Oliver's public "end of life" statements all corroborate. And GPS has documented that sexual violence in GDC facilities is systemic: the DOJ concluded sexual assault is "rampant," and of 456 sexual-abuse allegations recorded in 2022, only 35 were substantiated.

None of that reporting establishes a specific condition at Patten. What it establishes is the environment in which a facility with one contracted mental health counselor and no contracted dental FTE operates — and why a thin public record at a small institution is not the same thing as a clean one.

Sources

This analysis draws on Georgia Department of Corrections records — the MHM Correctional Services mental health and dental contract amendments and the Centurion medical staffing matrices and worked-hours workbooks released to GPS under public records request R032595-101926; GDC's FY2022, FY2024, and FY2026 audit calendars and its PREA and ACA accreditation schedules; and the Department's custodial mortality dataset. It draws on GPS's mortality registry and its analysis of cause-of-death coding, and on GPS's systemwide reporting on staffing collapse, infrastructure failure, and sexual violence in GDC custody, including the October 2024 DOJ findings letter and the 2024 Guidehouse assessment as described in that reporting. Facility leadership is drawn from GPS's personnel records. Firsthand narratives referenced are published in Georgia Prisoners' Speak — Tell My Story.