PHILLIPS TRANSITIONAL CENTER

Last updated October 4, 2026.(DS)

A Transitional Center Inside a Prison System in Crisis

Phillips Transitional Center sits in Buford, in Gwinnett County, on the grounds of Phillips State Prison — a transitional facility operated by the Georgia Department of Corrections for a male population at a close-security designation. GPS's standing facility record describes it plainly as a "transitional center at Phillips SP," and the state's own metadata lists a population of 203. The facility is led by Correctional Superintendent Verona Baly, who has held the post since January 2025, with Deputy Warden Wanda S. Brown serving as correctional assistant superintendent since 2018.

Transitional centers occupy an unusual place in Georgia's prison geography. They are, by design, the last stop before release — work-release and reentry facilities meant to bridge incarceration and community life. But the evidence assembled here shows that Phillips Transitional Center does not operate in isolation from the structural failures GPS has documented across the GDC system. Staffing collapse, classification drift, infrastructure decay, and a mortality record that GPS tracks as a floor rather than a ceiling all bear on what happens inside a 203-person facility in Gwinnett County.

This analysis draws on GPS's systemic findings, GPS's mortality registry, state facility records, and reporting from The Marshall Project. It examines what Phillips Transitional Center is, who has died there, and the systemwide conditions that shape the facility's operating reality.

Two Deaths in GPS's Registry

GPS's mortality registry — a database GPS maintains independently, drawing on the Department's own cause coding obtained through open records requests — records two deaths at Phillips Transitional Center since January 1, 2020. That count is a floor, not a ceiling: GDC reports deaths roughly two months late, and GPS's registry captures what has been documented, not everything that has occurred.

Anthony Lamar Johnson died October 10, 2021, at Phillips Transitional Center; GPS's registry lists the cause as Natural/Medical. He was 62.

Wayne A Lockett died December 23, 2024, at Phillips Transitional Center; GPS's registry lists the cause as Unknown/Pending. He was 67. A cause recorded as Unknown/Pending means GPS does not yet know why he died — the registry does not guess, and neither does this page.

Two deaths over five years at a 203-person facility is not, on its face, a mortality crisis of the kind GPS has documented at larger institutions. But the registry's coverage note is important context: GPS separately holds 791 deaths from 2015 to 2019 across the system from the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project series — the Department's own cause coding, obtained by open records request — and those are not included in the since-2020 count. The two deaths at Phillips Transitional Center are what GPS has recorded in the current registry window, and the record is incomplete by design of the reporting lag.

Staffing Collapse and the Limits of Supervision

The most consequential structural fact bearing on Phillips Transitional Center is one that applies across the entire Georgia prison system: GDC cannot staff its facilities. Officer vacancies 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 vacancy 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. Georgia ranks last of all 50 states for correctional-officer pay.

The October 2024 DOJ findings letter concluded explicitly 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." Approximately 31% of the system's roughly 49,000 incarcerated people are validated members of 315 different security threat groups — more than double the national average. Both 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 approximately 1,250 maximum-security inmates. That testimony is the kind of on-record corroboration that gives the vacancy statistics their concrete meaning: a 60% vacancy rate is not an abstraction when it means one officer standing alone on a compound of more than a thousand people.

For a transitional center, the staffing problem carries a particular irony. Transitional facilities are supposed to prepare people for supervised release — to provide structure, work assignments, and reentry programming. When the supervisory ratio collapses systemwide, the transitional mission is one of the first things to erode.

Classification Drift and the Transitional Mission

GPS has documented a systemic pattern of classification drift across Georgia's prisons: medium-security facilities housing high numbers of close-security inmates without the staffing and infrastructure to match. The GDC's own numbers, based on October 27, 2025 data, show how medium-security prisons are now functioning like high-security facilities — a drift that GPS treats as a driver of the state's broader prison crisis.

Phillips Transitional Center carries a close-security designation in GPS's facility record, and its population is 203. The classification question at a transitional center is different from the one at a medium-security prison: the facility's purpose is reintegration, and its residents are typically approaching release. But the systemwide drift GPS has documented means that security designations and actual operating conditions have diverged across Georgia — and transitional centers are not exempt from the consequences of that divergence.

GPS's reporting has described classification drift as a pattern documented across multiple facilities, with medium-security prisons operating as close-security institutions without adequate staffing or infrastructure. The finding is systemic, not facility-specific, and it shapes how any individual facility's security designation should be read.

Infrastructure, Food, and the Conditions of Confinement

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 (the Hays 2012 audit found roughly 42% non-functional, a finding the Guidehouse 2024 assessment confirmed), 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 about the system's physical plant 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.

Food service is one of the clearest illustrations. GDC spends approximately $1.69 per person per day on food (2024) 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 a Schwartzapfel investigation titled "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 the 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. Inmate-maintenance worker accounts collected at Dooly State Prison describe thousands of roaches inside kitchen equipment; a Coastal State Prison resident's account corroborates the tray contamination. 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 is the analytical center of GPS's investigation "Dunked, Stacked, and Served."

Sexual Violence as a Systemic Finding

Sexual violence in GDC facilities is systemic, and the evidence for that conclusion is among the most documented in GPS's body of work. 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, Georgia's largest women's facility — including the November 2024 Cameron Cheeks plea, a hire-fire-rehire case that 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.

These are findings about the system, not about Phillips Transitional Center specifically. But they establish the operating environment: a prison system in which the federal government has concluded that sexual assault is rampant, that investigations are effectively non-functional, and that the agency has never certified compliance with the federal law designed to prevent it.

Leadership and Accountability

Phillips Transitional Center is led by Correctional Superintendent Verona Baly, who has held the post since January 2025. Deputy Warden Wanda S. Brown has served as correctional assistant superintendent since 2018 — a tenure that predates the current superintendent and spans the period covered by GPS's mortality registry at this facility.

The facility operates on the grounds of Phillips State Prison, and GPS's standing record describes it as a transitional center at that host facility. The transitional center's residents are under the superintendent's authority, and the host-facility relationship is the one GPS's facility record documents.

What the Record Shows

Phillips Transitional Center is a small facility — 203 people — in a system of roughly 49,000. Its two recorded deaths since 2020, while each a named individual whose death GPS documents, do not by themselves establish a facility-level mortality crisis. What the record does establish is that Phillips Transitional Center operates inside a prison system that the U.S. Department of Justice found has lost control of its facilities, where gangs control access to basic necessities, where officer vacancies run at 49.3% to 60%, where food service operates on under 60 cents per meal, and where sexual assault is rampant and investigations are non-functional.

Anthony Lamar Johnson died at Phillips Transitional Center on October 10, 2021, at age 62; GPS's registry lists the cause as Natural/Medical. Wayne A Lockett died there on December 23, 2024, at age 67; GPS's registry lists the cause as Unknown/Pending. GPS has independently tracked 1,896 deaths in GDC custody since 2020 — a figure that is always a floor, because GDC reports deaths roughly two months late.

Sources

This analysis draws on GPS's systemic findings on staffing collapse, classification drift, infrastructure failure, food-service sanitation, and sexual violence in Georgia Department of Corrections facilities; GPS's mortality registry, which tracks deaths in GDC custody and separately holds 791 deaths from 2015 to 2019 obtained through open records request from the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project series; GDC facility metadata and personnel records; the October 2024 U.S. Department of Justice findings letter; the Guidehouse 2024 consultant assessment; the Hays 2012 audit; and reporting from The Marshall Project, including the May 16, 2026 Schwartzapfel investigation "Rats, Insects and Mold." On-record testimony from former GDC sergeant Tyler Ryals was provided to GPS.