Last updated November 8, 2026.(DS)

Smith Transitional Center: A Work-Release Gate With a Mortality Record of Its Own

Smith Transitional Center sits in Claxton, in Evans County, and is the transitional center attached to Smith State Prison. GDC's own directory lists it as a close-security facility for men with a population of 309, led by Superintendent Deidra M Edwards since 2021 and Assistant Superintendent Carl Anthony Anderson since July 2025. Its public record is thin in the way that transitional centers' records usually are — an audit calendar, a PREA schedule, a staffing matrix — but the mortality record is not thin at all. GPS's registry carries three deaths at this facility since January 2020, and the Department's own coding of those deaths raises questions the paperwork does not answer.

Three Deaths, Three Codings, and What the Records Actually Say

GPS's mortality registry records three deaths at Smith Transitional Center since the start of 2020. Jerry Nemi Parker, 43, died February 24, 2020; GDC coded his death as "Suicide." Darrell Decarlos Porter, 38, died August 9, 2020; GDC's coding is "Accident." Garry Lloyd Matthews, 24, died August 30, 2024, and the cause in GPS's registry remains Unknown/Pending — meaning GPS does not yet know it, not that any cause has been ruled out.

The coding itself is the analytical problem. GPS's internal analysis holds that GDC's manner-of-death designations reflect the Department's own classification coding rather than an autopsy finding, and that in these Smith Transitional Center records no pathologist examined the body for that determination. That distinction matters most for the "Accident" designation: GPS's analysis holds that a medical examiner, coroner, or autopsy determination would supersede a GDC coding of "Accidental" if one is later obtained. Separately, GDC's record does not officially confirm one of the deaths — a gap GPS's analysis attributes to the absence of an official-confirmation flag on the record, not to any finding about the death itself.

These are not abstractions. GPS's comparison of its cause-of-death data against a custodial mortality dataset obtained from a university law school through an open records request to GDC — covering 2015 through 2021 — found agreement in 84.5 percent of 200 records where GPS already held a recorded cause, with most disagreements being cases where GPS's classification was more specific than GDC's "Undetermined" category. The Smith records sit inside that larger reconciliation problem.

Families Describe a Death, a CPR Attempt, and Officers Who Did Not Step In

GPS has received accounts from family members describing a death at Smith Transitional Center in which a resident performed CPR on another person, and alleging that multiple correctional officers stood by without assisting. Family members have also described a video said to exist of the CPR attempt. GPS registers these as accounts, not findings: no autopsy record, incident report, or GDC statement in the material GPS holds confirms the sequence of events, and the Department has not publicly described such an incident. They are recorded here because a death in custody at a facility with three registry entries and no confirmed cause for the most recent one is exactly the circumstance in which family accounts are the only account.

Audits, PREA Schedules, and the Paper Trail of a Transitional Center

What GDC has published about Smith Transitional Center is almost entirely calendar data. The Department's FY2024 internal audits calendar lists Smith TC audits on April 10 and 11, 2024. The FY2026 calendar schedules the facility on June 25 and June 26, 2026. The FY2022 internal audits calendar scheduled an internal audit of Smith TC in June 2022, and the FY2022 PREA audit schedule lists the facility for a PREA audit running May 2 to May 3, 2022. GDC's spreadsheet also lists Smith TC among transitional centers carrying an accreditation schedule.

That is a facility that gets audited, on paper, with some regularity. What the calendars do not show is what any of those audits found. The pattern GPS has documented systemwide is that scheduled walkthroughs systematically fail to capture conditions under load — that high inspection scores coexist with sustained accounts of equipment failure and contamination — and that the gap between a scheduled audit and a functioning facility is where the analytical weight belongs. For Smith TC, the calendars establish that the audits happened or were scheduled; they establish nothing about outcomes.

Staffing: A 1.20 FTE Medical Matrix and a System at Half Strength

The one staffing document in the record is a medical staffing proposal. Centurion's proposed staffing matrix for Smith TC lists a Charge RN at 1.00 FTE and an NP/PA at 0.20 FTE, totaling 1.20 FTE. That is the entire proposed clinical complement for a 309-person facility — one nurse, and a fifth of a mid-level provider.

Set that against what GPS has documented about GDC staffing generally. Officer vacancies in Georgia's prisons have run between 49.3 percent and 60 percent systemwide for multiple years, against a national standard of no more than 10 percent; at Valdosta State Prison the rate reached 80 percent by April 2024. The hiring pipeline cannot close the gap — acceptance under 15 percent, 82.7 percent of new hires gone 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."

Former staff have described the same collapse from inside. Desiree Adamkiewicz, who began at Telfair State Prison in June 2016 at eighteen and rose to sergeant over lockdown buildings, testified in a recorded interview that men in lockdown filled out their own door-check sheets "to make it appear as if an officer is going and checking on these inmates and they're not." Stacy Bowen, a former GDC lieutenant, said in a self-recorded video statement posted in the Georgia Prison Reform Coalition Facebook group that counts "occur rarely, if occurring at all, because again we do not have the manpower for that," and asked, "I do not know how they continuously pass their so-called inspections." Both statements describe other facilities; neither is specific to Smith TC. They are included because the staffing math at Smith TC — 1.20 clinical FTE — is the same math, at smaller scale.

The Host Facility Next Door

Smith Transitional Center's identity in GDC's own records is relational: its short name is "SMITH SP HOST FACILITY," and its description reads "Transitional center at Smith SP." The prison next door carries its own documented history. In June 2024, a smuggled firearm was used to kill a food-service worker inside Smith State Prison, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. GPS's Tell My Story archive holds first-person accounts of the Smith State Prison compound from earlier eras — one writer describing seven years spent between Smith State and Hays State as time in "a place that bred violence," another recalling a two-year stretch in Smith's two-man cells in the late 1990s before transferring back to Georgia State Prison.

Those accounts are the writers' own recollections, published in Georgia Prisoners' Speak's Tell My Story series, and they describe a different institution and a different decade than the transitional center's current population. They are relevant here for one reason: transitional centers are where people are sent to finish sentences in the community, and the facility they are attached to shapes what that transition looks like.

What the Record Does Not Show

GPS has recorded three deaths at Smith Transitional Center since 2020, against 1,928 deaths in GDC custody systemwide over the same period — a systemwide figure that is always a floor, since GDC reports deaths roughly two months late. For a 309-person transitional center, three deaths in under five years is a rate that warrants explanation, and the explanations in the record are coding categories, not pathology.

The questions the record leaves open are specific. What killed Garry Lloyd Matthews on August 30, 2024, at age 24? Was any autopsy performed in the deaths coded "Accident" and "Suicide"? Did the April 2024 internal audits — scheduled five months before Matthews died — examine medical staffing at the 1.20 FTE level Centurion proposed? And what did the officers on duty do, or not do, on the day family members say a resident performed CPR while staff stood by?

None of those questions is answered in the material GPS holds. The page will be updated when they are.

Sources

This analysis draws on GDC's published audit calendars, PREA audit schedules, accreditation listings, and a Centurion medical staffing matrix for Smith Transitional Center; GPS's mortality registry and its reconciliation against a custodial mortality dataset obtained from a university law school through an open records request to GDC; GPS's systemic findings on staffing collapse, infrastructure failure, and sexual violence in GDC facilities, including the October 2024 DOJ findings letter and the 2024 Guidehouse assessment; recorded interviews and public video statements by former GDC sergeant Desiree Adamkiewicz and former GDC lieutenant Stacy Bowen, published in GPS's "They Told the People in Charge. Then They Left."; Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporting on the June 2024 fatal shooting at Smith State Prison; first-person narratives published in Georgia Prisoners' Speak's Tell My Story series; and family accounts received by GPS.