Last updated September 13, 2026.(DS)

Treutlen Probation Detention Center

Treutlen Probation Detention Center is a male facility operated by the Georgia Department of Corrections in Soperton, Treutlen County. Its GPS record carries the short name "Montgomery SP Host Facility," reflecting an administrative relationship to Montgomery State Prison that shapes how the detention center functions inside the wider GDC system. Elizabeth Scott has served as superintendent since June 1, 2025; Brad A. Metz has been correctional assistant superintendent since November 22, 2023. Scott's own personnel record traces a career through the region — corrections officer at Telfair State Prison from 2006 to 2015, then correctional sergeant, captain, and deputy warden at Montgomery State Prison from 2016 to 2024 — before she took the top post here.

What follows is not a story about one death. It is a story about a facility whose entire operating environment has been documented, at the system level, as structurally broken — and about the one person GPS can name who died inside it.

The One Death GPS Can Name

GPS's mortality database records a single in-custody death at Treutlen Probation Detention Center since tracking began on January 1, 2020: David Eugene Schmitt, 60, who died on January 31, 2024. The cause remains categorized as unknown or pending. That classification is not an anomaly peculiar to this facility — it reflects the opacity GPS has documented across GDC's death-reporting apparatus, where causes routinely lag months behind the deaths themselves and every count GPS publishes is explicitly a floor rather than a ceiling. GDC reports deaths roughly two months late, meaning the record GPS holds for any facility is always incomplete at the moment it is read.

That single death sits against a systemwide toll GPS has independently tracked: 1,890 deaths in GDC custody since 2020. Treutlen's contribution to that figure is small in absolute terms. The conditions that produced the systemwide number are not.

Staffing Collapse and the Loss of Facility Control

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: acceptance rates sit 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 Department of Justice findings letter concluded explicitly that "the leadership of the Georgia Department of Corrections has lost control of its facilities," faulting 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.

That finding is corroborated on the record by Russell Zirkle, a former GDC assistant warden, who stated in a timestamped interview documented in GPS reporting that Telfair State Prison, among others, was running a 70–80% officer vacancy rate. 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 an integrated structural finding — the mechanism that explains the per-facility violence, classification, mortality, and infrastructure-failure narratives across the system, including at facilities like Treutlen that hold people in shorter-term and transitional postures.

Infrastructure, Food, and the Conditions of Confinement

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

The food-service picture is equally stark. GDC spends approximately $1.69 per person per day on food as of 2024, with a 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 independently corroborated the pattern in May 2026, 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 further documented a systemic pattern of food-service sanitation failure across GDC kitchens that Department of Public Health 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 accounts collected at Dooly State Prison describe thousands of roaches inside kitchen equipment, and a Coastal State Prison resident's account corroborates the contaminated-tray pattern. 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 — a regulatory-capture dynamic that is the analytical center of the GPS investigation "Dunked, Stacked, and Served." High DPH scores at GDC facilities coexist with sustained witness reports of equipment failure and food contamination; the contradiction is the finding.

Sexual Violence and the PREA Baseline

Sexual violence in Georgia Department of Corrections 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 the DOJ documented include at-knifepoint sexual assaults at Pulaski State Prison. In 2020 at Smith State Prison, an incarcerated person was waterboarded and sexually assaulted by his cellmate. At Lee Arrendale State Prison, Georgia's largest women's facility, at least four staff members have been arrested for sexual assault since 2020, including the November 2024 plea of Cameron Cheeks — 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.

For a probation detention center like Treutlen — a facility holding men in a shorter-term, transitional posture rather than a long-term maximum-security population — the systemic PREA failure means the protections that should apply to every person in GDC custody are structurally absent, regardless of facility type or security level.

Sources

This analysis draws on GPS's own investigative reporting and systemic findings, including GPS's mortality database and its tracking of deaths in GDC custody since 2020; the October 2024 Department of Justice findings letter; the Guidehouse 2024 consultant assessment; the 2012 Hays audit; the May 2022 PREA Auditors of America review of GDC investigation files; The Marshall Project's May 2026 investigation of Georgia prison food; and on-record testimony from former GDC assistant warden Russell Zirkle, documented in GPS reporting, along with accounts from former GDC sergeant Tyler Ryals and from incarcerated people at Dooly and Coastal State Prisons.