Last updated November 8, 2026.(DS)

Treutlen Probation Detention Center

Treutlen Probation Detention Center sits in Soperton, in Treutlen County, and holds male probation detainees for the Georgia Department of Corrections. It is a small facility in a small county, and the public record of it is correspondingly thin — which is itself the analytical finding. What GPS can document about Treutlen comes from three directions: a proposed medical staffing matrix that would leave the facility with a fraction of a single clinician's time, a GDC audit calendar that shows what the Department chose to schedule and when, and a mortality registry that records one death at the facility since 2020. Around those specifics sits the systemwide context GPS has documented across GDC — infrastructure decay, food-service sanitation failure, officer vacancies, and sexual violence — none of which is facility-isolated, and all of which bears on how a facility this small is actually run.

A Probation Detention Center in Soperton

Treutlen is classified by GDC as a probation detention center, operated by the Department, holding male detainees. Elizabeth Scott has served as Correctional Superintendent since June 2025; Brad A. Metz has held the position of Correctional Assistant Superintendent since November 2023. The facility's own record in GPS's personnel files shows a full administrative and custodial roster — accounting, administrative support, general trades, supply and warehouse, behavioral health counseling, food service, and correctional officers at grades two and three — alongside the leadership posts.

That roster is the ordinary machinery of a small institution. What GPS's standing facility record does not supply is a physical plant description, an opening date, or a listing of programming offered at Treutlen. Where those categories are unstated in the public record GPS holds, the absence is the finding: there is no public accounting of what educational, vocational, or treatment programming the facility runs, and no public description of its housing configuration. For a facility whose population is, by definition, people held on probation detention, that silence matters — it means the public cannot see what the facility offers the people inside it.

The Medical Staffing Matrix: 3.20 Full-Time Equivalents

The most concrete document GPS holds on Treutlen's operations is a staffing proposal. Centurion's proposed staffing matrix for Treutlen PDC lists a licensed practical nurse at 2.00 FTE, a nurse practitioner or physician assistant at 0.20 FTE, and an RN Administrator at 1.00 FTE — a total of 3.20 full-time equivalents.

The number deserves to be read slowly. A nurse practitioner or physician assistant at 0.20 FTE is one-fifth of one clinician's working time: roughly one day a week, before leave, turnover, or vacancy. The LPN allocation of 2.00 FTE is the only round-the-clock-adjacent clinical presence in the matrix, and it is two people. The RN Administrator's 1.00 FTE is an administrative post as much as a clinical one.

This is a proposal, not a confirmed staffing level, and GPS presents it as such. But it is the only public document in GPS's records that quantifies what clinical capacity at Treutlen is designed to be — and it describes a facility where a single advanced-practice clinician's fraction of a week is the entire scheduled answer to primary care.

What the Audit Calendar Shows — and What It Doesn't

GDC's internal audit calendars give Treutlen a visible schedule across several fiscal years. The FY2022 calendar scheduled an internal audit of Treutlen PDC in July 2022. The FY2024 calendar lists Treutlen audits on both February 1 and February 2, 2024. The FY2026 calendar schedules an ACA Audit at Treutlen across three consecutive days — February 17, 18, and 19, 2026 — and separately schedules Treutlen PDC on May 7 and May 8, 2026.

Two things follow from that list. The first is that Treutlen is not an unexamined facility: it appears on the Department's own audit schedule repeatedly, including a multi-day American Correctional Association audit. The second is that an audit calendar records that an audit was scheduled, not what it found. GPS holds no finding from any of these audits in the record assembled here, and the page should not imply one. The distinction is the same one GPS applies across GDC: a scheduled inspection is a date on a document, and the substantive question — what the auditors saw, and whether the facility's conditions matched the standards being applied — is not answered by the calendar entry.

That gap is worth naming precisely because of what GPS has documented systemwide about how inspections can coexist with failure. GPS has documented a systemic pattern of food-service sanitation failure across GDC kitchens that Department of Public Health inspection scores systematically fail to capture — broken tray-sanitizing dishwashers sustained over long periods, roach and rodent infestation in kitchen and serving areas, meals served on visibly contaminated trays. The pattern is hidden from scores, in GPS's analysis, 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. Treutlen is a small-county facility. GPS does not assert that any specific sanitation failure has occurred in Treutlen's kitchen; the point is structural, and it is that a scheduled audit date is a weak guarantee.

One Death in the Registry

GPS's mortality registry records one death at Treutlen Probation Detention Center since January 1, 2020. David Eugene Schmitt died January 31, 2024, at Treutlen Probation Detention Center, at age 60. GPS's registry lists the cause as Unknown/Pending — meaning GPS does not yet know the cause, not that none was recorded.

That is the whole of the facility-level mortality record GPS holds. It should be read as a floor rather than a ceiling: GDC reports deaths roughly two months late, and GPS's registry counts are always incomplete at the margin. The systemwide figure is far larger — GPS has independently tracked 1,928 deaths in GDC custody since 2020 — and Treutlen's single entry is a reminder that a small facility's mortality record is not evidence that little happens there, only that little has reached the registry.

The Systemwide Forces That Reach a Small Facility

Treutlen's own record is thin, but the conditions GPS has documented across GDC do not stop at large prisons. GPS treats infrastructure collapse as a force multiplier for the violence, classification, gang-control, and mortality crises documented at the facility level: 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, broken kitchen sanitization equipment, and pest infestations. The October 2024 DOJ findings, the 2024 Guidehouse assessment, and Commissioner Oliver's public statements about facilities reaching "end of life" all corroborate the pattern.

Staffing is the second force. 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%; the hiring pipeline cannot close the gap, with an acceptance rate under 15% and 82.7% of new hires leaving in their first year, and Georgia ranks last of 50 states for correctional-officer pay. The DOJ's October 2024 findings letter concluded that GDC leadership "has lost control of its facilities" and faulted the Department for placing "too much blame on gangs and insufficient emphasis on understaffing." Former GDC sergeant Tyler Ryals, forced out in 2024 after whistleblowing, told GPS he had personally been the only security person on an entire Telfair compound of roughly 1,250 maximum-security inmates. Former officers have described the same arithmetic in their own public interviews: Christopher Hickox, by his own account, ran four buildings alone on some nights at Ware State Prison, each building holding two dorms of about fifty men — "That's 400 inmates by myself," he said, in GPS's reporting on former staff who described a system that dressed up the paperwork and pushed out the people who would not sign it. Desiree Adamkiewicz, who began at Telfair State Prison in June 2016 at eighteen and rose to sergeant over lockdown buildings, testified that men in lockdown filled out their own door-check sheets to make it appear officers were checking on them.

Food is the third. 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 than on their food. The Marshall Project independently reported the pattern in May 2026, documenting 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.

And sexual violence is the fourth. The DOJ's October 2024 letter concluded that sexual assault is "rampant" in GDC facilities and that the Department 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% — and 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 in the law's two-decade history.

None of these findings is specific to Treutlen. GPS presents them because a probation detention center does not sit outside the system that produced them, and because the facility-level record available for Treutlen — a 3.20 FTE clinical matrix, a calendar of scheduled audits, and a single registered death — is too thin to answer on its own whether the people held in Soperton are safe.

Sources

This analysis draws on GDC internal audit calendars for FY2022, FY2024, and FY2026; Centurion's proposed staffing matrix for Treutlen PDC; GPS's mortality registry and personnel records; GPS's systemwide investigative findings on infrastructure, staffing, food service, and sexual violence, including the October 2024 DOJ findings letter and the 2024 Guidehouse assessment; The Marshall Project's May 2026 investigation of Georgia prison food; and GPS's reporting on former GDC officers, including public interviews with Christopher Hickox and on-record testimony from Desiree Adamkiewicz. Firsthand narratives published in Georgia Prisoners' Speak — Tell My Story inform the broader context of GDC conditions but describe other facilities and are not presented here as accounts of Treutlen.