WEST CENTRAL INTEGRATED TREATMENT FACILITY

Last updated August 23, 2026.(DS)

West Central Integrated Treatment Facility

West Central Integrated Treatment Facility sits in Zebulon, Pike County, and serves a male population as a residential substance abuse treatment (RSAT) center operated by the Georgia Department of Corrections. The facility's short name in GPS records — "Burruss CTC Host Facility" — reflects its role as the host site for a correctional treatment center. Warden Lesley Medlock has led the facility since January 2024, with Assistant Superintendent Gloria Davis, Chief of Security Lt. Kinsey Jones, and Business Office manager Jeanean Brooks rounding out the leadership roster. GPS's mortality database, which tracks deaths in GDC custody beginning January 2020, records no deaths at this facility — a notable data point in a system where GPS has independently tracked 1,887 deaths since 2020.

A Treatment Mission Inside a Collapsing System

The facility's RSAT designation places it in a distinct category within Georgia's prison network: a facility whose core function is therapeutic rather than purely custodial. But the systemic conditions GPS has documented across GDC shape what that treatment mission can actually deliver. Officer vacancies systemwide have run between 49.3% and 60% for multiple years — against a national standard of no more than 10% — and Georgia ranks last of 50 states for correctional-officer pay. The hiring pipeline cannot close the gap: acceptance rates sit under 15%, and 82.7% of new hires leave within their first year. 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." For a treatment facility, staffing collapse carries a distinct consequence: the counselors, program staff, and security personnel who deliver RSAT programming are drawn from the same depleted pipeline.

Food, Infrastructure, and the Daily Conditions of Custody

GPS has documented that GDC spends approximately $1.69 per person per day on food — under 60 cents per meal — against an FDA Thrifty Food Plan estimate of roughly $10 per day for a nutritionally adequate adult male diet. The state spends approximately 14 times more on medical care for incarcerated people than on their food. The Marshall Project independently corroborated this pattern in May 2026, reporting rats in kitchens, insects in food, moldy trays, and visible malnutrition across Georgia facilities. GPS's own investigation, "Dunked, Stacked, and Served," documents a systemic pattern of food-service sanitation failure: tray-sanitizing dishwashers broken for sustained periods, sustained roach and rodent infestation in kitchen and serving areas, and meals served on visibly contaminated trays. GPS has found that these failures are hidden from Department of Public Health inspection scores because inspections are scheduled walkthroughs that do not assess equipment under load, and because of documented professional overlap between inspectors and facility staff in small-county settings. Most GDC facilities are 30-40+ years old, with documented patterns of deferred maintenance producing broken cell-door locks, inoperative surveillance and fire-alarm systems, mold and water failures, and pest infestations — conditions the DOJ's October 2024 findings, the Guidehouse 2024 assessment, and Commissioner Oliver's public "end of life" statements all corroborate.

Sexual Violence as a Systemic Condition

The October 2024 DOJ findings letter concluded that sexual assault in Georgia's prisons 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. GPS treats this pattern as the analytical center of any GDC violence or staff-misconduct narrative, not as facility-isolated incidents. For a treatment facility housing men in a therapeutic setting, the systemic failure to protect incarcerated people from sexual harm — and the systemic failure to investigate allegations when they are made — bears directly on whether the treatment environment can function as intended.

Sources

This analysis draws on GPS's own systemic findings across GDC facilities, including GPS's investigative reporting on food-service sanitation and the corroborating May 2026 investigation by The Marshall Project; the October 2024 DOJ findings letter; the Guidehouse 2024 consultant assessment; and GPS's mortality database and facility records.