WEST CENTRAL INTEGRATED TREATMENT FACILITY

Last updated September 13, 2026.(DS)

West Central Integrated Treatment Facility sits in Zebulon, Pike County, as a GDC-operated Residential Substance Abuse Treatment (RSAT) center serving men. The facility's short name in GPS records — "Burruss CTC Host Facility" — reflects its role hosting a correctional treatment center. Warden Lesley Medlock, listed in GPS's personnel database as a contractor, has led the facility since November 2023, with the position record carrying a start date of January 2024.

The facility's public profile is thin. GPS's standing record carries no opening date, no physical-plant detail, and no programming inventory beyond its RSAT designation. That designation is itself the facility's defining feature — a residential treatment setting for men with substance-use disorders, operating inside a state prison system whose broader failures GPS has documented extensively.

A Treatment Mission Inside a System the DOJ Found Out of Control

West Central's RSAT mission places it in a system where officer vacancies have run between 49.3% and 60% for multiple years, against a national standard of no more than 10%. GPS's systemic findings document that the hiring pipeline cannot close the gap — acceptance rates under 15%, with 82.7% of new hires leaving in their first year — and that 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." 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, and 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.

For a treatment facility, staffing is not merely a security question — it is a treatment-delivery question. GPS treats staffing collapse and gang assumption of facility control as the integrated structural finding that explains the per-facility violence, classification, mortality, and infrastructure-failure narratives documented across the system. West Central's own personnel record in GPS's database shows a single active entry: the warden herself. GPS has recorded no deaths at West Central since its mortality tracking began in 2020 — a count that is both the all-time and since-2020 figure, and always a floor given GDC's roughly two-month reporting lag. Systemwide, GPS has independently tracked 1,894 deaths in GDC custody since 2020.

Food, Infrastructure, and the Conditions of Care

The systemic conditions GPS has documented across GDC facilities bear directly on what a treatment center can deliver. GDC spends approximately $1.69 per person per day on food, 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 a nutritionally adequate adult male 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 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. GPS's documentation includes inmate-maintenance worker accounts collected at Dooly State Prison describing thousands of roaches inside kitchen equipment, and a Coastal State Prison resident's account of contaminated trays. 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 — a contradiction GPS has made the analytical center of its "Dunked, Stacked, and Served" investigation.

Most GDC facilities are 30-40+ years old, with documented patterns of deferred maintenance producing systemwide infrastructure failures: broken cell-door locks, 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.

Sexual Violence as a Systemic Baseline

GPS's systemic findings establish that sexual violence in GDC facilities is systemic, not facility-isolated. 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 GPS has documented 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 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 treatment facility like West Central, this systemic baseline shapes the environment in which any therapeutic work must occur.

Sources

This analysis draws on GPS's systemic findings across GDC facilities, including GPS's own editorial documentation of staffing collapse, food-service sanitation failure, infrastructure decay, and sexual violence patterns; independent corroboration from The Marshall Project's May 2026 investigation of Georgia prison food; the October 2024 DOJ findings letter; the Guidehouse 2024 consultant assessment; and GPS's internal mortality and personnel databases. GPS has recorded no deaths at West Central Integrated Treatment Facility since its mortality tracking began in 2020.