Georgia Grand Jury Dings Augusta Jail for Overcrowding Days Before Violent Detainee Assault
by Chuck Sharman
On January 16, 2025, a grand jury in Georgia’s Richmond County reported that its inspection of the County jail revealed serious overcrowding, with mattresses on the floor pressing many cells into double-occupancy. As if to underscore the problem’s seriousness, a detainee was violently assaulted and stabbed on January 23, sending him to the hospital with nine stab wounds. Five fellow detainees have been charged in that attack.
GA Code § 15-12-71 (2024) requires grand juries in each of the state’s 159 counties to physically inspect its jail every year. The grand jury seated in state Superior Court for Richmond County for its November 2025 term conducted the inspection on January 6, 2026, presenting its report to Judge R. Ashley Wright on the term’s last day. Though jailers quibbled about the exact number, the Grand Jury reported that the Charles B. Webster Detention Center in Augusta was operating at more than 126% of its designed capacity.
That “inadequate ability to house its jail population,” the report noted, was reflected in the fact that the jail was “set up to house 1,065” detainees and prisoners, but there were 1,346 confined there on the date of the grand jury inspection—almost 126.4% of capacity. Maj. Chester Huffman, who oversees the jail under Sheriff Eugene “Gino Rock” Brantley, told the Augusta Free Press that the jail management system recorded 1,305 people in custody on the inspection date, while a physical count tallied 1,274. He didn’t explain that discrepancy.
Overcrowding was particularly acute for women detained at the jail, with space for 85 not requiring medical or mental health care stretched to hold 109, representing 128.2% of capacity. Mental health care was also a problem; grand jurors found 100 people waiting in the jail for a spot in one of the state’s secure treatment hospitals.
To handle the swollen jail population, two-person cells can each get up to two additional mattresses to double their capacity, Huffman said. The extra sleeping space is on the floor, with a portable platform made of hard plastic placed under each extra mattress. The same device is used to add an extra mattress and double the occupancy of some single-occupant cells. The overcapacity strains food and laundry service, too, with “frequent fires” in dryers caused by “greasy towels,” the report found. The County could rent space in other lockups to hold its overflow of detainees, but Huffman said the $55-per-day cost was prohibitive.
Health and Mental Health
Care Problems
The report also noted that the County spends $130,000 monthly for detainee medical care, under a contract signed with a private third-party vendor, VitalCore Health Strategies, after the contract with previous provider Wellpath was not renewed at the end of 2023. In Mississippi prisons, where ViralCore holds the healthcare contract, it has come under fire from one state lawmaker who said that the state DOC was not getting promised healthcare for its prisoners, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Dec. 2025, p.33.]
If any offsite medical care is required, two guards must be pulled from duty to provide escort, exacerbating a significant understaffing problem. According to the report, the jail averages just one guard for every six detainees, while the national average was just 1:4 in 2023, the most recent year for which data was published by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) in April 2025. See: Jail Inmates in 2023 - Statistical Tables, BJS (Apr. 2025). That may also help explain problems that Huffman noted like broken locks on cell doors and missing light fixtures, some of them ripped down and fashioned into weapons by undersupervised detainees.
With 1,100 of the jail’s detainees held awaiting trial, but only 120 of them charged with violent offenses, the most obvious recommendation is to reduce bail and other impediments that keep the remaining incarcerated to await their day in court—in one case for over nine years. The grand jury did not suggest that, focusing instead on recommending construction of new space to hold 600 additional beds and other improvements, using an extra 1% sales tax that the state returns to counties to service debt on bonds floated for their capital outlay projects.
The victim in the recent attack, detainee Rodriquez Treyshawn Jones, 20, had been arrested 10 days earlier for armed robbery and marijuana possession. Jail surveillance video captured him entering a cell and exiting a long while later, shirtless and wrapped in a blanket as fellow detainees took him to the shower, allegedly to clean his bloody wounds. He was admitted to a hospital and expected to survive.
Charged in his assault were detainees Katravion Roberson, 19; Bennelle Evans, 40; Lyondo Ware Jr., 19; Antoine Rodriques Redfield, Jr., 25; and Anthony Orlando Jones, 35. Redfield, who was held for a February 2022 drive-by shooting that killed an eight-year-old in Augusta, was the victim of an earlier assault by fellow detainees that sent him to the hospital in November 2022.
Additional source: Augusta Free Press
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