Feds, Fulton County reach deal to improve deadly, inhumane conditions at Atlanta jail

ATLANTA (CN) — The U.S. Department of Justice and Fulton County, Georgia, agreed to resolve a civil rights complaint filed Friday over disturbing and inhumane conditions found at the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta.

The Justice Department said the proposed consent decree, which must still be approved by the court, would resolve its claims that the jail’s unlawful and dangerous conditions jeopardize the lives of its detainees, resulting in much higher rates of violence than seen nationally.

Under the proposed agreement, the jail would be required to develop plans to protect incarcerated people from violence and excessive force, improve staffing, restore sanitary living conditions, ensure adequate medical and mental health care is provided, and to stop housing vulnerable people in isolation when they are at substantial risk of self-harm.

It also requires the jail to develop a classification and housing plan to end its restrictive practices that were found to allow extremely violent individuals and gang members to be housed with vulnerable and low-risk individuals, including people with mental illness and 17-year-olds.

The Justice Department released its 97-page report in November detailing how solidarity confinement is used as punishment and in discriminatory ways against those same most vulnerable individuals.

Special education services to incarcerated 17-year-olds with disabilities must also be provided by the jail under the agreement.

Jail officials further failed to protect 17-year-olds, who have an average stay of 392 days at the jail, from rampant violence and sexual abuse, according to the report.

If approved, the agreement will also assign an independent monitor to assess the jail’s implementation of the decree’s requirements and issue public reports on the jail’s progress every six months. Members of the public would also be allowed to share information with the monitor about the jail’s conditions.

“The proposed consent decree serves as a cooperative measure to address the grievous pattern of inhumane — and frequently violent — treatment of people in custody, along with the filthy and unsanitary living conditions they endure while awaiting formal charges or trials at the Fulton County Jail,” Ryan Buchanan, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, said in a statement.

“This office is deeply invested in the well-being of all our residents, and we are hopeful that the systemic deficiencies revealed by our report will be remedied through the implementation of the requirements outlined in the decree, along with regular oversight of the progress of Fulton County and the Fulton County Jail, as overseen by an independent monitor,” he added.

Fulton County Sheriff Patrick Labat, who won reelection in November, asserts that his office has taken steps to alleviate some of the government’s concerns such as purchasing medical beds, starting to rehabilitate housing units and door locks, and reducing the jail population from 3,583 in August 2023 to 2,494 in December 2024.

Several detainees were forced to sleep on floor mats due to the overcrowding, but Labat claims the reduction has now allowed every individual to be assigned a bed.

The Justice Department’s court filings comes over a year after it initiated its investigation into the jail in July 2023, spurred by the shocking and disturbing death of Lashawn Thompson, who was found “neglected to death” inside a cell covered with thousands of bug bites.

Its six-month probe revealed “abhorrent, unconstitutional” jail conditions that violated the Eighth and 14th amendments of the U.S. Constitution by failing to protect inmates’ safety from an environment that has led to rampant homicides, stabbings and sexual abuse.

In 2023 alone, the Justice Department identified 314 stabbings and more than 1,000 assaults inside the jail.

That rate was 1.5 times the rate of stabbings in New York City jails and more than 27 times the rate of all incidents involving an edged weapon in Miami-Dade County jails. In the first nine months of 2023, there were over 200 emergency transports of incarcerated people to an outside hospital for injuries from assaults.

Buchanan said that 17 non-homicide deaths occurred in the jail between 2022 and 2023, double the national average.

He added that the true death toll of detainees is likely underreported due to people who were transported to a hospital and died outside of the jail, as well as little effort by jail staff to determine the root causes of such deaths, with hours or even days passing before several victims of assault were discovered.

In September, a separate investigation into Georgia’s prison system found that critical understaffing and enablement of gangs subjects inmates to unconstitutional conditions including physical and sexual violence.

Federal civil rights investigations are also being conducted into prisons and jails in Tennessee, California, South Carolina and Mississippi, and juvenile justice facilities across Kentucky and Texas.

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