In a blunt report released on Thursday, the department said officials in Fulton County have had “deliberate indifference to the risks of harms.”
The Justice Department has found significant civil rights violations at a jail complex in Fulton County, Ga., that it says was plagued by inadequate staffing, overcrowding, poor and unsanitary living conditions, sexual assaults and excessive violence by inmates and staff.
The department, in a blunt report released on Thursday, pinned responsibility on officials in Fulton County and the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office, which oversees the jail system. They have had a “deliberate indifference to the risks of harms,” it said.
“Detention in the Fulton County jail has amounted to a death sentence for dozens of people who have been murdered or who died as a result of the atrocious conditions inside the facility,” Kristen Clarke, an assistant attorney general who leads the agency’s civil rights division, said during a news conference on Thursday in Atlanta.
The Fulton County jail system, which includes four buildings, was under federal supervision between 2006 and 2015, largely for the very problems identified in the report.
The department opened its latest investigation in July 2023. Within weeks, six Black men died, one inmate was found unconscious because his cellmate strangled him, and five units experienced a wave of violent assaults leading to stabbings, one of which resulted in death, according to the report.
“These are fixable opportunities, and so that’s what our plan is,” Sheriff Patrick Labat of Fulton County said Thursday afternoon. He added that nothing in the report was a surprise and that the county had already put some of the recommendations in place.
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