Conditions in the Fulton county jail in Atlanta “violate the constitutional and statutory rights of people incarcerated”, a long-running federal investigation concluded on Thursday.
“Killings, stabbings, and assaults are common in the Jail,” according to a Department of Justice report. Contraband is pervasive, lethal violence goes uninvestigated – and is sometimes directly abetted by jail staff – and drug use is common, according to investigators in a 91-page report on Thursday.
Federal investigators began examining jail conditions after a sharp increase in the number of prisoners who died in custody there during the pandemic. The gruesome death of Lashawn Thompson in September 2022 made national headlines. Jailers found Thompson, who suffered from serious mental illness, covered in insects in his own waste with his face down on the cell toilet. A coroner described Thompson as “neglected to death”.
Thompson was one of dozens of people who have either been murdered, killed themselves or died in the jail in recent years. The report notes that even discounting deaths from homicide and suicide, the mortality rate inside the jail has been several times higher than the national average.
More than 1,000 assaults occurred in the jail in 2023, including 314 stabbings, according to the report. “In 2023, the rate of stabbings at the Jail was 1.5 times the rate of stabbings in the New York City Jails and more than 27 times the rate of all incidents involving an edged weapon in the Miami-Dade County Jails,” the report states. “The Jail had as many stabbings in a single month as the Miami-Dade County Jails – which house 1.5 times more people – had all year.”
The Fulton county sheriff, Pat Labat, who was re-elected last week, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report. But he has discussed the problems with the jail he administers in public with county commissioners, calling for the construction of a $1.7bn new facility. County commissioners balked at the proposal and are planning a $300m renovation of the facility instead.
The report describes physical deterioration in the jail, with doors that do not lock and entire wards rendered uninhabitable, that has become so substantial that prisoners have repeatedly chiseled through the walls of the facility to attack other prisoners.
“In May 2023, an assailant dug a hole through a shower wall to enter an incarcerated person’s housing zone and stab[bed] him,” the report states. “Later that month, a fight broke out between 26 people on two different zones, and an incarcerated person told officers that he was lying on his bed when an assailant came through a hole near the toilet via a pipe chase and stabbed him.”
Though drug use runs the range from marijuana to ecstasy and other narcotics, investigators noted how prisoners use “strips” – pieces of paper soaked in chemicals and unknown substances, then dried and smoked for narcotic effect. “One incarcerated person told us that strips bring ‘chaos’ to the housing units, likening the ensuing violence to war. While we were on-site for inspections, odor from people smoking unknown substances filled the air. Security and medical staff have reported getting contact high from breathing the air in the Jail. And we observed burnt and rolled papers left on the floor of the Jail – on more than one occasion, still burning – during our inspections.”
Six people have been murdered at the jail since 2022 – two stabbed to death by prison shanks that have become ubiquitous in the jail, two beaten to death and two strangled. The report notes that one victim in 2023 had been injured in three previous stabbings at the jail.
Investigators “found no evidence that the Jail conducts meaningful investigations into security lapses after violent deaths in the Jail”, the report concluded.
The Georgia senator Jon Ossoff released a statement following the report. “Today’s justice department report confirms that abuse at the Fulton county jail has been not just horrific, but also unconstitutional,” Ossoff said. “Each day these conditions persist is a failure to uphold Georgians’ human and Constitutional rights.”
Federal investigators have given Fulton county 49 days to make changes or face a federal suit.
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