Nov. 14 (UPI) — The U.S. Department of Justice says Georgia’s Fulton County Jail violates detainees’ constitutional rights and federal law by subjecting them to “dangerous and dehumanizing conditions.”
“Fulton County and the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office allowed unsafe and unsanitary conditions at the jail,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a news release on Thursday.
The unsafe and unsanitary conditions caused people held in the Fulton County Jail to suffer “harms from pest infestation and malnourishment” and put them at a “substantial risk of serious harm from violence by other incarcerated people,” Garland said.
He said those harms and violent acts include homicides, stabbings and sexual abuse.
The DOJ on Thursday released its report on the Fulton County Jail, including the main jail in Atlanta and annex facilities in Atlanta, Alpharetta and Union City.
The report indicates the jail fails to protect detainees from substantial risk of serious harm by other detainees and houses them in unsanitary and dangerous living conditions.
The report also says the jail system fails to provide adequate medical and mental health services, imposes solitary confinement in a discriminatory manner that exposes detainees to substantial harm and does not provide special education services to teens who are entitled to them while held at the jail.
The conditions and practices at the jail system are “longstanding” and contributed to six deaths caused by violence since 2022 and more than 300 stabbings in 2023.
Another four detainees died by suicide over the past four years, including one in April.
The conditions at the jail system violate detainees’ 8th Amendment protection against cruel and unusual punishments and 14th Amendment guarantee of due process, according to the DOJ report.
“We cannot turn a blind eye to the inhumane, violent and hazardous conditions that people are subjected to inside the Fulton County Jail,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said.
Detention in the county jail “has amounted to a death sentence for dozens of people who have been murdered or who died as a result of atrocious conditions and treatment that violate the Constitution and defy federal law,” Clarke said.
The death of detainee Lashawn Thompson, who died while jailed in 2022 and was found in what Clarke previously described as “covered in lice and filth,” spurred the federal investigation into the Fulton County Jail system.
The DOJ report says inadequate staffing and overcrowding in the jail contribute to sexual assaults and violence committed by detainees and jail staff.
The Fulton County Jail system currently houses about 2,000 inmates and has housed more than 3,000 at times.
Officials for Fulton County and the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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