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 on Thursday in Atlanta.
The Fulton County jail system, which includes four buildings, was under federal supervision between 2006 and 2015, largely for the same problems the Justice Department identified on Thursday.
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, leading to one death, according to the report.
The investigation detailed consistently unsanitary conditions, in part because of infestations of lice, cockroaches and rodents and little effort to remedy them. Contraband like drugs and weapons flow easily through the system, the report said, in some cases provided by jail staff.
The inmates are disproportionately Black and brown people compared with the overall population of the county, which includes Atlanta. And a majority of inmates also have mental health issues that are not adequately treated, and the stays are lengthy.
Georgia is one of four states that cuts off the juvenile justice system at 16 years old. This has led to 17-year-old inmates being exposed to some of the civil rights violations that the department identified.
“These children are subjected to violence and excessive force, experience sexual abuse and are denied adequate mental health care,” the report said.
The county has made changes in recent years to improve its contraband detection, including installing body-scanner machines and prohibiting jail staff from bringing personal bags into the jail. But that is not enough, investigators concluded.
“Without improving supervision and monitoring, however, these efforts are unlikely to make a significant impact on the jail’s contraband problems,” according to the report.
Officials from the civil rights division issued a long list of recommendations that included creating new policies that give vulnerable inmates more protection from violence and reclassifying inmates between violent and nonviolent people more often. It also recommended that Fulton County officials improve staffing, security and respond more often to inmate grievances.
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