Georgia’s Fulton County Jail subjects inmates to ‘inhumane, violent’ conditions that threaten their safety, DOJ finds

(CNN) — The Fulton County Jail in Atlanta unconstitutionally subjects inmates to “inhumane, violent and hazardous conditions” that threaten their safety, a US Justice Department official said Thursday, announcing the results of a 16-month investigation.

Housing units flooded by broken toilets; infestations of roaches and rodents; exposed wiring; a lack of food, medical and mental health care; and staff resorting to force – including Tasers – without justification are among the problems at the jail, Justice Department officials said in a news conference in Atlanta.

The jail also does not adequately protect inmates from violence by other inmates, “such as stabbings, sexual abuse or even murder,” Kristen Clarke, assistant US attorney general for the Justice Department’s civil rights division, said while announcing the department’s report on the probe.

The department’s civil rights investigation into the jail’s conditions, announced in 2023, was sparked in part by the 2022 death of Lashawn Thompson, an incarcerated man who died in a cell in the jail’s mental health unit covered in lice and filth, the department has said.

“Our investigation finds longstanding, unconstitutional, unlawful and dangerous conditions that jeopardize the lives and wellbeing of the people held there,” Clarke said Thursday.

“We cannot turn a blind eye to the inhumane, violent and hazardous conditions that people are subjected to inside the Fulton County Jail,” Clarke 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.”

CNN has reached out to the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office and the family of Thompson for comment on the report.

Within weeks of the investigation’s July 2023 launch, six men had died at the jail, including one who died during a series of violent assaults that left at least seven people stabbed across five jail units in 24 hours, according to the report.

The report lays out what it calls minimum remedial measures to address issues including inmate safety, protection against excessive force, environmental hazards, health care and other issues. The US attorney general could file a lawsuit to correct the issues if state officials don’t address the concerns within 49 days, the report says.

Inmates ‘left to wonder whether humanity remained intact’

The investigation into the jail’s conditions “has at its basic level revealed that the men and women, (and) young people who find themselves housed at the jail are often left to wonder whether their humanity remained intact once they cross the threshold of the jail facilities,” Ryan Buchanan, US attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, at said at Thursday’s news conference.

“The most obvious casualties of the civil rights violations occurring in the jail are those who leave the jail in body bags,” Buchanan said.

The 105-page report lays out examples of the problems it alleges, including the treatment of inmates with mental health challenges and inmates’ violent deaths.

Thompson was just one of four Black men dealing with serious mental health needs to die in the jail’s mental health unit in under a year, according to the report.

Three months before Thompson’s September 2022 death, an unhoused man with a reported serious mental illness was arrested and taken to the jail’s mental health unit after breaking into a building to find warmth and shelter, according to the report.

The man had stopped taking his medications and was found unresponsive after a possible seizure, according to the report. He died a month later in hospice care, the Justice Department said.

Two weeks after Thompson’s death, two more men – also with serious mental health concerns – died in the same unit as Thompson, according to the report. “Both were killed by their cellmates, and both were found with their feet bound,” the report states. “One of them was wrapped up in bedding ‘like a mummy.’”

More than 1,000 assaults and more than 300 stabbings were reported at the jail in 2023, Buchanan said. That outpaced the rate of similar assaults at jails in other major cities nearly two-to-one, he said.

“The Fulton County Jail had as many stabbings in a single month as the Miami-Dade County Jail had all year, and that’s a facility with one-and-a-half times more people,” Clarke said.

The report also found “a substantial risk” of inmates being sexually abused by other inmates in part due to poor supervision, weapons inside the jail and a lack of effective classification practices that allow extremely violent people and gang members to be housed with vulnerable, low-risk people.

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This is a developing story and will be updated.

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Contributing: Ryan Young, CNN