Fulton County Sheriff Pat LaBlatt as well as employees and inmates at Fulton County Jail aka Rice Street, will not get the new facility they had been hoping and fighting for over the past couple of years. Instead, Fulton County Commissioners voted in a 4 to 2 vote last night to approve a $300 million renovation of the current jail rather than build the $1.7 billion dollar facility requested. The news comes after a heated and sometimes acrimonious debate between commissioners, who also turned down LaBlatt’s request for $2 million in funding to cover the costs of overtime pay for jail employees.
Protesters are planning to demonstrate at the Fulton County Courthouse and in front of the jail in this afternoon over the conditions at the county jail.
In May of 2024, the Senate Committee on Public Safety chaired by Majority Whip Sen. Randy Robertson (R-Cataula) held its sixth meeting regarding conditions at the beleaguered Fulton County Jail. The investigations were initiated in July of 2023 following the horrific death of Lashawn Thompson who in September of 2022 was found dead in a filthy jail cell laying in his own waste face down in a cell toilet after having been eaten alive by bed bugs.
On Thursday, Nov. 14, 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice issued an official and scathing report regarding the conditions in the jail in Atlanta, saying it “violate[d] the constitutional and statutory rights of people incarcerated … [and] killings, stabbings, and assaults are common in the jail.”
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.”
In addition, the report states, “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.”
Following the release of the report, Fulton County Chairman Robb Pitts and Sheriff Patrick Labat released a joint statement regarding the DOJ findings.
“While we are still reviewing the detailed report issued today by the Department of Justice regarding their civil rights investigation into the Fulton County Jail, Fulton County has worked closely with DOJ officials throughout this investigation.
Everyone at Fulton County shares the goal of ensuring that our Jail is safe and humane, and we agree with the Department of Justice that the issues identified are fixable. We believe our planned repairs and other programs will address the needed Jail improvements and are committed to continuing to working with the Department of Justice and the community to address the issues identified,” the statement said.
The notorious facility made more national headlines when former president Donald Trump and 16 of his cohorts in the Georgia elections scandal were booked at the facility in August of 2023 on RICO and election tampering charges.
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