A new coalition of criminal justice advocates is challenging Fulton County Board of Commissioners on the best way to address the humanitarian and overcrowding crises that have plagued the county jail for decades.
The one thing both sides agree on is that there won’t be a brand new jail built at a cost of billions to taxpayers, since a motion to fund a new jail using a sales tax failed at the commissioners’ meeting last week.
“Clearly there’s no pathway forward for a large $1.5 or $2 billion facility to be built,” District 2 Commissioner Bob Ellis told Capital B Atlanta. But that is where the harmony between the coalition and the county commissioners ends.
The Communities Over Cages coalition is made up of local advocates and organizations that want the county to prioritize policy decisions like indicting people within 90 days of their arrest, releasing people charged with low-level offenses on signature bond, and funding mental health care and substance abuse treatment outside of jail.
However, both Ellis, a Republican, and chairman Robb Pitts, a Democrat, say they’ll continue to direct resources toward incarceration by funding renovations and a new roof at Rice Street jail and fully utilizing the North Fulton County Jail in Alpharetta.
“We need a systemic solution, not more space to repeat the same pattern,” said Fallon McClure, deputy director for policy and advocacy at the ACLU of Georgia.
Talk of a new Fulton County jail peaked last year in response to a spate of inmate deaths, overcrowding, and hazardous conditions in the existing facility on Rice Street. A proposed new jail would have been nearly four times the size of the existing one, with 4,416 beds, according to the jail feasibility study presented to the commissioners in December by a team of consultants from the architectural firms STV and TreanorHL.
But on Wednesday, Communities Over Cages released a report prepared by the Prison Policy Initiative calling into question the rigor and methodology of the jail feasibility study.
“The present condition of the jail did not emerge from nowhere. It is the result of negligence and a refusal of the Fulton County Sheriff and other elected officials to decarcerate the facility despite being warned repeatedly by advocates,” said Roberta Meyers Douglas, VP of state strategy and reentry at the Legal Action Center.
Even among commissioners who want to continue funding the current jail, there is recognition that resources also need to go toward the problems that led to the jail’s overcrowding in the first place.
“If we build a 10,000-bed jail the day that it is finished, it’ll probably be overcrowded again,” said Pitts, who chairs the Fulton commission. “So we need to address some of the systemic issues that have plagued this jail.” But Pitts stops short of saying he wants to ease incarceration overall, reiterating his desire to purchase the Atlanta City Detention Center (ACDC) from the city.
“More than half, probably two-thirds of the inmates in our jail are from the city of Atlanta. So we, Fulton County, need that jail and we’re prepared to pay the city for it,” he said.
Fulton County currently leases 700 beds in ACDC from the city. The agreement was voted for by both city council and the board of commissioners despite much opposition from groups who are now members of Community Over Cages because the city council had already voted to turn that jail into a diversion center.
Ellis, who also suggested the county house more inmates at ACDC, said he is still open to a new building but only one with 250-500 beds to serve as an annex.
“We probably do need to explore construction of some sort of expansion facility focused on housing a certain type of inmate,” he said, suggesting either a maximum-security facility for the most violent incarcerated people or a medical facility to house people with mental illness.
While the commissioners and jail reform advocates debate, at least one person is still committed to the idea of a new jail. Fulton County Sheriff Patrick Labat told Capital B Atlanta in a statement that a new jail would also give his office more space to conduct positive programming that is aimed at reducing recidivism.
“The Rice Street Jail needs to be replaced. The decades-long challenges plaguing the jail are worsening day by day,” the sheriff’s office said in a statement to Capital B Atlanta.
