DOJ demands changes at ‘abhorrent’ Atlanta prison

What happened

People in Georgia’s Fulton County are being jailed under “abhorrent, unconstitutional” conditions that violate their civil rights, the Justice Department said Thursday in a highly critical report. The DOJ began investigating the county lockup in Atlanta in 2023, following the 2022 death of Lashawn Thompson, a 35-year-old inmate who was found malnourished and covered in lice in a garbage-filled cell. A medical examiner ruled him “deadly neglected.”

Who said what

The 16 months federal investigation found that poorly trained and understaffed jail guards in Fulton County had a habit of “using excessive force” against inmates, even for minor infractions, and punished teenagers with solitary confinement and has fueled a “crisis of violence” by housing extremely violent inmates alongside vulnerable, low-risk inmates. Assaults and stabbings with ‘shafts’ are ‘a feature of life’ in the prison, the report adds, and the cells are infested with vermin, overrun by overflowing toilets and plagued by dangerous exposed wires.