Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke Delivers Remarks on Findings that Conditions in the Fulton County Jail Violate the Constitution and Federal Law

Remarks as Prepared for Delivery

Good afternoon. My name is Kristen Clarke, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Justice. Joining me is Ryan Buchanan, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia.

The Justice Department has completed a comprehensive investigation into conditions at the Fulton County Jail in Fulton County, Georgia. Our investigation finds long-standing, unconstitutional, unlawful and dangerous conditions that jeopardize the lives and wellbeing of the people held there.

We cannot turn a blind eye to the inhumane, violent and hazardous conditions that people are subjected to inside the Fulton County Jail. 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. It’s not just adults but also young people who are subjected to conditions and treatment that violate the Constitution and defy federal law. Many people held in jails in our country have not been convicted — they are awaiting hearings or trial dates or are serving short sentences for misdemeanors.

The Fulton County Jail does not adequately protect incarcerated people from violence such as stabbing, sexual abuse or even murder. Physical deficiencies in the environment, such as unlocked doors and large holes in walls, permit and even facilitate brutality. Incarcerated people use makeshift weapons built out of jail fixtures to attack others, including vulnerable people with mental health needs and 17-year-olds. In 2023 alone, we identified 314 stabbings and more than a thousand assaults. This rate of violence exceeds what we’ve seen in other cities. The Fulton County Jail had as many stabbings in a single month as the Miami-Dade County Jail, a facility with 1.5 times more people, had all year. Since 2022, six people in the jail have lost their lives to violence.

I will walk through additional core findings set forth in the report we are issuing today:

• Living conditions at the jail are hazardous and unsanitary. Housing units are full of flooded water from broken toilets. Roaches, rodents and pests abound. Standing water, exposed wiring and vermin make living areas unsafe. The jail does not provide enough food, leaving people severely malnourished.
• The jail fails to provide constitutionally adequate medical or mental health care to people at the jail exposing people to preventable bad outcomes including injury, seriousness illness, pain and suffering, mental health decline and death. The lack of security staff and failure to prioritize health services impede access to care. Medical emergencies do not receive appropriate medical responses. People at risk of suicide do not receive sufficient protection and people with serious mental health needs do not receive adequate treatment.
• The jail uses solitary confinement, also known as restrictive housing, in discriminatory and unconstitutional ways that expose people — particularly 17-year-olds and people with mental health disabilities — to risks of harm, including acute mental illness and self-injury. The jail uses lengthy confinement in restrictive housing as punishment without written explanation, which violates due process.
• As Georgia is one of only four states where the juvenile justice system’s jurisdiction ends at 16, there are 17-year-old girls and boys also held at the jail. And these 17-year-old boys and girls are exposed to particular harm. It does not provide special educational services to 17-year-old boys and girls who are entitled to them under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act; it fails to protect these children from violence, including sexual abuse; and it uses isolation to punish them, which both violates their rights and contradicts clear research that such isolation uniquely harms young people.
• The jail staff uses excessive force. This includes deploying tasers without reasonable cause. For example, detention officers tased a man after he said he felt like hurting himself and needed to see a mental health specialist. Such violations stem from understaffing, poor policies and training and supervisory failures.

The summary I have just shared is harrowing enough, but individual experiences are gut wrenching. For example, LaShawn Thompson, a Black man with serious mental illness, entered the jail on low-level charges and was confined to the mental health housing unit. Three months later, staff found him dead in his cell, infested with lice and, as a medical examiner concluded, “neglected to death.” Several months before that, another Black man with serious mental illness died after he stopped taking his medication. Two more Black men with mental health disabilities were murdered by their cellmates. Weeks after we opened our investigation, six more Black men died at the jail.

This is a racial justice issue: 91% of the people living in these abhorrent, unconstitutional conditions are Black — as compared to 45% of Fulton County’s overall population.

It is also important to note that the vast majority of the approximately 2,000 people held at the jail have not been convicted of a crime, are awaiting hearings and have yet to be tried.

There are also a significant number of people with mental health disabilities.

During our investigation, we worked closely with correctional, medical, mental health and educational experts. We physically inspected the jail and observed housing units. We visited medical and mental health service areas; reviewed thousands of pages of documents; and interviewed dozens of jail staff and leadership. And we listened to people held inside the jail and their advocates and family members. We thank officials for their cooperation and we thank those who provided valuable information and whose advocacy predates this investigation.

I’ll note that officials have taken preliminary steps to improve conditions, but they are simply not enough. We hope our findings report sounds an alarm that will prompt the Fulton County Board of Commissioners and the Sheriff’s Office to swiftly implement the comprehensive reforms necessary to ensure constitutional conditions going forward. The County has pledged to work cooperatively to resolve our findings. At the end of the day, people do not abandon their civil and constitutional rights at the jailhouse door. Jails and prisons across the country must protect people from the kind of gross violations and unconstitutional conditions that we have uncovered here.

I will now turn it over to U.S. Attorney Buchanan.