By Shaddi Abusaid
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
ATLANTA — Fulton County Sheriff Patrick Labat told Atlanta City Council members even more people will die if they vote to end a lease allowing his department to house county inmates at the city’s jail.
The sheriff cautioned that terminating Fulton’s lease at the Atlanta City Detention Center late next year would mean an influx of detainees into the county’s already-crowded and notoriously dangerous Fulton County Jail, leading to additional violence and potentially more deaths.
The Rice Street facility is under a consent decree following a scathing Justice Department investigation that detailed the “abhorrent” and “unconstitutional” conditions there.
Officials say the jail is overcrowded and understaffed. Many of the locks don’t work, giving inmates free rein of entire cellblocks in a facility where weapons and contraband are widely available. Labat has said many of the shanks used in jailhouse stabbings are fashioned from the facility’s crumbling walls and infrastructure.
“People will continue to die the more we cram people in these spaces,” Labat told the city’s public safety committee on Monday, urging them to continue to allow the housing of Fulton inmates at the city jail.
His warning comes days after Fulton County commissioners approved plans to spend an estimated $1.2 billion to renovate the troubled Rice Street facility and build a new medical and mental health building next to the main jail.
Labat, who has long urged county officials to build an entirely new jail, predicted their project will take years longer than expected and come in at nearly double the cost.
“You can’t tell me we’re not going to have cost overruns,” he said.
Several activists encouraged city officials to end the lease with the sheriff, saying one way to reduce the number of detainees is to stop arresting people for low-level, nonviolent offenses or send arrestees through the county’s diversion center, which critics have said is woefully underutilized.
Some advocates have also warned the city jail could be used to detain Atlanta’s unhoused as Mayor Andre Dickens’ administration looks to move people off the streets ahead of next year’s World Cup.
Among the speakers was Devin Barrington-Ward, a spokesperson for the National Police Accountability Project. He said the city originally intended the lease to be temporary when it struck the deal in 2022, but now he’s concerned it will become a more permanent arrangement.
“Fulton County and the sheriff have never been able to get their act together as it pertains to the conditions at Rice Street,” Barrington-Ward said. “They just use ACDC (the Atlanta City Detention Center ) as a fallback while they continue to manage the jail in a way that is dysfunctional and dangerous.”
The city entered into the lease agreement three years ago as a way to help with the overcrowding crisis at Rice Street. But Dickens said at the time that he remained committed to eventually repurposing the facility into a community resource hub.
Labat suggested he’ll likely need that space in perpetuity if he wants to keep people from sleeping on floors or being crammed into regularly flooded cellblocks at Rice Street.
The jail flooded again last week, hours after the commission voted on the $1.2 billion renovation package. Now the sheriff says he has people standing “shoe-deep in water.”
On Tuesday, the sheriff’s office said its number of detainees crept over the 3,000 mark for the first time in months. That includes just over 2,000 people who are being housed at Rice Street and another 463 at the Atlanta City Detention Center — 317 women and 146 men.
The sheriff’s office houses all of the women at the city jail regardless of their offense, except for those receiving medical attention at Rice Street . Other detainees are housed at smaller jails in Alpharetta and Union City.
Labat said the city jail, along with annexes in north and south Fulton, help alleviate overcrowding in the main jail and provide places to house nonviolent offenders. The county is also leasing another 600 beds in Cobb, Forsyth and Oconee counties, the sheriff said.
“We don’t have any room,” Labat told council members, cautioning that withdrawing detainees from the city jail would inevitably lead to more violence and new lawsuits.
A scathing report issued last week said the staffing crisis is so bad that unsupervised detainees armed with makeshift weapons would immediately tear apart any new repairs to the facility.
The report filed by court-appointed monitor Kathleen Kenney said chronic understaffing at the Rice Street facility will obstruct every facet of the county’s compliance with the DOJ agreement.
Labat acknowledged Monday that his agency struggling to keep employees, calling it “a retention problem.”
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