The drama continues between the Fulton County jail and the Atlanta Detention Center. Decades of trouble in the Fulton County jail system continue to play out, and now the City of Atlanta is backtracking on its pledge to close the city’s detention center in a bid to relieve overcrowding at county jails.
On Monday, faced with consistent concerns about the overcrowding that has seen inmates sleeping on the floor, Mayor Andre Dickens announced his intention to temporarily lease up to 700 hundred beds in the Atlanta City Detention Center to the county. That facility has been nearly empty since Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, with the backing of then City Councilman-Dickens, pledged to close the detention center and turn it into a “Center for Equity.”
“As I have continually supported since my time on the Atlanta City Council, I remain committed to fully repurposing the ACDC facility for non-incarceration purposes,” Dickens said. “But we are also confronted by a real and immediate crisis of overcrowding at the Fulton County Jail. Many of these detainees are Atlanta residents, and our conscience calls us to act. This temporary lease agreement will allow the City of Atlanta to play a role in alleviating this humanitarian crisis and provide the time necessary for Fulton County to develop and implement a long-term solution.”
The plan is similar to one outlined by Kasim Reed in his bid to recapture the mayoral spot last year following the stepping aside of Bottoms. That plan helped Reed to earn the endorsement of Fulton County Sheriff Patrick Labat but wasn’t enough to boost Reed’s campaign. Georgia State Senators Sonya Halpern and Jen Jordan, both representing parts of Atlanta, also called for a similar measure last year. In addition to helping with crime prosecution, Dickens and the other leaders that have endorsed the plan point to the human rights issues at the Fulton jail that have resulted from the severe overcrowding.
Some activists who hoped for the jail to be permanently closed were upset at the reversal from Bottoms and Dickens talk a few years ago.
“No longer will Atlanta be in the jail business,” said Bottoms at the time. “Today, we have taken another critical step forward in the march for criminal justice reform by beginning the work to repurpose our jail to serve the people of Atlanta as a Center for Equity. The process will be an inclusive one to ensure stakeholders and those most impacted by the criminal justice have a seat at the table.”
James Woodall is a former president of the Georgia NAACP and now a public policy associate at the Southern Center for Human Rights. Woodall was very critical of the new plan, blaming the overcrowding problem on the legal system that he says criminalizes poverty and race, not because of public safety.
“Deeply troubled to hear that having worked for months to repurpose the nearly empty ACDC from a jail into a resource ATL so desperately needs, Michael Julian Bond just introduced legislation that leases ACDC beds to the Fulton Sheriff to further mass incarceration of our own people,” said Woodall.
Following on the heels of the approved construction of the sprawling law enforcement center in south Atlanta that some activists also opposed, anti-law enforcement activists are likely to be very loud in Atlanta over the next few months.
