Justice Dept. Reaches Deal to Monitor Fulton County Jail

The Justice Department has struck a deal with officials in Fulton County, Georgia, to appoint a monitor to try to ensure its troubled jail addresses long-running problems with safety, staffing and sanitation.The tentative agreement, which was announced Friday, must still be approved by a federal judge.It is the result of findings issued in November by civil rights lawyers in the department, who described “atrocious” conditions, including frequent infestations of lice, cockroaches and rodents, and free-flowing contraband like drugs and weapons.The proposed agreement is part of the Justice Department’s push to quickly wrap up a host of civil rights investigations into local police and law enforcement agencies in the waning days of the Biden administration.Historically, Democratic administrations have pursued such cases more aggressively than Republican ones.

In 2017, the first Trump administration walked back a number of such cases, and the incoming Trump administration is expected to do much the same.The department opened its investigation into the Fulton County Jail in July 2023, although change was not immediately apparent.Within weeks, six Black men died; one person was found unconscious because his cellmate had strangled him; and five units experienced a wave of violent assaults leading to stabbings, one of which resulted in death, according to the report.Under the proposed deal, known as a consent decree, the jail will develop plans to keep people safe from violence, improve supervision and staffing, maintain working doors and locks, and establish a comprehensive proposal to keep the jail “clean, sanitary and free of pests.”Attorney General Merrick B.

Garland called the consent decree “a critical step toward correcting the dangerous and dehumanizing conditions that have persisted in the Fulton County Jail for far too long.”The federal government has tried before to fix the jail’s problems.The Fulton County Jail complex, which includes four bui...