ATLANTA – The Fulton County Jail needs a new building and more staff, shortcomings that could be solved with more funding, the chief counsel to the Fulton Sheriff’s Department told state lawmakers Thursday.
Overcrowding at the main Rice Street lockup has led to violence, including 293 stabbings this year, 922 inmate assaults of other inmates, 68 attacks by inmates on staff, and 10 deaths, two of which were homicides, Amelia Joyner testified during the first meeting of a state Senate subcommittee formed to look into problems at the Fulton jail.
Contributing to the violence are a large number of inmates who shouldn’t be in the Fulton jail because they have been convicted of violent crimes and belong in the state prison system, Joyner said.
“We house entirely too many individuals who are dangerous,” she said.
The Fulton Jail is attempting to cope with the overcrowded conditions while seriously understaffed. While the jail’s authorized strength is 1,017, its staff is down to 889, including 243 civilians, Joyner said. Despite a pay raise that brought the starting salary for sworn correctional officers to $60,000 a year, the jail staff’s turnover rate stood at 36.3% as of the end of last year, she said.
Joyner said the deteriorating jail building – including crumbling brick and mortar – is adding to the stress.
“The physical plant has been so dilapidated the inmates are able to create weapons,” she said.
Joyner said the sheriff’s department has taken steps to address overcrowding, including working with the court system on pre-trial diversion efforts. Fulton County also has entered agreements to house some of Fulton’s inmates at jails in three other counties and the city of Atlanta, she said.
Those efforts had reduced the jail population from a high of 3,700 to 2,915 as of Wednesday, Joyner said. Still, a few inmates are being forced to sleep on “portable sleeping devices” that are essentially legless cots.
Sen. Randy Robertson, R-Cataula, the subcommittee’s chairman, said none of the overcrowding problems are the sheriff’s department’s fault, since they can’t control how many inmates are brought to the facility.
Robertson suggested the subcommittee will have to look elsewhere for solutions, including to the court systems to reduce the average length of inmate stays at county jails.
Joyner said the average inmate stay at the Fulton jail has risen to 295 days, multiple times the length of time inmates should be expected to be housed at a county jail rather than in a state prison.