As the final year of Fulton County’s four-year lease for use of the Atlanta City Detention Center approaches, a group of local and national criminal justice advocacy groups is calling on the Atlanta City Council to support a resolution to begin planning how the county will remove its 435 inmates from the facility.
The coalition Community Over Cages expects the legislation to be introduced Aug. 18 during the full council meeting by District 12 council member Antonio Lewis, who co-sponsored the bill with District 4 council member Jason Dozier and District 5 council member Liliana Bakhtiari.
“The choices on Monday are very clear. If you believe in public safety, council members, you will pass the stage withdrawal legislation,” said Devin Barrington-Ward, communications director for the National Police Accountability Project and director of the Black Futurists Group, at a press conference Wednesday.
Read More: Why Does Atlanta Want to Lease Its Jail to Fulton County?
Prior to the lease agreement, coalition members like Devin Franklin, senior movement policy counsel at the Southern Center for Human Rights, warned that inhumane practices carried out at Fulton County’s Rice Street Jail would carry over to ACDC.
Since the detainee transfers began in December 2022, over a dozen people have died in Fulton County custody, including 19-year-old Noni Battiste-Kosoko and 43-year-old Michael Brandon Rivers at ACDC.
Two days after Battiste-Kosoko was found unresponsive in her cell, the U.S. Department of Justice announced it had opened an investigation into conditions at Fulton County Jail. Over a year later, the DOJ published a 97-page report detailing the constitutional and statutory rights violations endured by those incarcerated in Fulton County.
“Jail conditions in facilities like ACDC represent a systematic assault on human dignity, which too often becomes a death sentence,” Fallon McClure of Working Families Power said at Wednesday’s press conference.
“We need only to look to Baltimore and Washington, D.C., to see where paths of authoritarianism will lead and how quickly civil liberties can be eroded when we normalize law enforcement responses to social issues.”
Read More: Overcrowded, Understaffed and Unsafe: One Woman’s Night in Atlanta’s City Jail
The coalition is instead calling on Mayor Andre Dickens to direct the Atlanta Police Department to prioritize the underutilized diversion center the city invested millions into creating.
In the first four months the diversion center was open, it saw on average three people per day, far fewer than the 40 people per day it was designed to serve.
Similarly, the coalition wants to see city leaders follow through on a resolution passed by the council in 2019 and signed by former Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms to close the jail and transform the building into the John Lewis Center for Equity, Wellness and Freedom.
Despite the 2019 legislation, the future of ACDC is still up in the air as Fulton County government leaders, most notably Robb Pitts, chair of the Board of Commissioners, have repeatedly called for the jail to be sold to the county.
During the city Department of Corrections budget hearing in May, LaChandra Burks, chief operating officer for the city and a member of the mayor’s Cabinet, said all avenues for the future of ACDC remained under consideration, including closing the jail and selling it to Fulton County.
Coalition members Robyn Hasan-Simpson and Dominique Grant of Women on the Rise said during the rally that Dickens is turning his back on the resolution he introduced when he was a member of the City Council.
“Enough is enough. It is time to end the lease,” Grant said. “It is time to close ACDC for good, and it’s time to put our energy and our dollars where they actually make a difference, and that’s in our community.”
