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Scathing Justice Dept report says Georgia jail left inmates vulnerable to dangerous conditions
The jail in Georgia’s largest county, Fulton County, leaves its inmates vulnerable to “substantial risk of serious harm from violence” and violates their constitutional and statutory rights, according to a new Justice Department report released Thursday.
After a more than year-long civil rights probe into the Fulton County Jail – which has long been plagued by overcrowding, understaffing and violence — federal investigators concluded detainees are subjected to “dangerous and unsanitary” conditions, like pest infestations and malnourishment. These conditions especially endanger those with mental health conditions, the report found.
“None of these problems are new,” the report said. “And despite widespread awareness of these issues, the unconstitutional and illegal conditions have persisted.”
The Justice Department launched its civil investigation into Fulton County’s jail in July 2023, after at least four Black inmates died in the mental health unit in a matter of weeks, including two who were killed by their cellmates. “Within weeks of opening our investigation, six more Black men had died in the Jail,” the Justice Department revealed. The family of one inmate, Lashawn Johnson, said he died in in the jail in 2022, after he was “eaten alive” by insects and bedbugs. About 91% of the jail’s total population is Black, according to the report, compared to 45% of the overall Fulton County population.
Justice Department investigators conducted multiple site visits, expert consultations and interviews with inmates and staff.
Crumbling infrastructure, failing security, abusive staff and insufficient medical and mental health treatment contributed to the overall unconstitutional conditions described in the report.
According to the county sheriff, 62% of the jail’s inmates suffer from mental health or substance use disorders and the staff failed to provide proper treatment or take steps to mitigate risks of suicide.
“We found that 75% of those who died in the Jail since January 2021 had a current mental health diagnosis or reported a history of mental illness,” the report said.
Justice Department investigators noted in their findings that Fulton County and the sheriff sought to remedy some of the issues, including by surging millions in emergency funding and sending some inmates to detention facilities in other districts.
Still, the problems persisted. In 2024, three men in Fulton County’s main jail have died, including one person who was stabbed 20 times in April. From 2022 to the present, according to the report, “six incarcerated people have died in violent attacks.” All six victims were Black men, the Justice Department said.
Non-lethal violent assaults are also rampant inside the jail. In 2023, the Sheriff’s Office said there were 1,054 assaults and more than 300 stabbings in the jail. The investigation also uncovered a pattern or practice of sexual abuse, according to the report.
Announcing the report’s findings, Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Department said officials in Fulton County have taken “preliminary steps” to address the issues outlined in the report, but such measures are “not enough.”
The Justice Department’s report outlines various remedial measures the jail must carry out to improve the conditions, like increased accountability measures for staff, overhauling how the jail secures its facilities from violence and contraband, and ensuring proper suicide prevention measures.
“At the end of the day, people do not abandon their civil and constitutional rights at the jailhouse door,” Clarke said. “We can fix these problems,” she added later.
The Fulton County Sheriff’s Office, which runs the jail, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Justice Department officials on Thursday noted the sheriff had cooperated with the probe.
CBS News
Want to live an extra 5 years? Those over 40 should exercise like this every day, researchers say
Exercising like the most active 25% of Americans can help those over 40 add an extra 5 years to their life on average, according to new research.
In the study, published Thursday in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, researchers created a predictive model to estimate the impact of different levels of physical activity on life expectancy using data about people who were at least 40 years old from the National Health and Nutritional Examination Survey and other sources.
Though it was an observational study, which doesn’t prove cause and effect, the findings suggest increased focus on physical activity can potentially pay off in terms of Americans’ lifespans.
“Our findings suggest that (physical activity) provides substantially larger health benefits than previously thought, which is due to the use of more precise means of measuring (it),” the authors wrote.
So how much do you have to exercise to gain the potential benefits? The total physical activity of the most active 25% of Americans was equivalent to 160 minutes of walking at a normal pace, or about 3 miles per hour, every day, according to the study.
If all Americans over 40 matched this level of activity, life expectancy at birth would bump from 78.6 years to nearly 84 years, about a 5-year increase in average lifespan.
If the least active Americans committed to an extra 111 minutes of walking daily, the effects were even more dramatic, the estimates indicate — adding almost 11 years to the average lifespan.
This isn’t the first time research has highlighted the health benefits of walking.
A study last year from the same journal found walking just 11 minutes per day could significantly lower the risk of stroke, heart disease and some cancers.
Other viral fitness trends like the “hot girl walk” and “fart walk” have also encouraged Americans to get their walking shoes on for a number of physical and mental health positives.
The U.S. Postal Service on Thursday said its annual loss widened to almost $10 billion, although revenue rose slightly after two postage rate hikes this year, part of Postmaster Louis DeJoy’s plan to get the postal agency on a better financial footing.
The USPS said it lost $9.5 billion in the fiscal year ended September 30, compared with a loss of $6.5 billion a year earlier. The postal service blamed the wider loss on billions spent on noncash contributions to worker compensation.
Excluding that expense as well as what it described as other “certain expenses that are not controllable by management,” the USPS said it would have lost $1.8 billion in fiscal 2024, compared with a loss of more than $2.2 billion a year earlier. Revenue rose 1.7% to $79.5 billion in the most recent fiscal year.
The USPS is in the midst of a 10-year overhaul engineered by DeJoy, who has argued that higher postal rates and other changes are essential to staunch the postal service’s financial bleeding. Under his original plan, the USPS had aimed to turn a profit in fiscal 2024, but instead, the agency has now reported mounting losses for two consecutive years, raising questions about the effectiveness of the turnaround effort.
DeJoy said the agency is focused on reducing its costs, but that it is also dealing with “many economic, legislative and regulatory obstacles for us to overcome.”
The USPS has raised postage rates twice in 2024, with a two-cent per stamp increase in January and a second boost in July, which raised the cost of a Forever stamp to 73 cents.
Fewer deliveries
Mail volume declined in the most recent fiscal year, although revenue increased due to the higher postage rates, the USPS said. It delivered 112 billion pieces of mail, magazines, packages and other items last year, a decline of 3.2% from the prior fiscal year, it said in a financial report.
Keep US Posted, an advocacy group of newspapers, magazines and other companies that rely on the USPS, described the agency’s $9.5 billion loss as “staggering,” and said it was $3 billion higher than expected. The group also blamed the rate hikes for driving customers away from the USPS, reducing mail volume.
“The bottom line is that these consistent financial losses are driven by stamp hikes which lead to disastrous mail volume losses, plus the complete failure of USPS to capture parcel market share in already crowded package delivery space,” said Keep US Posted executive director Kevin Yoder in a statement.
Yoder, a former Republican Congressman from Kansas, also criticized the USPS for focusing on packages rather than traditional mail delivery, which he said remains the largest revenue generator for the postal service.
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Want to live an extra 5 years? Those over 40 should exercise like this every day, researchers say
Vandals uproot 60 new trees on St. Paul riverfront tossing many in the Mississippi River