From Inquest:
As a physician in Atlanta, I work with many patients who come from marginalized and neglected communities, many suffering from what Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes as organized abandonment. Alongside other local health-care workers and students, I have advocated for people’s release from detention and alternatives to incarceration—driven by the reality that a multitude of negative health consequences stem from criminalization and incarceration. In clinics and hospitals across Atlanta we see vividly the unmet needs of patients. We also see that the political choices city and county officials make—where and what to invest in—constitute structural violence that ultimately leads to preventable suffering and premature death. In a city and county where racialized inequality is the norm, the criminal legal system remains the primary institution “provided” to low-income Black residents.
The horrifying death of Lashawn Thompson at the Fulton County Jail in September 2022, one of at least fifteen that year, is illustrative of a problem that is entirely preventable. He died in the so-called “mental health wing” of the main jail on Rice Street, after being detained for three months for a misdemeanor, unable to afford his bail. His death, for which the family commissioned a private medical review, was attributed to complications from severe neglect—with untreated schizophrenia, dehydration, malnutrition, and severe untreated insect infestations all serving as contributing factors. Confined for months, decompensating and unaided, Thompson, like so many others in custody, died a death that was not inevitable. Since July 2023, motivated in part by this tragedy, the Department of Justice has placed the entire Fulton County Jail under the microscope.
Thompson died only a month after elected officials approved a controversial new jail lease in Fulton County—Georgia’s most populous county and home to 90 percent of Atlanta’s residents. Despite decades of reforms, litigation, financial investments, new contractors, and new leadership, Fulton County’s sole strategy to address the pervasive conditions of violence, suffering, and abuse in its facilities has been to simply obtain more space, no matter the financial and opportunity costs. In 2021, at the height of COVID-19, instead of taking decarceration for public health reasons more seriously, Fulton claimed it needed more space, and so jail officials sent a hundred people to neighboring Cobb County’s jail. Today, a few hundred people are still shuffled around to surrounding county jails, at significant cost, because space, we’re told time and again, is the primary issue. Continue reading >>>
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