Post 3 At-Large Council member Keisha Sean Waites issued the following statement after a new report was released by the ACLU:
“I commend the ACLU for its work in addressing the volatile issues regarding the inhumane treatment of individuals wrongly incarcerated in the Fulton County jail. It’s clear from the findings that resulted from their investigation that many of our public servants are refusing to put people before politics.
Though this issue has received more attention in the past few months, I recognize that this problem persisted long before the current sheriff assumed his post.
However, the recent rush to lease the Atlanta City Detention Center, or ACDC, from the City at the expense of postponing the John Lewis Center for Equity and Justice has done more than revive a human rights argument.
The ACLU report shows that 728 people of the 2,892 people detained by Fulton County could be released expeditiously if Fulton County did the following:
- Stopped the continued incarceration of people simply because they cannot afford their bond.
- Diverted eligible individuals charged with non-violent misdemeanor offenses to the Policing Alternatives and Diversion Initiative, or PAD.
- Indicted inmates accused of felonies promptly (within 90 days, as required by Georgia law).
- Transferred individuals that are mentally ill and those awaiting competency evaluations to programs that support mental health services.
The ACLU findings are most disturbing because the intergovernmental agreement between Atlanta and Fulton County is a four-year lease to house 700 inmates. If City and County leaders are reviewing and taking into consideration the ACLU analysis, the need to lease space at ACDC due to overcrowding is eliminated.
Our focus should be reserving dignity and ceasing unjust discrimination of people who are victims of circumstances caused by poverty and insufficiency. The travesty of this is we can immediately solve the overcrowding, which I deem a ‘manufactured crisis,’ and not cost the public money or safety. While many argue against the data, research shows that mass incarceration is not effective, and it has not made us safer. No argument can be made toward locking up the mentally ill, those with no access to legal counsel, and others due to excessive backlogs – it’s fundamentally wrong and a violation of the constitutional rights of these citizens.
Hundreds of people in the Fulton County jail should not be there. We don’t have an overcrowding problem. We don’t have a ‘humanitarian crisis.’ We have a leadership problem. This problem is solved when public servants decide to make people a priority over politics,” Waites said.
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