ACLU of Georgia Demands Sheriff Address Human Rights Abuses at Clayton County Jail
The attorneys wrote that they had received reports of “egregious violations at the jail,” including spaces with human feces on the floor and dirty water that makes people vomit.
Today, the ACLU of Georgia sent a letter to the Clayton County Sheriff demanding he address the jail’s well-documented human rights abuses, and requested a response no later than November 14.
The attorneys wrote that they had received reports of “egregious violations at the jail,” including spaces with mold, raw sewage gas, and human feces on the floor; limited or no access to functioning toilets, and women being forced to urinate in view of men; limited or no access to personal hygiene products; unsanitary accommodations for nursing mothers; and insufficient access to water and dirty water that makes people vomit.
Most people at the jail are held pre-trial, which means they are languishing at the jail, sometimes for years, as they wait for their cases to be heard.
“The reports point to an egregious and sustained pattern of constitutional violations, with people in your care subject to conditions that no court would tolerate and that no human being should suffer,” the attorneys wrote to the sheriff. “We ask that you reply to this letter with your commitment to investigate and correct these conditions, and a plan for doing so.”
Conditions are as atrocious today as they were when I first began reporting on the jail in 2023. Over the years, I’ve spoken to several people detained at the jail who have told me that they’re denied clean jumpsuits for months. Few toilets and showers work. Bug infestations are rampant. Many have to sleep on the floor. Food portions are meager.
In January, I spoke with a person at the jail who told me:
Most of the most of the guys in here don’t have underwear because the commissary, this is the first week they actually had a full stock of commissary. They were completely out of everything.
[But] some guys can’t afford that [underwear.] Even when they come around to wash the jumpsuit, these guys don’t even have anything to put on. They have to wrap up in a sheet. They don’t even give you a clean jumpsuit. When they come to wash, they take it, wash it, and bring it back another day or two.
So you had guys walking around wrapped in a sheet or a blanket. And mind you, there’s three people to a room. So you have, you have guys walking around, wrapped up in the sheet or blanket because they had to send a jumpsuit out. Some guys just chose not to send them out.
In April, the same person told me:
We have 48 people on the dorm, and we have one shower that work. …
We have some rooms that the toilet don’t work. When they lock us in the room, some of these guys have to beat on the door to try to get out to the restroom, and nine times out of 10, they don’t get out.
I’ve seen the guys — just recently, he had to use the bathroom in the plastic bag in his room because he couldn’t get out to use the restroom because his toilet don’t work in his room.
In 2023, Senator Jon Ossoff called for Attorney General Merrick Garland to initiate a civil rights investigation into the jail. But by the time President Biden left office, Garland had done nothing about the request (at least publicly.) There’s no hope Attorney General Pam Bondi — who is using the Department of Justice to criminalize dissent and attack the president’s political enemies — will take any action.
But detainees can’t wait for a functional federal government to address the jail’s human rights violations.
“Conditions in the Clayton County Jail are inhumane and blatantly unconstitutional, and all eligible individuals should be released immediately,” said Akiva Freidlin, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Georgia in the group’s press release. “Nobody should be subjected to such a dangerous and disgusting environment. Sheriff Allen must move urgently to improve conditions.”
This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.
Photo by Umanoide on Unsplash. (This is not a photo of the Clayton County Jail.)