$250K verdict, separate guilty plea hint at issues in DeKalb jail
A federal jury awarded $250,000 to a group of former DeKalb County jailers who faced repeated sexual harassment by the detainees they were tasked with supervising.
Jail leadership did little to address the women’s concerns about their exposure on the job, they said in a 2022 lawsuit. And an overcrowded facility, coupled with an ongoing staffing shortage, led to the sexually hostile working conditions that made their jobs untenable, their attorney said.
“Inmates are constantly a threat to female detention officers’ safety, and they are not held accountable for their dangerous and harassing behavior,” the women said in their complaint.
They alleged DeKalb Sheriff Melody Maddox and members of her command staff acted with “deliberate indifference” by failing to take corrective action despite their repeated complaints, effectively allowing the behavior to continue until the women were forced to resign.
Male detainees who repeatedly exposed themselves and made lewd sexual gestures faced little, if any, disciplinary action, largely due to a lack of resources within the jail itself, according to case filings.
“It was an ongoing, constant thing,” said attorney James Radford, who represented the five former jailers. “When guys did this, there was very little fear of consequences.”
Disciplinary hearings within the jail were often delayed for weeks or even months, Radford said, and such offenses were typically viewed by leadership as relatively minor.
Court filings show that between 2019 and 2022, the DeKalb jail housed about 1,550 inmates at a time within the eight-story facility. Higher-security detainees are typically held in the jail’s upper floors, jail staff testified in depositions. But employees said inmates often manipulated the locks on jail doors by stuffing debris inside the mechanisms to prevent the doors from fully closing.
Jail officers, they said, were tasked with regularly clearing out the doors and ensuring they locked at the end of each shift. If the cell doors were damaged, a locksmith would be called in to assist.
According to case filings, Maddox requested additional funding to replace damaged locks throughout the jail and upgrade monitoring equipment, but the $2 million she received was only enough for upgrades on the seventh and eighth floors. As a result, women jailers seeking to discipline certain inmates for sexual harassment were often unable to lock the men inside their own cells.
Radford said the weeklong trial included testimony from Maddox herself, who cited a staffing shortage and ongoing facilities issues as part of the problem.
The sheriff’s office declined to comment on the lawsuit and has not responded to questions sent by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Also this month, ex-jailer Joann Marks became the latest detention officer to be sentenced to jail after having an inappropriate relationship with an inmate.
She was sentenced to 12 years, with two to serve behind bars at her former workplace. She was ordered to turn herself in by Jan. 19.
The investigation into Marks began in April 2024, when a search of an inmate’s cell revealed a cellphone and cigarettes. Authorities later determined Marks had given the contraband items to the detainee.
According to the DA’s office, Marks admitted to investigators to also having sex with the inmate, leading to her termination and subsequent charges.
Marks’ attorney Daryl Queen said in court documents that his client “accepted responsibility for her actions and is not seeking to excuse her conduct.” He called the incident a “deeply regrettable mistake.”
In the memorandum, Queen stated Marks had a previous romantic relationship with the inmate and admitted to providing him the cellphone.
However, Queen denies that Marks had sex with the inmate, stating that she initially admitted to it “out of fear and confusion during repeated questioning.”
The inmate also made a statement denying that any sexual act had occurred, according to court documents.
The two court proceedings are the latest incidents bringing the DeKalb jail into the public eye.
Last fall, the family of a man who’d died of an overdose while detained at the jail sued, saying he was ignored for hours by a guard playing on her cellphone while he lay dying. Authorities said the man became unresponsive after taking fentanyl given to him by another inmate. He was ultimately taken to the hospital, where he died two days later.
And in December, three inmates escaped from the jail, hailing a Lyft to get to Florida and then staying at an Airbnb. The inmates were discovered missing during a routine security check and were caught after U.S. Marshals found they’d made their plans on a recorded line at the jail.
A 2018 investigation by the AJC found, within a five-year period, at least 99 complaints of sexual harassment to the Department of Corrections submitted by dozens of women working in Georgia’s prison system. The number was four times more than any other state agency reviewed by the AJC.
Inappropriate interactions between inmates and detention officers aren’t limited to local jails. In California, a group of current and former inmates in the Los Angeles County women’s jail filed a federal lawsuit alleging male correctional officers watched them shower, harassed and groped them and retaliated against them when the allegations were reported, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Defense attorney Gerald Griggs, who is not involved with either Georgia case but does represent detainees at the DeKalb jail, said he wasn’t shocked to hear of Marks’ plea, having seen plenty of cases involving contraband inside metro Atlanta’s jails. Typically, the only people who can get those items to inmates are the people who work within the facility, he said.
“When you have people that are being charged with serious offenses and you have people that are working with them repeatedly, I think there’s an opportunity there for interaction that may not be lawful,” said Griggs, who visits clients at the jail on a weekly basis.
Jailers, Griggs said, are often “drastically underpaid and overworked.”
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