Human rights advocates support court-ordered cap on Fulton’s jail population
The conclusion that a court-ordered cap on Fulton County’s jail population may be needed to ensure safe operations — a possibility mentioned in a report filed in federal court this month — has left some of Atlanta’s fiercest human rights advocates feeling validated.
The federal monitor evaluating progress on the legal agreement, known as a consent decree, between Fulton County and the Department of Justice to improve deplorable jailhouse conditions raised the possibility of an inmate population cap because staffing levels are dangerously low — dangerous for both inmates and jailers.
The monitor’s report did not recommend an exact cap number, but said the population should be set related to jail staffing to keep everyone safe.
The need for a reduced number of inmates is also highlighted in a new study titled “Path to 1,000 Policy Report,” by the Community Over Cages coalition.
The coalition’s report, shared exclusively with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, makes a series of recommendations that they hope will lower the inmate population inside the Rice Street jail to 1,000. Those recommendations involve just about everyone connected with the criminal justice system — the county, the district attorney, the solicitor general, the courts, the state and the city of Atlanta.
Notably absent from any recommendations in the report is the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office, a decision its authors said was made because the sheriff has far less discretion about who is booked into or released from jail than other system actors.
A spokesperson for Sheriff Patrick Labat said Friday that he has “worked diligently with our justice partners to reduce the jail population and improve conditions at the Fulton County Jail” and established an Inmate Advocacy Unit that reviews thousands of cases to identify people eligible for release or transfer.
Robyn Hasan-Simpson, executive director of Women on the Rise and one of the authors of “Path to 1,000,″ said advocates have identified low staffing levels as being a major issue for years, long before the federal monitor’s report was filed in court Feb. 20.
Hasan-Simpson said the county’s $1.2 billion plan to renovate the jail and build a new facility for inmates with special medical or mental health needs “makes no sense” because of the staffing crisis.
“You cannot staff and you’re trying to build?” Hasan-Simpson said, adding that the need for a cap could be lessened if facilities like the Center for Diversion & Services were used to full capacity.
The Rice Street jail has a stated “full operational capacity” of 2,644 inmates, but a current operational capacity of 1,900 inmates because several hundred beds are offline amid renovations and for other reasons. In January, 1,965 inmates were housed there, according to county officials.
The county’s entire jail population, including in facilities other than the Rice Street jail, has declined significantly from 3,600 inmates in July 2023 to below 3,000 currently.
The “Path to 1,000″ urges monthly reporting by police on prearrest diversion data “with explanations on why diversions were not utilized and remedial steps.”
The report says the Fulton district attorney’s office should prioritize cases based on whether the suspect is in jail while awaiting trial, as opposed to scheduling based on the date of the incident. The DA’s office did not respond to questions submitted by the AJC earlier this week.
As for the solicitor general’s office, the report says it should dismiss or divert cases in which people charged with misdemeanors are waiting in jail until they can get a hospital bed for a “competency” assessment.
In an interview Friday, Fulton County Solicitor General Keith Gammage said there needs to be more investment “in proper resources and more mental health treatment facilities across this great state and nation.”
Gammage added that he established a system in 2020 in which his prosecutors and investigators work “around the clock” to address cases where someone is in jail on a misdemeanor charge, expediting cases by getting them before a state court judge sooner.
Mark Spencer, another author of “Path to 1,000,” is a physician and executive director of Stop Criminalization of our Patients, or SCOOP. He said lowering the jail population is more doable than hiring enough qualified detention officers.
“Finding adequate staffing to lower that ratio (between inmates and jailers) … has proven to be not just difficult, but quite literally impossible,” Spencer said. “This is kind of what we’ve been saying for the past, really five years and beyond.”
He added: “The most basic functions of any sort of carceral institution cannot take place if you don’t have enough staffing.”
How might a cap work?
The federal monitor’s report raises the question of what a court-ordered cap might look like. The monitor has not responded to questions from the AJC.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney, who co-chairs a justice board that seeks alternatives to incarceration in metro Atlanta, told the AJC that a federal judge likely would not set a population number in stone.
“My guess is, rather than it being a fixed number, it would be in proportion to the level of staffing, so that if the county were able to bump up staffing levels correspondingly, the population of inmates could go up,” McBurney said.
According to the monitor’s report, the “custody staffing level” dropped by about 10% from December 2024 to December 2025, from 416 filled positions to 373.
As of Jan. 20, according to the report, 71 contract employees were working in “unit control towers” and 33 others were in training.
Sheriff Labat’s spokesperson said Friday that 543 employees perform detention duties, adding that the sheriff “issued a directive in June 2025 that all sworn employees support the jail, whether assigned full-time or not.”
According to county records, the average monthly population for all of the detention facilities used by the county was 2,968 as of Feb. 11. That includes inmates at the Rice Street jail; the Atlanta City Detention Center; the South Annex; the Marietta Annex; and elsewhere. Seventy inmates were “on the floor,” meaning they sleep in temporary beds called “boats.”
If a federal judge ordered the county to shrink its population, it wouldn’t necessarily mean inmates would be freed, McBurney said.
“It could mean that 500 people are transferred to a facility far away, which makes it hard for family to visit them,” McBurney said.
Labat in 2023 proposed moving some inmates to private prisons in Mississippi, and another facility near the Georgia-Florida line, to ease overcrowding. Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee ruled in October of that year that state law bars exporting prisoners to another state.
McBurney said a cap could be enforced by holding the county in contempt if they don’t lower the population enough, and by fining the county. He added that the monitor’s mention of a possible cap on population suggests she is “out of patience” — that the county has been given a chance to raise staffing levels and it’s time to go in another direction.
If the court orders a cap, Fulton County Commission Chairman Robb Pitts said Wednesday the county could increase the number of people on electronic monitoring, use the diversion center “more aggressively,” and work with the courts to release people in jail for minor offenses who can’t afford to pay their bond.
At a news conference on Friday, Pitts said he and Khadijah Abdur-Rahman, vice-chair of the Board of Commissioners, plan to seek the rest of the board’s approval of a “five-point plan” to reduce the jail population.
He said the plan would involve adding a “last chance diversion opportunity” in a trailer outside the Rice Street jail for people who refused to be taken to the diversion center. He declined to discuss the rest of the plan.
As of earlier this month, Fulton County reported 543 people on electronic monitoring, significantly fewer than the county’s capacity of 1,450 people.
If it were possible to use the electronic monitoring program to its potential, “that would clearly take care of opening up space for 70 people that are on the floor and decrease the jail population greatly,” Commissioner Mo Ivory said during a Feb. 18 commission meeting.
McBurney agrees there is opportunity to put more people on electronic monitoring. But judges are sometimes reluctant to do so when a prosecutor argues against it, he said.
The “Path to 1,000″ warns against overuse of ankle monitors, saying evidence shows that electronic monitoring “does not reduce jail populations.”
Spencer called electronic monitoring a form of “net widening” that creates a “virtual jail or prison.”
“There’s no limit to the number of people that can be put into that system,” he said. “And without really intentional and serious safeguards, what net widening does is actually funnels more people into correctional control.”
About the Author
Reed Williams is an enterprise reporter on the Local team at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
