A federal judge on Thursday ordered Fulton County and Atlanta officials to facilitate the sale of the city jail to the county and warned he would lock up any elected official who blocks these efforts.
U.S. District Judge Marvin Shoob delivered this edict while meeting with political officials and attorneys from both sides of a 2004 federal lawsuit involving overcrowding at Fulton County jail that was settled.
However, sale negotiations for the city jail have been alternately stonewalled by the city and county -- preventing the county jail from obtaining inmate population relief -- and Shoob had seen enough and decided to get tough.
“I am prepared to do something,” Shoob said. “I’ve talked to the warden at the Atlanta Penitentiary and he’s got room for everybody I send over. And they won’t have cellphones.”
The county has failed to meet mandates of the negotiated settlement that set population caps and minimum staffing levels at the county jail, which sends hundreds of inmates to rented cells in other counties. Overcrowding continues to force inmates to sleep on the floor, which violates the agreement.
“The city wants to sell [its] jail to the county,” Atlanta Chief Operating Officer Peter Aman said.
The city jail, which is west of downtown, currently houses 900 immigration detainees and 200 city ordinance violators. Atlanta would lease 200 beds in the jail if Fulton County bought and operated it, Aman said.
Two years ago, the proposed jail sale price was $33 million, the balance of the debt at that time. Aman said the price would be less now.
“We were ready to go and had the deal all laid out,” Aman said.
County Attorney David Ware told Shoob that money was the problem, that the county expects a $35 million shortfall this year.
Find the money, Shoob said.
The judge said he would issue his order once he receives a report in two weeks from his jail expert, Calvin Lightfoot.
“We’re running a jail like a Third World country,” Shoob said. “I don’t care where they get the money.”
Shoob told Ware to inform the Fulton county commissioners to move ahead with the sale. If there is resistance, Shoob said, “I’ll let them know I’ll send them to the federal penitentiary. I really mean it.”
The county already has spent $60 million to renovate the jail, one of the mandates in the 2006 settlement of the lawsuit that complained of dirty and dangerous conditions.
Yet the county continues to spend millions of dollars a year to house inmates in rented cells in other counties and cities, and Fulton does this instead of “addressing this problem head-on,” Shoob said.
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