In August, a Georgia Senate subcommittee delivered recommendations to address dire conditions in Atlanta’s Fulton County Jail. But one crucial solution was absent: bail reform.
The inquiry was the result of recent reports that suggest a long list of problems plague the jail, including extreme crowding, crumbling infrastructure, rampant violence, medical neglect and a deplorably high death toll within the jail. In just two years, more than two dozen inmates died, either in the jail or shortly after being transported to medical facilities.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
As a result of the probe, the subcommittee handed down 17 recommendations aimed at resolving the crisis. After reviewing these proposed solutions, one thing becomes clear: They will do very little to address the crisis happening at the jail.
More than 1,600 people are incarcerated in Fulton County Jail. Most people don’t realize, however, that a majority of these people have been deemed eligible for release by a judge. The only reason they remain behind bars is because they cannot afford bail.
The subcommittee’s recommendations, however, are surface level and focus on bureaucratic band-aid fixes — such as hiring third-party experts, streamlining processes and even suggesting that Superior Court judges carry full dockets. These recommendations not only include ideas that are already underway but also contradict themselves because the legislators praise policies that have reduced the jail population while pushing the city to transfer a jail facility to the county to expand incarceration.
But perhaps the most striking aspect of the report is that it ignores the elephant in the room: the devastating impact Senate Bill 63 will have in making this crisis grow worse, the fact that the report’s authors support this bill and the missed opportunity for bail reform to address the county jail’s failures.
The law expands the use of cash bail in the state, mandating judges to assign bail for minor offenses, including marijuana possession and protesting. This means in cases in which they would have previously decided to release people without financial conditions, judges are now asking people to buy their freedom as they await their trial. To make matters worse, this new law also restricts anyone in Georgia — except for-profit bail bond companies — from helping more than three people per year. Although it’s still too early to know how this new law will affect jail populations in the state, what’s likely to happen is that more people will be incarcerated before their trial as a result, which will only make the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Fulton County Jail worse.
At the news conference where state senators presented their report, lawmakers said they believe that what’s at the root of the Fulton County Jail’s problems are breakdowns in the system that are the result of conflicts and dysfunctional working relationships between different agencies, such as the County Commission, district attorney, judges and sheriff’s departments. It’s true that case processing delays in the county are resulting in increased risk of harm, crowding and unnecessary incarceration of people who haven’t yet been convicted of any crime.
However, research shows that pretrial detention is one of the major driving factors contributing to jail population growth. That’s because unless people are able to pay money in exchange for their release from jail, they’re likely to spend that entire time behind bars. The Bail Project, for instance, has provided assistance to nearly 1,500 legally innocent Georgians, the majority of whose cases were still pending after two years.
This data shows that to truly reduce overcrowding and improve the conditions at the Fulton County Jail, the Georgia Senate must confront the cash bail system. Other studies confirm this as well. For instance, research conducted in jurisdictions that have reformed their bail policies, such as New Jersey, found a decrease in the state’s jail population without an increase in crime rates.
This issue is not unique to Fulton County — or Georgia for that matter. Jail crowding is a problem that counties across the country face. Oftentimes, the knee-jerk reaction is to build larger jails or improve bureaucratic policies. But that won’t solve the root cause of this problem. The crisis at Fulton County Jail is one that requires immediate attention — and the solution is bail reform. It’s a matter of life and death, of the dignity of Georgians and of justice. We cannot afford to wait.
David Gaspar is chief executive officer of the Bail Project. Michael Collins is senior director of government affairs for Color of Change.
