Fulton County GA Jails Fail Inspection Yet Again

AJC: Report to show Fulton jail keeps failing

Sometime in the next few days, Fulton County Jail will get another failing report.

Calvin Lightfoot, the prison expert a federal judge tapped to oversee efforts to clean up the jail, said he will release this week another quarterly report on progress making the lockup safe and sanitary.

The document will include dozens of shortcomings noted many times before and as recently as last November, Lightfoot said. “This report is only saying the same old same old.”

Fulton Sheriff Ted Jackson, who took office Jan. 1, and his chief jailer, Riley Taylor, agree the jail is “a mess.

“We’re in big trouble, and we know it,” Jackson said, after only days into his administration.

The 20-year-old jail has failed virtually every inspection since the resolution of the 2004 inmate lawsuit over unsanitary and dangerous conditions. A federal consent order signed almost four years ago laid out minimum standards; a monitor was chosen to make periodic checks and reports on progress.

“I think we are in trouble,” said Taylor, who was the independent on-site auditor for Lightfoot until Jackson named him chief jailer. “We have been in trouble with the court, and we have to show [the judge] we are serious where the previous administration was not. [Jackson] did inherit a mess.”

Lightfoot said the jail continues to fail to meet almost half of the 90 requirements in the court order.

“Month after month and quarterly report after quarterly report, it’s the same items,” Lightfoot said of the failings he has documented in previous reports on former Sheriff Myron Freeman’s progress. “Only some have improved a little.”

The pressing issues concern the treatment of inmates, staffing and repairs.

An FBI investigation into the March 2008 death of inmate Richard Glasco continues. Officials confirm several jail employees, some of whom left at the end of Freeman’s term, have testified before a federal grand jury looking into whether jailers beat Glasco so badly, the inmate died from his injuries.

Meeting minimum staffing levels in the cell blocks is still difficult, a problem compounded by a flawed system for tracking employees who come to work late or not at all.

Staffing, though improved, remains the single biggest concern, Taylor said.

“We’re still seeing a bad absentee rate,” he said. Regarding the jail’s sick-leave policy, he said, “I don’t think everyone is abusing it, but some are.”

At the same time, some jail employees reportedly are leaving before the end of their shifts and having co-workers clock them out, Taylor said.

Meanwhile, more than 100 people are claiming “some type of family medical leave,” Taylor said, adding it was unknown when they will return to work. “Tracking hasn’t been good.”

Parts of the jail property resemble a construction site, as workers continue the $60 million renovation that began in April 2007 and is scheduled to be completed at the end of this year.

Work has been finished on four floors, but 12 housing units and the infirmary are closed while workers upgrade heating and air conditioning systems and replace plumbing fixtures in cells and external electrical lines.

At any given time, the county is paying to house more than 400 inmates in other jails because the areas under renovation must be clear of prisoners.

No emergency inmate evacuation plan is in place, Lightfoot complained, and that will be emphasized in his report, which will be filed later this week.

The federal court decree, he said, “is all about inmate safety.”