Overcrowded, Understaffed and Unsafe: One Woman's Night in Atlanta's City Jail

Yahoo

06-06-2025

Dominique Grant said she was in the middle of a mental health crisis when she was pulled over driving on Moreland Avenue by a Georgia State Trooper the Friday before Mother's Day.
Arrested under suspicion of DUI, the 32-year-old mother was booked into the Atlanta City Detention Center (ACDC) around 11 p.m. that night.
Grant admits to speeding but denies being intoxicated. She believes the officer was upset that she requested a field sobriety test and chose to arrest her instead. After she was handcuffed and placed in the back of the police car, she said the officer then offered her a Breathalyzer, which she refused.
Grant is a full-time advocate and community organizer working with currently and formerly incarcerated women. So it felt like an unfortunate twist of fate when she found herself behind bars in one of the jails she regularly visits.
'I asked to be taken to the diversion center instead of ACDC, and I was denied that option,' she told Capital B Atlanta.
When Grant arrived at the jail, she said, she was able to get in contact with her husband before she was put in a cell with two other women. One she said was visibly drunk and cursing at corrections officers, and another who she thought was experiencing withdrawal symptoms had a large open wound on her leg.
Throughout the night, Grant said, she asked to be given water and was ignored, until an officer offered her water out of his own cup. When she asked for a new cup, he declined and continued to disregard her pleas.
'I got there at 11 o'clock at night, it's now 6 o'clock in the morning and I haven't gotten water or a phone call since … so I'm just crying,' she said.
Grant said the treatment she and the other people detained in the jail that night was unprofessional, and she made it known.
'I said, 'We really push [the incarcerated women we work with] to respect y'all, because y'all are doing y''alls jobs, but to see how y'all treat people is really crazy,'' she recounted.
Once the corrections officers found out she was with Women on the Rise, a local organization working to combat mass incarceration and empower formerly incarcerated women, she said her treatment changed. She was allowed to leave her cell and make a phone call at 6:15 a.m.
'I call my husband, and he's like, 'Yeah, I've been sitting in the lobby since 2:30. Your bond has been posted since 2 o'clock,'' she said.
Grant was relieved to be released at 6:30 a.m. on Saturday morning so she could spend Mother's Day with her 4-year-old son. Still, the overall experience left a bitter taste in her mouth but even more committed to her work.
Since her release, Grant has hired an attorney, begun seeing a therapist, visited a psychiatrist and restarted mental health medication. She also plans to take a driving class before her August court date.
As the campaign and operations manager for Women on the Rise, Grant has been front and center with Communities Over Cages, a coalition of local organizations working to close the Atlanta City Detention Center.
Built in 1995 ahead of the Olympic Games, ACDC is owned and operated by the city of Atlanta. But it is not the responsibility of the city to maintain a jail. According to Georgia law, that responsibility falls to the county's elected sheriff, Patrick Labat. Facing an overcrowding crisis and deteriorating conditions at their main jail led Fulton County leaders to turn to Atlanta for help.
But even with access to a newer, not overcrowded jail, many of the same issues persist. Last fall, the U.S. Department of Justice released a 97-page report on the jail that described how policy, training, and systems of accountability do little to prevent excessive uses of force by corrections officers against incarcerated people.
Read More: Renovating Fulton County Jail Isn't Enough, Sheriff Says
'The DOJ report talks about the fact that the issue with Fulton County or with Rice Street isn't necessarily the condition of the building itself. It's the culture amongst [corrections officers] and that shit is carrying straight over to ACDC,' Grant said.
The four-year lease agreement between the city of Atlanta and Fulton County, that allowed for Grant to be detained at ACDC rather than in a Fulton County-owned jail, will end in December 2026, and the contract explicitly states renewal is not an option. With the lease's expiration date on the horizon, advocates like Grant are hopeful they can successfully get the city to close the jail once and for all.
Fulton County officials, however — such as Board of Commissioners Chairman Robb Pitts — have been vocal about wanting to purchase ACDC from the city. While Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens has said he has no plans to sell or relinquish the jail to the county, Pitts told Capital B Atlanta that based on his own conversations with the mayor's office, he still believes it is a possibility.
This isn't the first time Atlanta has gotten this close to closing its downtown jail. In September 2018, former Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms ended the city's eight-year agreement to house Immigrations and Customs Enforcement detainees in ACDC.
'As we work to achieve our vision of an Atlanta that is welcoming and inclusive, with equal opportunity for all, it is untenable for our City to be complicit in the inhumane immigration policies that have led to the separation of hundreds of families at the United States southern border,' Bottoms said in 2018.
For a while, it looked like the jail was close to being shuttered. Once it was no longer holding ICE detainees, the jail housed fewer than 50 people on average while operation costs continued to rise for the building that was designed to hold 1,300 people.
In May 2019, then-City Council member Dickens successfully authored and introduced a bill to create the Reimagining ACDC Task Force made up of residents, organizers, and local government representatives. The next week, Mayor Bottoms signed legislation authorizing the closure of ACDC with the goal of transforming it into a centralized hub for social services like behavioral health programs and job training and placement. Despite the task force developing four proposals for how to repurpose the facility in 2020, ACDC now houses over 400 people.
In December 2022 — at the end of one of the most deadly years at Fulton County's main jail on Rice Street, where 15 people died — the city of Atlanta entered into a four-year lease agreement with the county for up to 700 beds in the city's detention center. Two of the 19 people who have died in Fulton County custody since then were incarcerated at ACDC.
At the start of the lease, Fulton County was housing around 3,400 people in its main jail, which was built to hold 2,500. Half of those in custody were unindicted.
According to the county's public safety dashboard, the number of incarcerated people sleeping on portable or temporary bunks continued to rise in the months after the lease agreement began and did not reach zero until a year later.
'The leadership of the grassroots movement, especially Women on the Rise, gave the city a blueprint for how they could repurpose that space, and the city broke its promise,' said Tiffany Roberts, who served on the Reimagining ACDC Task Force, in an interview with Capital B Atlanta.
Read More: Why Does Atlanta Want to Lease Its Jail to Fulton County?
Roberts is also director of public policy at the Southern Center for Human Rights, who, along with Women on the Rise, was a vocal opponent of the lease with Fulton County and warned that it would not alleviate the overcrowding issue that the lease purported to address.
As a former criminal defense attorney with the Fulton County Public Defender's Office and then in her own private practice, Roberts saw how the jail was used to warehouse people who often didn't have the resources to pay for their own release.
'[I was] representing people who were homeless or who were profiled by police and were stuck at the detention center for city ordinance violations that were essentially either crimes of race or crimes of poverty,' she said.
Roberts has been telling officials and residents for years that overcrowding will not be solved until local elected officials address the root causes of the issue instead of throwing more money at police, prisons and prosecutors to lock up more people.
It was recently reported that the multi-million dollar Fulton County Center for Diversion and Services is barely utilized by the 15 police departments in the county, including APD, that are authorized to use the facility
'There should be incentives, for example, for police officers to use [diversion services] rather than arrest. Mayor Dickens has within his power to tell the police to deprioritize crimes of homelessness,' she said.
A representative from Grady Health System, which operates the diversion center, told the Fulton County commissioners last week that the staff sees an average of only three people each day.
Next year, Fulton County will have to find a way to house the 400, mostly women, that are currently being detained in ACDC. No announcements have been made yet, but prior to the lease, they were being detained at the south annex jail in Union City that the county has been renovating over the last year.
Legislation introduced in March by council member Antonio Lewis to begin planning a staged withdrawal of detainees has stalled in the Public Safety and Legal Administration Committee.
Roberts said now is the time for Atlantans to press local elected officials to prioritize uplifting Black communities, not criminalizing the people who live in them.
'We have to stop defaulting to this nonsensical belief that authoritarianism and over-policing is okay as long as Black people do it. We complain about other folks doing it at the national level, so we've got to be paying attention to what our local officials are doing,' she said.
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