Trump Won’t Experience the Full Horror of the Fulton County Jail. No One Should.

Former President Donald Trump on Thursday may have to endure the indignity of setting foot in an actual jail for something less than an hour to be booked and photographed. With his arraignment on RICO and other felony charges, the world’s attention will rest on Rice Street in Atlanta, site of Fulton County’s increasingly notorious jail. The true indignity, though, belongs to those who manage and operate the jail and those imprisoned within it, where seven people have already died this year, and 15 in the year before this one. People die in squalor regularly on Rice Street—four in the past six weeks—usually with the most fleeting attention.

Public officials like Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and Sheriff Pat Labat vowed to treat the former president like any other person being booked for a crime. But Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, and others charged with election interference crimes are unlike most of the other people in that jail, because they are white and have enough legal firepower to negotiate bond. Indeed, these defendants will not experience anything resembling the oftentimes horrific treatment of the rest of the population there.

Jail conditions in Atlanta have been notorious since Atlanta’s post-Reconstruction rebirth, a permanent fixture of life among the city’s poorest. The current jail is the sixth built in the city since 1900, each one successively plagued with overcrowding, degradation, and violence.

The county emptied its iconic tower—the Big Rock—near the state Capitol and Georgia State University in 1960, moving its 440 prisoners to a new facility on Jefferson Street. It was in this still-shiny new jail where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spent his first night in jail ever, after being arrested that October for participating in a demonstration at Rich’s department store downtown. The Jefferson Street jail—now a men’s transitional shelter—was built to hold 890 people.

“I suppose the thing that wears on me most is the dread monotony,” King said of it. “Sixteen hours is a long time to spend within a few square feet with nothing creative to do.”

By the time his son Martin Luther King III had won a seat on the Fulton County Commission 25 years later, the monotony had been replaced by a doubling of the jail population, conditions that led to a riot in 1971 and a federal consent order in 1984. It took just three months for the monitor to declare the county in violation of the order that year.

Crack tore through Atlanta in the 1980s and early 1990s. Atlanta responded with a wave of arrests and incarceration. Some neighborhoods in Atlanta have yet to completely recover. Atlanta’s police force became more aggressive and its courts expanded, but the jail did not keep pace. “What no one at that time foresaw was the speed with which the cocaine epidemic was spreading in this area,” wrote Judge J. Owen Forrester in a 1989 ruling ordering the county to immediately cut its prisoner count.

Fulton County opened its new jail on Rice Street in 1989 with a design capacity of 1,125 and hasn’t held as few inmates since. A 2006 consent order required the jail headcount to remain under 2,500 inmates. In December 2022, Rice Street held about 2,950.

Despite the overcrowding and violence, mortality at the Fulton County Jail was close to national averages before the pandemic. Deaths in custody have exploded since, a function of serious staffing shortages, shortfalls in medical services, and a change in the criminal composition of the imprisoned. As of May, 132 of the county sheriff’s 403 deputies were posted at the jail—40 officers short of full staffing according to the office.

That was before the sheriff’s office had to find deputies whatever way they could to cover increased security requirements for the courthouse as Fulton County’s 2020 election grand jury deliberated. (I saw dozens of new faces in uniform firsthand last week while preparing to testify before that grand jury.)

Four people have died at Rice Street in the past six weeks. The latest, Alexander Hawkins, was a 66-year-old Atlantan who had bounced between incarceration and homelessness for most of his life. He died a week ago for want of $500 to make a $5,000 bond, held as a recidivist for allegedly shoplifting a $24 pair of pants and a $20 electric shaver from Walmart in July.

But the jail’s current dysfunction predates the Trump case. Fulton County’s courts stopped holding criminal trials at the start of the pandemic emergency. At the same time, street violence briefly exploded—a 60 percent increase in homicides, which has since fallen near the 2019 baseline. But that still led to an increase in arrests of people who were not eligible for—or could not afford—bond, which exacerbated violence within the jail.

In 2022, jailers fought 11 fires and reported 534 fights and 114 stabbings. The sheriff rolls wheelbarrows full of shivs into county commission meetings when he wants to make a point about funding. At least two of the 15 deaths last year were murders. In both cases, the victim was on a medical floor of the jail and ostensibly killed by another inmate confined with them in close quarters.

After word began to spread about the death of Lashawn Thompson, who was found dead face down in a toilet while covered in lice, the Department of Justice announced a civil investigation into Fulton County’s jail conditions last month. The DOJ cited credible allegations that “Fulton County Jail is structurally unsafe, that prevalent violence has resulted in serious injuries and homicides, and that officers are being prosecuted for using excessive force.”

The Fulton County Sheriff’s Office has been unwilling to publicly discuss its contingency plans if Donald Trump violates a court order for, say, posting something inappropriate on social media. “We don’t want to get ahead of the process,” a spokeswoman said earlier this month. “It is safe to say the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office has considered all possibilities and planned for what may be required of our agency in the event of a possible indictment.”

Again, whatever Trump might experience won’t resemble the standard horrors of Fulton County Jail. No one should. Glee at the prospect is unseemly in the face of the routine horror borne by people who are not famous millionaires. Hopefully, at least, the attention his experience shines on the facility will lead to some long-urgent reform.