Jail at Which Trump and Georgia Co-Defendants Are Set To Surrender Is a Notorious ‘Public Health Nightmare’

President Trump’s expected “arrest” on Thursday at Atlanta’s Fulton County Jail has cast a new spotlight on the deeply troubled correctional facility whose dangers have been denounced for years by human rights activists as well as by supporters of District Attorney Fani Willis’s second most famous target, Young Thug, an A-list rapper.Mr. Trump’s attorneys have already agreed with Ms. Willis that he will be released on a $200,000 bond, so the former president’s time at the jail will be brief. The same can’t be said for Young Thug, whose actual name is Jeffery Lamar Williams. He has been imprisoned in the jail since May 2022 after being arrested on racketeering charges, accused of presiding over a gang called Young Slime Life, or YSL. He has even released an album while incarcerated.Mr. Williams has been repeatedly denied bail, most recently in July, and his attorneys have called the experience “torturous” and the jail’s conditions “dungeon-like.” Mr. Williams’s pre-existing kidney condition has been exacerbated by poor nutrition at the jail, his attorneys have argued. The judge in Mr. Williams’s case was unmoved, though, after prosecutors argued that the rapper was scheming from behind bars to harm others and had once texted an associate, in 2010, that “Snitch hoes get murked. Them and their kids.” Mr. Williams’s attorneys strongly denied ill intent by their client.Seven inmates have died so far this year at the Fulton County Jail, after 15 died in 2022. By comparison, New York City’s infamous Rikers Island facility saw 19 deaths of people in custody in 2022, even as the threat of a federal court takeover loomed.Last month, the Department of Justice launched a civil rights investigation into the facility at Fulton County following reports of abuse and neglect by officials at the jail. The Fulton County Sheriff’s office and county officials, in a statement, said that they would be “cooperating fully with the investigation.”One of the reports that, in part, led to the investigation into the facility was published by the Southern Center for Human Rights. It found that in one outbreak in 2022, every single inmate in one unit had suffered from lice, scabies, or both.The same investigation also found that 90 percent of the inmates in the affected unit had been found to be malnourished. Last year, one inmate, LaShawn Thompson, was found dead in his cell with his body covered by bedbugs and sores.Attorneys for Thompson’s families, Ben Crump and Michael Harper, said, “It is our prayer that the DOJ confirms the clear pattern of negligence and abuse that happens in Fulton County and swiftly ends it so that no other family experiences this devastation.”In a letter to the justice department, the Southern Center for Human Rights outlined other shortcomings that it found at the facility, alleging that officials have intentionally allowed the jail itself to fall into disrepair.The report also alleges, “Frequent incidents of staff corruption, such as facilitating assaults of people detained at the jail, sexually abusing people in their custody, smuggling contraband into the facility, and other acts/omissions that result in violence.”Upon the announcement of the investigation into the Fulton County Jail, the director of the Southern Center for Human Rights, Terrica Ganzy, said it was a “significant step toward a reckoning for the lives tragically and senselessly lost, and for the many people who continue to suffer rampant indignity and abuse in Fulton jails.”While Mr. Trump’s bail, as earlier noted, has already been set at $200,000, meaning he won’t be incarcerated, the terms of his bail also require that he regulate his behavior on social media, and make “no direct or indirect threat of any nature against the community.” Should Mr. Trump violate these conditions with one of his intemperate social media postings, the judge in his case, Scott McAfee, could conceivably take the unprecedented step of ordering him detained.

Jail at Which Trump and Georgia Co-Defendants Are Set To Surrender Is a Notorious ‘Public Health Nightmare’

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