Two years after a mentally ill man died malnourished and covered in bugs in Atlanta’s Fulton County Jail, a Justice Department investigation found the man’s death was just one of a string of deaths from unconstitutional conditions pervasive in prison.

The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division released a report Joi concluded that the Fulton County Jail, which handles pretrial detention for most of Atlanta, subjects inmates to pest infestations and malnutrition, excessive force by corrections officers and fails to protect them from rampant violence and sexual assaults by other inmates. The report found that these conditions violate the Eighth and 14th Amendments, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

Department of Justice launched the civil rights inquiry following the 2022 death of Lashawn Thompson. Thompson, a 35-year-old man with schizophrenia, had been locked up in the Fulton County Jail for three months on a battery charge when he was found dead in an extremely dirty cell. Thompson’s body was covered in lice, bedbugs and sores. An independent autopsy listed the cause of his death as “severe neglect”, noting that Thompson was suffering from a “severe bug infestation”.

In a press statementAttorney General Merrick Garland said Thompson’s “horrific death was symptomatic of a pattern of dangerous and dehumanizing conditions in the Fulton County Jail.”

“The Department of Justice report concluded that Fulton County and the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office allowed unsafe and unsanitary conditions at the jail,” Garland said. “As a result, people incarcerated in the Fulton County Jail suffered injuries from pest infestation and malnutrition and were at substantial risk of serious injury from violence by other inmates, including murder, stabbing and sexual abuse.”

Justice Department investigators reported widespread infestations of mice, cockroaches, bedbugs, lice, and scabies.

In addition to being unsanitary, the prison kitchen fails to adequately feed the inmates. The report notes that prison medical staff determined in 2022 that 90 percent of the people in the mental health unit where Thompson died were “significantly malnourished with obvious muscle wasting.”

Because Georgia is one of four states where the juvenile justice system ends at age 16, the Fulton County Jail routinely holds 17-year-olds and subjects them to the same conditions.

Minors and the mentally ill are held in isolation for extended periods. Corrections officers use Tasers and pepper spray against mentally ill inmates and juveniles without justification.

The report also found that the prison inadequately investigated and reported allegations of sexual assault, even though the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) is supposed to create zero-tolerance policies for rape in prisons and jails. Justice Department investigators wrote that this neglect extended to the prison’s juvenile population:

Even a complaint about the sexual assault of a 17-year-old boy has sparked no apparent action to address the violence. In June 2023, a 17-year-old boy filed an emergency complaint, reporting that he had been anally penetrated and was bleeding. The complaints officer responded that she turned the complaint over to the prison’s investigative unit, provided no further information and closed the complaint. Later that week, the same person filed another emergency complaint from the same location, reporting being sexually harassed and forced to perform sexual acts and requesting to be moved to another location. The complaints officer responded that he had forwarded the complaint to the PREA investigator, again provided no further information and closed the complaint. Despite a request, we have not received any incident reports or documentation indicating that anyone has investigated these complaints.

Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.), who urged the Justice Department to launch the investigation, said in a press statement that Thursday’s report “confirms that the abuses at the Fulton County Jail were not only horrific, but unconstitutional . Every day. these conditions persist is a failure to uphold the human and constitutional rights of Georgians.”

But these conditions persist in prisons and jails across the country, where neglect, apathy and cruelty lead to hundreds of deaths a year. In a Texas county jail, three people he died of thirst for a period of two years.

The Justice Department report notes that so far in 2024, three men have died in the Fulton County Jail: one from a suspected drug overdose, one by stabbing and one by suicide.