The US Department of Justice denounced on Tuesday “appalling and inhumane conditions of incarceration” in penitentiary establishments in the state of Georgia, in the southeast of the country, blaming the “indifference” of local authorities.
The brief visit of Donald Trump in August 2023 to the Fulton County jail, near Atlanta, for his now famous taking of a criminal ID photo and the taking of his fingerprints, had shed harsh light on the conditions of detention in Georgia, which has the 4th largest prison population in the United States.
“A prison sentence should not be a sentence of death, torture and rape,” Deputy Attorney General for Civil Rights Kristen Clarke said at a press conference in Atlanta to announce the findings of a report on the state’s 34 prisons and its four private prisons.
Inmates are “attacked, stabbed, raped and killed, or left to waste away in grossly understaffed establishments,” she said, specifying that the report covered a prison population of some 50,000 people.
These are not “isolated incidents, but long-standing and systematic violations of prisoners’ rights stemming from a culture of indifference to the safety of the people Georgia holds in its prisons,” Clarke said. .
“The State has known about these unsafe conditions for years, but has failed to take reasonable steps to respond,” according to the report.
In 2019, the most recent year for which national statistics on prison homicides are available, the murder rate per number of inmates was almost triple the average across the United States, the assistant minister noted.
“And since then, the number of homicides within establishments managed by the Georgia Prison Service has almost tripled in absolute value,” with around thirty reported each year, she added.
