What happened

Fulton County, Georgia, is imprisoning people in “abhorrent and unconstitutional” conditions, violating their civil rights, the Justice Department said in a highly critical report Thursday. The DOJ began investigating Atlanta County’s lockdown in 2023, following the 2022 death of Lashawn Thompson, a 35-year-old inmate found malnourished and covered in lice in a trash-filled cell. A medical examiner ruled he had been “neglected to death.”

Who said what

The 16 months federal investigation found that poorly trained and understaffed Fulton County Jail guards had a “practice of using excessive force” against inmates even for minor infractions, punishing teenagers with solitary confinement and fueled a “crisis of violence” by housing extremely violent inmates alongside vulnerable, low-risk inmates. Assaults and stabbings with “shanks” are “a feature of life” in the prison, the report adds, and cells are infested with vermin, flooded by overflowing toilets and beset by dangerous exposed electrical wires.