This story was updated on Thursday, March 20, 2025, at 12:49 p.m.
The Atlanta City Council is advancing a resolution that could force Fulton County to look for a new place to jail people.
In 2022, Atlanta and Fulton officials struck a four-year agreement for the county to lease 700 beds at the Atlanta City Detention Center (ACDC) — a little over half of its overall capacity — with no renewal option.
At the time, Mayor Andre Dickens said his intention was only to help address what he called a “humanitarian need” to relieve overcrowding at Fulton’s Rice Street jail, because detainees were sleeping on the jail floor in so-called “boats” in open bullpen areas.
“We are not in the jailing business,” Dickens said at an August 2022 public safety committee meeting. “That is not what Mayor Dickens wants to be in. I do not want to be in the jailing business.”
Momentum had been building for years to close the downtown Atlanta facility and redesign it into a community center.
And on Monday, Devin Franklin, senior movement policy counsel at the Southern Center for Human Rights (SCHR), reminded the city council of that effort.
“I believe that now is the time for you all to act on that promise,” Franklin said.
SCHR helped draft a resolution proposed by Councilman Antonio Lewis to allow the city to start planning to withdraw Fulton County detainees from ACDC, which was cosigned by council members Jason Dozier and Liliana Bakhtiari.
“It’s time for us to make sure that we get them out of our building before they take our building,” Lewis said at a meeting earlier this month.
Fulton County has been trying, on and off, to buy the city jail, but city officials have made it clear they have no plans to transfer the building to the county, especially since the sheriff has never used more than half of the beds allowed under the lease due to a lack of staffing.
The issue came to a head when several Georgia Senate Republicans proposed a law that would have forced Atlanta to let the county take over more space at the city jail. That bill is now stalled at the state House, but it helped inspire Lewis’ council resolution.
This comes shortly after Fulton County, Sheriff Patrick Labat and the U.S. Department of Justice entered into a court-enforceable agreement to begin making improvements to the county jail following a federal civil rights investigation that found detainees were living in unsanitary and dangerous conditions in violation of their constitutional rights.
Lewis’ council resolution says the lease “has been an objective failure in its efforts to ensure the safety of people in the custody of the sheriff and to meaningfully address the overcrowding at Rice Street.”
It adds that more than a dozen people have died in the custody of the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office since the lease agreement began, including two in the city jail. And just this month, a detention officer at the Fulton County Jail was stabbed multiple times by a pre-trial detainee whose mother says she tried to warn officials that he suffers from schizophrenia and needs help.
The resolution is now headed to the Atlanta Public Safety and Legal Administration Committee for consideration.
On Wednesday, Fulton County Commissioners said they planned to keep tabs on it.
“We have some stakeholders that are going to be not only present [at the meeting] but are going to publicly say what the ramifications will be if that happens,” Commissioner Khadijah Abdur-Rahman said. “My office is closely monitoring that.”
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly identified Commissioner Khadijah Abdur-Rahman’s current title. It has now been corrected.
