Six weeks after the United States Department of Justice published the findings of its investigation into Georgia Department of Corrections (GDC) prisons, it published a similar report on its investigation into Atlanta’s Fulton County Jail.
Fulton County is notoriously rife with violence and sexual assault, reminiscent of the GDC facilities where I spent most of the past 14 years. At most county jails, including the one where I’ve been for the past six weeks and the three others across Georgia where I’ve been incarcerated in the past, the level of violence is lower. But not because jails are more humane places than prisons. It’s because they warehouse people differently, in a way that comes at its own cost.
Prisons operate as more of a community space. Movements are controlled, but you still see people from other living units and other buildings. You run into them on the walkway going to work, or church, or the law library. This presents more opportunities for assaults, but it also makes day-to-day life more bearable than an environment with no social or community elements at all.
GDC facilities are overcrowded at times, but not like this. For example, the general population pod I’m in currently has four cells, each of which has two bunk beds—so, a pod designed to house four people per cell and 16 people altogether. There are close to 50 people here: 16 in the beds, another three on the floor of each cell, four or five more on the landing by the stairs, another nine on the floor out in the main part of the jail. This is not a large space—during a search when we’re all ordered to sit down on the ground with our backs to the wall, we’re crammed kneecap to kneecap and we make a full circle all the way around the room.
The cells each have their own toilet, but only the people who live there are allowed to use them. So everyone sleeping out on the floor in the common areas has to share the one toilet out there.
In times when GDC held me in solitary confinement it wasn’t unheard of to get a roommate, and is increasingly common today, but it was never more than one roommate at a time and it was usually short-term. Here, the cells used for solitary confinement have four or five people each. If you go to protective custody, you’re sleeping with your head pressed up against the toilet.
There’s no hot food, only room-temperature or cold. Breakfast is one scoop of either cold grits or cold oatmeal; one smaller scoop of cold powdered eggs; one flat piece of muffin-like bread, the size of a Nintendo DS when it’s closed; and a packet of Kool-Aid. Once a week as a treat we get cereal and milk instead. Lunch will be a patty of meat byproduct; some rock-hard rice and corn, maybe green beans; a flat piece of cornbread, the size of a Nintendo DS when it’s closed; a piece of chocolate cake, no icing just the cake part; and a pack of Kool-Aid. Dinner is a paper sack containing a bologna sandwich and a pack of cookies.
This is common across the country, in jails and prisons alike. After over a decade in Georgia prisons, I wasn’t shocked by the variations on wet bread. I did notice that the portions seem smaller here, but what shocked me was the commissary prices. They make prison commissary look generous.
As Filter has previously reported, it was already catastrophic when, in 2022, GDC commissary hiked the price of Ramen soups from $0.39 to $0.48. And then by 2024, Ramen was $0.79.
Here, Ramen soups are $1.20. Peanut butter is over $1 for a quantity the size of a ketchup packet. A honeybun is almost $3. And similar to GDC, we’re only allowed to spend $75 on commissary per week, so everyone’s too hungry to put any of that toward toiletries instead of food. Especially when the hygiene products are several times more expensive than in the free world, and a buck or two more than they are in GDC.
The cheapest soap you can buy is a bar of Irish Spring for $2.27. A bar of Dove soap is $3.25. Body wash is $9. In GDC you can buy toothbrushes, but not here. Once a week the state will issue you one of those finger brushes that aren’t long enough to reach the back of your mouth. Toothpaste is $4. And there’s no deodorant, which is especially unfortunate given the overcrowding.
Fulton County is extreme, but it’s not an anomaly. Jails, across the board, are powder kegs. No jobs, no programming, none of even the pretense of recreation you get in prison. Instead of getting to go outside, you get to go to a concrete enclosure no bigger than your dorm where you can see a sliver of sky through a grate, if you’re lucky. And there are so many desperate people waiting to learn their fate, still feeling fresh anger and loss, who haven’t yet learned how to do time.
Jails are filled with people experiencing incarceration for the first time. They’re not yet cognizant of their own mortality, the way you learn to be in prison. There’s always some new guy looking to make everything a pissing contest. In almost every interaction, every transaction, people are jockeying for position in some way. And of course they are, when the resources are so limited.
Top image (cropped) via Fulton County Sheriff’s Office/YouTube. Inset images (cropped) of Fulton County Jail via United States Department of Justice