Fulton County is moving to build a new jail facility in Atlanta after years of deadly conditions, federal scrutiny, and political paralysis have made the status quo untenable.
The county's Rice Street jail, built in 1989 for roughly 2,500 inmates, has routinely held more than 3,000. In recent years it became notorious for stabbings, infestations, and inmate deaths. In 2023 alone, at least 15 people died inside. The crisis reached a national audience in September 2022 when Lashawn Thompson, a mentally ill detainee, was found dead in a filthy cell covered in insects. The U.S. Department of Justice launched a formal civil rights investigation into the facility in July 2023 under the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act, and that probe remains open.
Now, after years of fighting between Sheriff Pat Labat, who has pushed for a $1.7 billion full replacement, and a divided Board of Commissioners more focused on diversion and mental health investment, the county is taking a concrete step forward. Fulton County is seeking a construction manager for what it is calling a "Special Purpose Facility," a targeted new build focused on medical, mental health, and specialized detention needs rather than a wholesale replacement of the aging Rice Street complex.
Source: NationGraph.
The approach reflects a compromise commissioners settled on after rejecting Labat's larger proposal. In 2023, the county also leased the shuttered Atlanta City Detention Center to relieve immediate overcrowding pressure while longer-term plans took shape.
The specific cost, capacity, and site for the new facility have not been publicly confirmed. What is clear is that the county is using a Construction Manager at Risk delivery model, meaning the selected firm will work alongside designers from the start and then commit to a guaranteed maximum price before construction begins. That structure is designed to control costs and catch problems early on a project of this complexity.
Fulton County is Georgia's most populous county, with about 1.07 million residents, and its jail holds a population that is overwhelmingly Black and male, most of them awaiting trial. Slow case processing, worsened by the pandemic and high-profile prosecutions including the Trump RICO case and the Young Thug YSL trial, has kept the pretrial population elevated for years.
Advocacy groups including the Southern Center for Human Rights and Communities Over Cages have pushed the county to reduce incarceration rather than build new capacity. That pressure, combined with the ongoing DOJ investigation, means every decision around the new facility will face intense public scrutiny. The county's next visible step will be selecting a construction manager and releasing more details about what, exactly, it plans to build.
