"Your rights didn't even matter": Community Organizer Maxx Boykin On His Experience Inside Atlanta's Fulton County Jail

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When a detainee at the Fulton County, GA jail in Atlanta was found dead in a filthy, vermin-infested cell in September, 2022, the federal Department of Justice announced an investigation into the death - and into allegations of a pattern of mistreatment and danger at the Rice Street facility in downtown Atlanta.

Noting that the jail faces several allegations, from operating a decrepit, unsafe facility to deputies physically abusing detainees, Attorney General Merrick Garland declared that the probe “will determine whether systemic violations of federal laws exist.”

To Maxximillian Boykin, a community organizer who works in and around Atlanta, there is little doubt that the Fulton County Jail is a filthy, chaotic, dangerous place where the rights of the accused fall victim to understaffing and chaos. Boykin found out first-hand when he was held at the jail for about three days last spring - just months before Lashawn Thompson, a 35-year-old detainee, died in the same facility amid squalid conditions.

The jail “was extremely overcrowded. It took them hours to even process anyone,” Boykin says of his detention in May 2022, adding that guards wouldn’t, or couldn’t, give him the phone call that was his right after arrest. As night fell and the hours dragged by, Boykin says, “I had to sleep on the floor of the jail. There were at least 40 of us in this one big holding cell. We're just all sitting there waiting to get transferred” for fingerprints and mugshots.

Perhaps more shocking was the medical treatment, or lack thereof, that the jail provided for those in its custody. The staff, Boykin says, treated him like a pariah when he told them he takes PrEP, the daily prescription medication that prevents HIV. At the same time, he says, jail staff ignored other inmates in obvious physical or psychological distress.

“I also noticed that there was an older man who was locked up around the same time … who very early on, says he's a diabetic and will need diabetes medications” but no one in charge seemed to acknowledge him or ensure he had access to his medication, Boykin says.

“From the point that cops show up, to the point you got locked up, to the point you got out, it was just like a succession of violations of your rights. Your rights didn't even matter.”

- Maxximillian Boykin

Although he’d been booked at the jail before, usually after police crackdowns on public demonstrations, Boykin says his detention on relatively minor criminal charges - firearms possession and possession of marijuana - was an entirely different experience.

“The last time I was there was a protest charge. We were in and out,” back on the street in short order, he says. This time, Boykin says, “from the point that cops show up, to the point you got locked up, to the point you got out, it was just like a succession of violations of your rights. Your rights didn't even matter.”

Complaints of inhabitable conditions and abusive staff at Fulton County Jail are nothing new. In 2006, a federal judge ruled that the situation at the detention complex, which dates to the early 1900s, was so dangerous it required federal supervision for nearly a decade. In 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, infectious diseases experts warned the jail was at high risk for a catastrophic infection rate unless it drastically cut the number of detainees.

In the Justice Department’s July statement announcing the investigation, Kristen Clarke, an assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, said the Fulton County Sheriff's Office must answer for the death of Thompson - who was caked in feces on a mattress crawling with bedbugs - as well as allegations that an undisciplined, short-handed staff is running a decrepit facility more than a century old.

“Detention or incarceration in jail should not include exposure to unconstitutional living conditions that place lives in jeopardy or risk of serious harm from assaults,” said Kristen Clarke, an assistant attorney general who leads the agency’s civil rights division. “Jail facilities must provide constitutional and humane conditions, in which all people can live safely while they go through the criminal process.”

When the investigation was announced, Fulton County Sheriff Patrick Labatt issued a statement acknowledging a “humanitarian” crisis at the jail. The crumbling facility, he says, must be decommissioned as soon as possible.

“I have publicly, privately, and repeatedly raised concerns about the dangerous overcrowding, dilapidated infrastructure and critical staffing shortages at the jail,” Labat said in a statement after the probe was announced. He said he anticipates the investigation will confirm a March 2023 study “that the Rice Street Jail is not viable and a replacement jail is needed.”

A Microcosm of Systemic Issues

To Boykin, the jail is a microcosm of systemic issues involving crime and incarceration that plague Black communities - and Black men, in particular. He says he heard and observed things in detention that speak directly to poverty, education, over-policing and the revolving door between lock-up and the street.

The young detainees “were like teenyboppers to me. I was like, ‘Dang.’ And they said they've been in there multiple times,” Boykin says. They told Boykin the police would watch them on the street and arrest them “even if they weren’t actually doing anything illegal.”

When the guards weren’t ignoring the detainees, Boykin says, they were rude and abusive.

“Some of the (detainees) couldn't understand what's happening in them -- they can't read,” he says. “I feel like that is a way that (prosecutors) also get a lot of folks to (plead guilty) because they don't understand what's happening to them.”

“There was one man in there who was an immigrant. You could tell he could not understand things,” Boykin says. Yet the deputies, he says, “would continue to yell instructions at him but he doesn’t understand what you're saying. It's clear he does not speak English. Yelling is not gonna make him understand this any faster.”

“It was like there was no innocence in there: ‘We’re treating you badly because we know that you’re probably guilty of something. We’re treating you badly because you didn’t follow our orders quickly enough.’”

— Maxximillian Boykin

About halfway into his detention, Boykin says, he was put in a smaller, less crowded cell, but evidence of the dysfunction was everywhere, from blood and feces on the walls to detainees sleeping on cots wherever deputies could put them. Meals rotated between baloney sandwiches and grits (no vegetables, Boykin says) and daily exercise time consisted of about 20 minutes on a narrow, fenced-in patio between two buildings.

Some detainees seemed to be suffering from medical or psychological distress; others had been in for weeks, Boykin says. And deputies seemed to believe everyone had already been tried and convicted despite the presumption of innocence.

“It was very much definitely ‘You're guilty,’” he says. “It was like there was no innocence in there: ‘We're treating you badly because we know that you're probably guilty of something. We're treating you badly because you didn't follow our orders quickly enough.’”

By the time Boykin was able to make a phone call - he borrowed a cellphone from another detainee - it still took nearly 24 hours from the time his bail was paid to when he actually walked free from the Fulton County Jail. Although some would argue that jail isn’t meant to be pleasant, Boykin counters that jail should not be abusive, life-threatening or inhumane.

Ultimately, he says, the whole experience reinforced his belief that the entire law enforcement system, from policing to detention, needs to be dismantled, starting with the Fulton County Jail.

“I was a police abolitionist before,” he says. “But now, I do not think that Rice Street (where he was detained) or any of the jails in Fulton County are hospitable for people.”

Cover Image of Fulton County Jail (Google Maps)