It’s Time to Close Atlanta City Detention Center
The Atlanta City Detention Center (or ACDC) has, historically, served as a place to warehouse immigrants and the poor. It was erected just prior to the city of Atlanta serving as host for the 1996 Olympic Games. Beforehand – and for the duration of – the Olympics, ACDC’s population shot up from 2,200 to 4,500; at the same time, many homeless (or visibly poor) men and women disappeared from Woodruff Park.
In 2010, ACDC entered into a lucrative contract to rent cells to the federal government in order to house people detained by ICE (U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.) The city receives $78 per detained immigrant per day. But in June, Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms announced that ACDC would, at least temporarily, no longer be accepting newly detained immigrants from ICE.
The city of Atlanta continues to profit off of the incarceration of immigrants at ACDC. Detainees there are forced to work for eight hours a day, with zero compensation (at some other facilities, immigrants are paid $1 a day for their work.) The city has been paid over $6 million from ICE in the 2016 fiscal year alone.
Earlier this month, “Inside Atlanta’s Immigrant Cages,” a report by Project South and Georgia Detention Watch, was released. The report, which is the culmination of a year-long project comprised of interviews with many prisoners, attorneys, tours of the facility, and the poring over of hundreds of documents obtained from the city, paints a gruesome picture of life at the jail. Almost all detained immigrants at ACDC interviewed for the report noted that officers often yelled at and intimidated them, used vulgar language, and threaten them constantly with lock-downs. The conditions that prisoners live in are unsanitary and dangerous; medical care is scant; the quality of the food is notably poor; people are thrown in solitary confinement for no discernable reason. It is a place of great suffering.
“The city jail serves no other purpose than to warehouse poor Atlantans and immigrants,” said SCHR Executive Director Sara Totonchi. Since the passage of the cash bail reform ordinance in February, and the temporary stop in new federal detainees, the cost of keeping ACDC open is prohibitively high. “With the temporary halting of the contract with ICE and the implementation of the new bail ordinance, this jail serves no legitimate purpose and should be closed immediately to save taxpayer dollars,” said Totonchi. Mayor Bottoms herself agrees: she no longer thinks it is cost effective for taxpayers to keep ACDC’s doors open.
“It is time for Atlanta to stop colluding with ICE permanently and end its agreements to detain immigrants,” said Azadeh Shahshahani, Legal & Advocacy Director with Project South, in a statement.
The Racial Justice Action Center has done formidable work in spearheading the campaign to close ACDC. The time is now.
Read ‘Inside Atlanta’s Immigrant Cages’ here.
Read more about protests against ACDC here.