Oh, Fulton County: A jail with locks that don’t work (Updated)

Well, Fred, in most of those instances the authorities are attempting to fix the locks. That’s not yet the case in Fulton County, even though the problem has been known for a decade. And while you may have missed or ignored that part of my complaint, the county’s apparent apathy toward the problem is what really ticks me off. Equipment will break or become obsolete; anyone can recognize that. It’s the failure to fix said equipment — all while spending tens of millions of dollars every year on the facility — that infuriates me.

As for Cutty’s evidence: The Arrendale situation appears to be analogous both in the problem and the failure to address it. And, as a Georgia taxpayer, that ticks me off, too.

The Santa Clara jail may also be analogous, although the document at the link does not say how long the problem had been known about. And the other example cited in that link is not analogous, as a grand jury determined officials didn’t know about the problem — the exact opposite of the case in Fulton.

The Kentucky example is not analogous, because the problem (which concerned locks on emergency exits, not individual cells) was discovered as a result of the riot. And authorities there responded by checking the locks at the state’s other prisons.

The Cedartown example is nowhere close to Fulton’s: The problem that allowed the inmate to escape was that “Electrical technicians and computer programmers were working on the lock when the escape occurred.” That’s a different kind of incompetent, but it isn’t nearly the same as knowing for a decade that cell locks don’t work and choosing not to fix them.

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