Letter to Atlanta City Council Regarding Atlanta City Detention Center (ACDC)

Published August 2022

We are writing as a group of healthcare workers who live, vote, and work with patients throughout Atlanta to express our strong opposition to City Council’s proposed plan to lease the Atlanta City Detention Center (ACDC) to the Fulton County Jail. In solidarity with the community, we ask our Mayor and Atlanta City Council to honor their promise to close the jail and redirect the funds to initiatives like a Center for Equity, Wellness, and Freedom that will directly benefit individuals and the community at large.

As healthcare workers we are deeply concerned for the public health and public safety of Atlanta communities. COVID-19 has laid bare how deeply intertwined these two concepts are. For instance, the majority of the largest single-site COVID outbreaks have been in jails and prisons. We must urgently move away from incarceration as a solution to public safety concerns as it continues to undermine both the health and safety of communities. Even short periods of incarceration have been shown to have a destabilizing effect - leading to missed work, inability to pay rent, and eviction - and can actually increase the likelihood of future arrest. As healthcare workers, most of us have seen how harmful incarceration is to the health and safety of our patients. This is such a serious problem in Atlanta that last year, two emergency medicine physicians who work at Grady Memorial Hospital published an article about it in the New England Journal of Medicine, which is one of the top medical journals in the world.

The current City Council and Mayor have reneged on the promises made to community members and are now planning to lease this empty, wasteful jail to the Fulton County Sheriff’s Department to use to relieve overcrowding at their jail. The overcrowding at Fulton County Jails is a self-inflicted, chronic issue ever since the jail’s inception requiring multiple levels of federal oversight and over a billion dollars of further public investment - clearly to no avail. Despite the manufactured urgency by the Sheriff's department in seeking more jail cells, this is simply not the case. To be clear, the Fulton County Sheriff, Fulton County courts, and the Fulton County DA’s office have all of the necessary tools available to decrease the Fulton County jail population swiftly and safely without the addition of further jail space. These include but are not limited to dropping prosecutions of drug-related crimes and crimes of survival related to poverty and homelessness, further use of citation and release, elimination of cash bail for any bail-eligible offense to stop wealth-based detention, and release of medically vulnerable patients including all of those over 50 years old who empirically pose negligible risk to the public. All of these widespread practices undermine the stated goals of public health and public safety. There are both medical and legal experts willing to sit down for as long as it takes to review evidence based public safety policies - legislating based on fear mongering and one-sided views from the sheriff’s office is naive, irresponsible, and short-sighted.

Instead of addressing the basic needs of our community and investing in affordable housing, high-quality and equitable public education, and equitable access to healthcare, our city continues to waste tens of millions of dollars a year on locking away poor and marginalized community members to both their individual detriment and our community’s disadvantage. A Center for Equity, Wellness, and Freedom would provide a number of local resources - health and nutrition services, mental health providers, substance use counseling, educational programs, affordable housing resources - that our patients desperately need. These investments not only reduce preventable human suffering but are effective crime reduction investments as well! Incarceration is an expensive, ineffective, and harmful intervention and we as healthcare workers do not support the expansion of it under the guise of public safety and/or public health. We urge you to listen to your community, make good on your original promise, and support the Communities Over Cages Alliance’s demand to close the ACDC and use this funding to build a Center for Equity, Wellness, and Freedom.

Signed

Mark Spencer, MD

Vanessa Van Doren, MD

Erica Heiman, MD

Danielle Jones, MD

Alex Galloway, MD

Lauren Chen, MD

Krysta Frye, MD

Subada Soti, MD

Krisha Desai, MD

Stacie Schmidt, MD

Francois Rollin, MD, MPH

Alice Jiang, MD

Andrew Davis, MD

Hima Veeramachaneni, MD

Tracey L. Henry, MD, MPH, MS

Juhi Jain, MD

Anika Backster, MD, MS

Amara Fazal, MD

Matthew Wheatley, MD

Amy Zeidan, MD

Austin Gitomer, MD

Shavonne Collins, MD

Emma Kofmehl, MD

Lakshmi Katta, MD

Bisrat Woldemichael, MD

Christina Lin, MD, PhD

Alex Pressman, MD

Phillip Anjum, MD

Janhavi Dubhashi, MPH, MD Candidate

Nithya Shanmugam, MD Candidate

Ariana Traub, MPH, MD Candidate

Spencer Lee-Rey, MD Candidate

Nita Chai, MSEd, MD Candidate

MopeninuJesu Oluyinka, MD Candidate

Julia Ding, MD Candidate

Jenny Nguyen, MD Candidate

Anna Horner, MD Candidate

Anna Maurer, MD Candidate

Kieran Kristensen, MD

Babajide Owosela, MD Candidate

Eva Rimler, MD

Ashvini Vaidya, MSc, MD Candidate

Tuzo Mwarumba, MD Candidate

Michael Daugherty, MD Candidate

Marshall Fleurant, MD

Shub Agrawal, MD, MBA

Siri Chirumamilla, DO, MS

Jennifer Lom, MD

Randi Smith, MD, MPH

Tracey Henry, MD, MPH

Onyie, MD Candidate

Shuai Hao, MD

Kevin Rymut, MD, BSN

Mackenzie Garcia, MD, MPH

Daniel Resnick, MD

Hamdi Abdi, MD Candidate

Meg Winata, BSN

Meredith Lora, MD

Nicole Lue, MD Candidate

Shayli Patel, MD Candidate

Kristen Liberty Zecca, MPH, MD Candidate

Lucie Duffie, MD Candidate

Emilio Arellano, MD Candidate

Keziah Daniels, MD Candidate

Kyle Bundschuh, MD Candidate

Carlin Zaprowski, MD Candidate

Emily Chu, MD Candidate

Natalie David, MD Candidate

Julian Moran, MD Candidate

Emily, MD Candidate

Vega Walke, MD Candidate

Arielle Lawson, MBE, MD Candidate

Sarah McLaughlin, MS, Candidate

Lee Beaty, MD Candidate

Daniela Farchi, MD/PhD Candidate

Olivia Veira, MPH, MD Candidate

Kasthuri Nair, ScM, MD Candidate

Chiemela Ohanele, MD/PhD

Julia Shuford, MD Candidate

Annabel Lu, BS, MD Candidate

Nikkia Schady BA, MD Candidate

Robert Foster, MD

Angella Appah, MD Candidate

Katie Steklac MS, MD Candidate

Anne Emanuels, MPH, MD Candidate

Andrew Elmer B.S., MD Candidate

Sarah Kamal, MD

Michaela Whitelaw, MPH, MD Candidate

Kathryn Sharma, BS, MD Candidate

Maja Wichhart, MD Candidate

Samantha Eco, MD Candidate

Lisette Corbin, BA, MD Candidate

Sarah Samaranayake, MD Candidate

Alex Abdollahzadeh, MD Candidate

Molly Lavaud, MD Candidate

Travis Wilson, MPH, MD Candidate

Jordan Hildenbrand, MD

Noble Maleque, MD

Ruby Ladd, MD Candidate

Giovanni Mella-Velazquez , MD Candidate

Abby LeCates, MD Candidate

Cassidy Golden, MD Candidate

Hannah Marcovitch, MD Candidate

Mary Katherine Henry, MD Candidate

Maura George, MD

Jennifer Wang, MD Candidate

Wilson Battle, MD Candidate

Mackenzie Bennett, B.S, MD Candidate

Klevi Golloshi, B.S., MD Candidate

Joseph Sharp, MD

Aliza Makhani MD Candidate

Kahsavyah Buckley M.Sc., MD Candidate

Carey Jansen, PhD, MD Candidate

Maya Wergeles, MD Candidate

Deanna Gill, MD

Rebecca Steinberg, MD, MSc

Heesu Park, BS, MD Candidate

Kacie Isaacson, MD

Sagar Mehta, MD

Heather Brandt, DO

Ruwanthi Ekanayake, MD/PhD candidate

Nikhil Vettikattu, BA, BS, MD Candidate

Meenakshi Vanka, MD

Abinand Rejimon MD/PhD Candidate

Danielle Llanos, MD

Sophie Vitter, MD

Tsion Assaye, MD Candidate

Omid Behbahani-Nejad, MD

Alex Matelski, MD

Cally Braun, MD Candidate

Reena Hemrajani, MD

Nidhi Patel, MD

Anwar Osborne, MD

Kevin Oshiro Do, MD

Michaela Henderson, MD Candidate

Christyn Hosking, M.A.

Zach Bosshardt, MD

Michelle Casimir, PsyD, ABPP

Drake Berry, B.A. Criminal Justice, MD Candidate

Kallio Hunnicutt-Ferguson, PhD

Chanda C. Graves, PhD, ABPP

Rachel Waford, PhD

Martha Ward, MD

Eugene Farber, PhD

Radhika Agarwal, MD

Jada Bussey-Jones, MD

Julie Hollberg, MD

Camille Lin, MD Candidate

Alban Foulser, MA

Michael Khoury, MD

Cecilia Castelano, MD Candidate

Theresa Vettese, MD

Stephanie Freitag, PhD

Mohamed Munye, MD Candidate

Isabel Lopez, MD

Lina Tewala, MD Candidate

Moneba Anees, MD

Justin Trop, MD, MSc

Wesley Gordon, MD

Vincent Guzzetta, MD

Maggie Giger, MA

Henry Kahn, MD

Samantha Patton, PhD

Carlos Saldana, MD

Srinivasa Nithin Gopalsamy, MD, MSc

Vincent Marconi, MD

Lucy Witt, MD

Anjuli Shah, MD

Ameeta Kalokhe, MD, MSc

Kirsten Williams MD