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House approves limits to jailing people with mental illness charged with no crime

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The House approved legislation strictly limiting when Mississippians can be jailed solely on the basis of mental illness, when they have not been charged with any crime– something that currently happens hundreds of times a year.

Similar language in the Senate is awaiting a floor vote.

Currently, state law allows people to be jailed during involuntary commitment proceedings if there is “no reasonable alternative.” Hundreds of times a year, Mississippians are jailed with no criminal charges, solely because they may need treatment for mental illness. No other state jails so many people charged with no crime for such lengths of time.

Since 2006, at least 17 people have died after being jailed during the commitment process, including a man who died after being jailed without charges in Alcorn County for 12 days in January. No state agency tracks this information, so Mississippi Today and ProPublica assembled a tally by reviewing lawsuits, Mississippi Bureau of Investigation reports, and news clips.

The House legislation, HB 1640, authored by Public Health Chairman Rep. Sam Creekmore, R-New Albany, would require a judge to determine that a person is “violent” and issue a specific order to hold them in jail. The detention would be capped at 24 hours, and the local community mental health center would be required to provide treatment while the person was jailed. A person would get a hearing within three to five days of their evaluations, compared to seven to 10 days in current law.

HB 1640 would also require a screening by a mental health professional before a person could be taken into custody, a provision intended to prevent situations where people are taken to jail to await evaluations that determine they don’t actually need treatment.

On the House floor on Tuesday, some lawmakers raised questions about who will pay for the treatment that will be required if counties can’t detain people in jail. The bill contains no additional funding.

“It’s cheaper to transport someone than to keep them in jail,” Creekmore said, arguing that deputies can drive people to available crisis unit beds around the state instead of holding them in jail.

The Department of Mental Health operates a bed registry that allows county officials to see where there are open beds around the state, but the facilities can also reject patients if they determine they are violent or have medical needs the crisis unit can’t care for. State data shows the number of those rejections has been falling.

As initially introduced, the legislation restricting jail detentions applied to all jails in the state. The committee substitute added language allowing people to be detained in jails that have been certified as a holding facility by the Department of Mental Health. To get the certification, jails and other facilities must meet health and safety standards, including suicide prevention protocols, and provide mental health treatment and medications.

Adam Moore, spokesman for the Department of Mental Health, said Tuesday afternoon that there are currently only two certified holding facilities in the state. One is the Chickasaw County Detention Center and the other is Magnolia Regional Health Center in Alcorn County.

Joy Hogge, executive director of the nonprofit organization Families As Allies, was at the Capitol Tuesday for Mental Health and Wellness Day with a handout urging lawmakers to make some changes to HB 1640 and the related Senate bill, SB 2744.

Hogge said she is concerned that requiring a screening before a person can be taken into custody for commitment proceedings could put a burden on families by forcing them to try to get a relative to agree to go to a provider’s office for an evaluation in the midst of a crisis.

“What we see is families that are just desperate to get help for their loved one, and find it very difficult to do that,” she said.

The screening requirement includes an exception: If a person being considered for commitment proceedings is “actively violent or refuses to participate in the pre-affidavit screening,” the community mental health center can recommend that the process go forward and sheriff’s deputies can take a person into custody.

Hogge said there are some patients, such as those with complex medical needs or physically aggressive behavior, who won’t be able to get the treatment they need at the crisis stabilization units; the state hospitals may be the only facilities that can treat them.

But the state hospitals admit patients only with a court-order through the commitment process, and only during designated hours. With more flexible admissions policies, the state hospitals could admit those patients faster and they could spend less time in jail.

“Why aren’t we looking more at that part?” Hogge said.

Moore, the DMH spokesman, said the agency is considering adding admission hours at the state hospitals in the next few months.

“Our state hospitals are working closely with the CSUs in situations where someone has a commitment order and may be physically aggressive and needs to be admitted quickly to the state hospital,” he said.

The Families As Allies handout also calls on lawmakers to “eliminate all references to holding people in jail,” instead of permitting it in certain circumstances.

Leaders of another nonprofit organization, Disability Rights Mississippi, have also said the legislation doesn’t go far enough in restricting jail detentions for people who have committed no crime. They are planning a lawsuit against the state and some counties arguing the practice is unconstitutional. 

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Mississippi Today

On this day in 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois urged active resistance to racist policies

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mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-27 07:00:00

April 27, 1903

W.E.B. Du Bois by James E. Purdy in 1907 from the National Portrait Gallery.

W.E.B. Du Bois, in his book, “The Souls of Black Folk,” called for active resistance to racist policies: “We have no right to sit silently by while the inevitable seeds are sown for a harvest of disaster to our children, black and white.” 

He described the tension between being Black and being an American: “One ever feels his twoness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” 

He criticized Washington’s “Atlanta Compromise” speech. Six years later, Du Bois helped found the NAACP and became the editor of its monthly magazine, The Crisis. He waged protests against the racist silent film “The Birth of a Nation” and against lynchings of Black Americans, detailing the 2,732 lynchings between 1884 and 1914. 

In 1921, he decried Harvard University’s decisions to ban Black students from the dormitories as an attempt to renew “the Anglo-Saxon cult, the worship of the Nordic totem, the disenfranchisement of Negro, Jew, Irishman, Italian, Hungarian, Asiatic and South Sea Islander — the world rule of Nordic white through brute force.” 

In 1929, he debated Lothrop Stoddard, a proponent of scientific racism, who also happened to belong to the Ku Klux Klan. The Chicago Defender’s front page headline read, “5,000 Cheer W.E.B. DuBois, Laugh at Lothrup Stoddard.” 

In 1949, the FBI began to investigate Du Bois as a “suspected Communist,” and he was indicted on trumped-up charges that he had acted as an agent of a foreign state and had failed to register. The government dropped the case after Albert Einstein volunteered to testify as a character witness. 

Despite the lack of conviction, the government confiscated his passport for eight years. In 1960, he recovered his passport and traveled to the newly created Republic of Ghana. Three years later, the U.S. government refused to renew his passport, so Du Bois became a citizen of Ghana. He died on Aug. 27, 1963, the eve of the March on Washington.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Jim Hood’s opinion provides a roadmap if lawmakers do the unthinkable and can’t pass a budget

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mississippitoday.org – @BobbyHarrison9 – 2025-04-27 06:00:00

On June 30, 2009, Sam Cameron, the then-executive director of the Mississippi Hospital Association, held a news conference in the Capitol rotunda to publicly take his whipping and accept his defeat.

Cameron urged House Democrats, who had sided with the Hospital Association, to accept the demands of Republican Gov. Haley Barbour to place an additional $90 million tax on the state’s hospitals to help fund Medicaid and prevent the very real possibility of the program and indeed much of state government being shut down when the new budget year began in a few hours. The impasse over Medicaid and the hospital tax had stopped all budget negotiations.

Barbour watched from a floor above as Cameron publicly admitted defeat. Cameron’s decision to swallow his pride was based on a simple equation. He told news reporters, scores of lobbyists and health care advocates who had set up camp in the Capitol as midnight on July 1 approached that, while he believed the tax would hurt Mississippi hospitals, not having a Medicaid budget would be much more harmful.

Just as in 2009, the Legislature ended the 2025 regular session earlier this month without a budget agreement and will have to come back in special session to adopt a budget before the new fiscal year begins on July 1. It is unlikely that the current budget rift between the House and Senate will be as dramatic as the 2009 standoff when it appeared only hours before the July 1 deadline that there would be no budget. But who knows what will result from the current standoff? After all, the current standoff in many ways seems to be more about political egos than policy differences on the budget.

The fight centers around multiple factors, including:

  • Whether legislation will be passed to allow sports betting outside of casinos.
  • Whether the Senate will agree to a massive projects bill to fund local projects throughout the state.
  • Whether leaders will overcome hard feelings between the two chambers caused by the House’s hasty final passage of a Senate tax cut bill filled with typos that altered the intent of the bill without giving the Senate an opportunity to fix the mistakes.
  • Whether members would work on a weekend at the end of the session. The Senate wanted to, the House did not.

It is difficult to think any of those issues will rise to the ultimate level of preventing the final passage of a budget when push comes to shove.

But who knows? What we do know is that the impasse in 2009 created a guideline of what could happen if a budget is not passed.

It is likely that parts, though not all, of state government will shut down if the Legislature does the unthinkable and does not pass a budget for the new fiscal year beginning July 1.

An official opinion of the office of Attorney General Jim Hood issued in 2009 said if there is no budget passed by the Legislature, those services mandated in the Mississippi Constitution, such as a public education system, will continue.

According to the Hood opinion, other entities, such as the state’s debt, and court and federal mandates, also would be funded. But it is likely that there will not be funds for Medicaid and many other programs, such as transportation and aspects of public safety that are not specifically listed in the Mississippi Constitution.

The Hood opinion reasoned that the Mississippi Constitution is the ultimate law of the state and must be adhered to even in the absence of legislative action. Other states have reached similar conclusions when their legislatures have failed to act, the AG’s opinion said.

As is often pointed out, the opinion of the attorney general does not carry the weight of law. It serves only as a guideline, though Gov. Tate Reeves has relied on the 2009 opinion even though it was written by the staff of Hood, who was Reeves’ opponent in the contentious 2019 gubernatorial campaign.

But if the unthinkable ever occurs and the Legislature goes too far into a new fiscal year without adopting a budget, it most likely will be the courts — moreso than an AG’s opinion — that ultimately determine if and how state government operates.

In 2009 Sam Cameron did not want to see what would happen if a budget was not adopted. It also is likely that current political leaders do not want to see the results of not having a budget passed before July 1 of this year.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Mississippi Today

1964: Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was formed

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mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-26 07:00:00

April 26, 1964

Aaron Henry testifies before the Credentials Committee at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.

Civil rights activists started the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to challenge the state’s all-white regular delegation to the Democratic National Convention. 

The regulars had already adopted this resolution: “We oppose, condemn and deplore the Civil Rights Act of 1964 … We believe in separation of the races in all phases of our society. It is our belief that the separation of the races is necessary for the peace and tranquility of all the people of Mississippi, and the continuing good relationship which has existed over the years.” 

In reality, Black Mississippians had been victims of intimidation, harassment and violence for daring to try and vote as well as laws passed to disenfranchise them. As a result, by 1964, only 6% of Black Mississippians were permitted to vote. A year earlier, activists had run a mock election in which thousands of Black Mississippians showed they would vote if given an opportunity. 

In August 1964, the Freedom Party decided to challenge the all-white delegation, saying they had been illegally elected in a segregated process and had no intention of supporting President Lyndon B. Johnson in the November election. 

The prediction proved true, with white Mississippi Democrats overwhelmingly supporting Republican candidate Barry Goldwater, who opposed the Civil Rights Act. While the activists fell short of replacing the regulars, their courageous stand led to changes in both parties.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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