Mississippi Today
Incarcerated Mississippians with mental illness face nation’s second-longest wait for care
Mississippians who need mental health treatment before they can stand trial have to wait in jail longer than people in any other state but Texas, according to a new national study by the nonprofit Treatment Advocacy Center.
But the Department of Mental Health says a new 83-bed forensic facility scheduled to open later this year will drastically reduce wait times. It’s asking for $9.5 million from the Legislature to fully staff the facility and will open as many beds as it can with whatever funding it receives.
Forensic beds are reserved for people with a mental illness who have been charged with a crime and require treatment before they can stand trial, and for people who have been found not guilty by reason of insanity.
The report found that people in Mississippi who require competency restoration services wait an average of 9.6 months after a court has ordered them into treatment before being admitted to a state hospital. The only state where people waited longer was Texas, with an average wait of 1.2 years.
Adam Moore, spokesman for the Department of Mental Health, said the agency has been working to improve forensic services, and the new unit could make a huge difference.
“If the new building were opened and fully staffed today, there would be very few individuals waiting for competency restoration in jail, and because the number of competency restoration beds would increase so dramatically, the wait times would be significantly reduced for those who weren’t admitted immediately,” he said in an email.
Mississippians awaiting competency restoration are often incarcerated for months in county jails that typically offer little in the way of mental health services. For sheriffs, housing and protecting them can be a major challenge.
In September, Adams County Sheriff Travis Patten offered a tour of the jail he runs. He has been sounding the alarm about dangerous conditions in the jail for years. In 2022 the nonprofit protection and advocacy organization Disability Rights Mississippi informed the county it planned to investigate, saying jail conditions were “simply put, deplorable and inhumane for any individual.”
Most people facing charges in the county are sent across the river to the jail in Concordia Parish, Louisiana. But that jail won’t accept people with serious mental illness, so the crumbling jail in downtown Natchez detains people waiting for treatment through the forensic or civil process.
In September, one of the jail’s two padded cells had been occupied for six months by a man awaiting forensic services.
“Jailers don’t get paid very much here,” he said. “But yet what the community is wanting is for them to be psychiatric nurses, and they are not equipped to do that.”
The report by the Treatment Advocacy Center, which conducts research and lobbying aimed at making it easier for people with mental illness to get treatment, reviewed the availability of state hospital beds for psychiatric treatment around the country. The organization found the number of such beds reached a “historic low” last year, following decades of policy aimed at reducing the number of people with mental illness and developmental disabilities who are treated in institutions such as state hospitals.
The report also tallied beds available to people who have been ordered by a judge to receive psychiatric treatment through the civil commitment process. Unlike those awaiting forensic beds, such people haven’t been charged with a crime. But Mississippians going through the civil commitment process are frequently detained in jail, sometimes for days or weeks at a time, Mississippi Today and ProPublica reported last year. They are generally treated like criminal defendants and often unable to access prescribed psychiatric medications.
Since 2006, at least 14 people have died after being jailed during the civil commitment process.
Mississippi is a national outlier: Mississippi Today surveyed behavioral health officials and advocates in all 50 states to find that in no other state are people routinely jailed without criminal charges for days or weeks while they await civil commitment proceedings.
Mississippi officials involved in the commitment process often say they have to jail people because they have nowhere else to put them. But the Treatment Advocacy Center report found that Mississippi actually has more beds for such patients than most states: Mississippi has 9.8 civil beds for every 100,000 residents, more than all but six states and well above the national average of 5.2.
That finding suggests that a lack of treatment beds is not the core reason that Mississippi officials jail people solely because they may be mentally ill.
Polly Tribble, executive director of Disability Rights Mississippi, which advocates for the rights of people with disabilities including serious mental illness, said that in Mississippi, deinstitutionalization has not been accompanied by the development of effective community-based mental health services. Those services could help people stay stable so that they don’t need inpatient treatment or behave in ways that lead to criminal charges.
“You’re either going to the hospital or jail,” she said. “But if we could cut it off, before that, and help people stay at home, and stay in their community and get better, then we could fix it at the jail and the state hospital levels.”
The Treatment Advocacy Center report also found that the number of state hospital beds in the state dropped by 31% from 2016 to last year. That decline was in part a response to a 2016 lawsuit by the Department of Justice alleging that Mississippi discriminated against people with mental illness by failing to provide services at the community level and instead forcing them into state hospitals.
Since then, the agency has shifted resources from the state hospitals to the community mental health centers that operate local services, including crisis stabilization units with beds that were not counted in the Treatment Advocacy Center report.
But the federal lawsuit is over, and the remedial order that required the state to expand community services has been overturned.
Department of Mental Health director Wendy Bailey told lawmakers on Wednesday that the agency remains committed to expanding community-based services.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
On this day in 1875
Nov. 2, 1875
The first Mississippi Plan, which included violence against Black Americans to keep them from voting, resulted in huge victories for white Democrats across the state.
A year earlier, the Republican Party had carried a majority of the votes, and many Black Mississippians had been elected to office. In the wake of those victories, white leagues arose to challenge Republican rule and began to use widespread violence and fraud to recapture control of the state.
Over several days in September 1875, about 50 Black Mississippians were killed along with white supporters, including a school teacher who worked with the Black community in Clinton.
The governor asked President Ulysses Grant to intervene, but he decided against intervening, and the violence and fraud continued. Other Southern states soon copied the Mississippi plan.
John R. Lynch, the last Black congressman for Mississippi until the 1986 election of Mike Espy, wrote: “It was a well-known fact that in 1875 nearly every Democratic club in the State was converted into an armed military company.”
A federal grand jury concluded: “Fraud, intimidation, and violence perpetrated at the last election is without a parallel in the annals of history.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Mississippi Today’s NewsMatch Campaign is Here: Support Journalism that Strengthens Mississippi
High-quality journalism like ours depends on reader support; without it, we simply couldn’t exist. That’s why we’re proud to join the NewsMatch movement, a national initiative aimed at raising $50 million for nonprofit newsrooms that serve communities like ours here in Mississippi, where access to reliable information has often been limited.
In a time when trusted journalists and media sources are disappearing, we believe the stakes couldn’t be higher. Without on-the-ground, trustworthy reporting, civic engagement suffers, accountability falters and corruption often goes unaddressed. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Here at Mississippi Today we act as watchdogs, holding those in power accountable, and as storytellers, giving a platform to voices that have been ignored for too long. And we’re committed to keeping our stories free for everyone because information should be accessible when it’s needed most.
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Every dollar raised strengthens our ability to serve you with fact-based journalism on issues that impact your everyday life—whether it’s covering local election issues or reporting on decisions affecting schools, safety and economic growth in Mississippi. Your support makes it possible for us to stay rooted in the community, offering nuanced perspectives that help Mississippians understand and engage with what’s happening around them.
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We’ll examine what’s at stake if local newsrooms lose press freedoms and will discuss how you, as members of the public, can help protect it. This event is open to Mississippi Today and Verite News members as a special thank-you for supporting local journalism and standing with us in this mission. Donate today to RSVP!
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Thank you for believing in the power of journalism to strengthen the communities we love—not only during election season but year-round. With your help, we’ll keep Mississippi informed, engaged and connected for generations to come.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Hinds County loses fight over control of jail
The Hinds County sheriff and Board of Supervisors have lost an appeal to prevent control of its jail by a court-appointed receiver and an injunction that orders the county to address unconstitutional conditions in the facility.
Two members from a three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with decisions by U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves to appoint a receiver to oversee day-to-day jail operations and keep parts of a previous consent decree in place to fix constitutional violations, including a failure to protect detainees from harm.
However, the appeals court called the new injunction “overly broad” in one area and is asking Reeves to reevaluate the scope of the receivership.
The injunction retained provisions relating to sexual assault, but the appeals court found the provisions were tied to general risk of violence at the jail, rather than specific concerns about the Prison Rape Elimination Act. The court reversed those points of the injunction and remanded them to the district court so the provisions can be removed.
The court also found that the receiver should not have authority over budgeting and staff salaries for the Raymond Detention Center, which could be seen as “federal intrusion into RDC’s budget” – especially if the receivership has no end date.
Hinds County Board of Supervisors President Robert Graham was not immediately available for comment Friday. Sheriff Tyree Jones declined to comment because he has not yet read the entire court opinion.
In 2016, the Department of Justice sued Hinds County alleging a pattern or practice of unconstitutional conditions in four of its detention facilities. The county and DOJ entered a consent decree with stipulated changes to make for the jail system, which holds people facing trial.
“But the decree did not resolve the dispute; to the contrary, a yearslong battle ensued in the district court as to whether and to what extent the County was complying with the consent decree,” the appeals court wrote.
This prompted Reeves to hold the county in contempt of court twice in 2022.
The county argued it was doing its best to comply with the consent decree and spending millions to fix the jail. One of the solutions they offered was building a new jail, which is now under construction in Jackson.
The county had a chance to further prove itself during three weeks of hearings held in February 2022. Focuses included the death of seven detainees in 2021 from assaults and suicide and issues with staffing, contraband, old infrastructure and use of force.
Seeing partial compliance by the county, in April 2022 Reeves dismissed the consent decree and issued a new, shorter injunction focused on the jail and removed some provisions from the decree.
But Reeves didn’t see improvement from there. In July 2022, he ordered receivership and wrote that it was needed because of an ongoing risk of unconstitutional harm to jail detainees and staff.
The county pushed back against federal oversight and filed an appeal, arguing that there isn’t sufficient evidence to show that there are current and ongoing constitutional violations at the jail and that the county has acted with deliberate indifference.
Days before the appointed receiver was set to take control of the jail at the beginning of 2023, the 5th Circuit Court ordered a stay to halt that receiver’s work. The new injunction ordered by Reeves was also stayed, and a three-person jail monitoring team that had been in place for years also was ordered to stop work.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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