Mississippi Today

Parole Board revamp, victim notification among bills before Legislature

Published

1 year ago

February 22, 2024

Over a dozen bills have been introduced in the Legislature this session to revamp the state’s parole system, including at least one filed in response to the release of a man who killed his two family members.

House Bill 112, by Rep. Price Wallace, R-Mendenhall, would require the Parole Board to send certified mail notification to crime victims, victim’s family or a designee before a parole hearing.

One of Wallace’s constituents is Zeno Mangum, the son of one of the victims of James Williams III, who killed his father and stepmother and was granted parole last year despite opposition from family members and lawmakers. Mangum previously told Mississippi Today his family opposed Williams’ release and didn’t receive notification about a parole hearing, which Parole Board Chairman Jeffery Belk disputed.

“I’m sure there’s others out there who haven’t been notified either,” Wallace told Mississippi Today about his bill.

Among the findings from a June 2023 review by the Legislative Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review Committee was that the board could improve its victim notification process.

In a sample of 100 inmates, PEER found two instances in which an inmate with a registered victim had a parole hearing in 2022, but there was no record in the Mississippi Department of Corrections’ inmate database of the victim receiving notification of the hearing.

Wallace said the requirement of certified mail, which needs a signature for delivery, would show proof that victims and families are notified of a parole hearing ahead of time.

The bill would take effect after passage, and it has been referred to the House’s Judiciary B and Corrections committees.

Here is a look at other parole-related bills proposed this session.

Parole Board membership

House Bill 114 by Rep. Wallace would dissolve the current five-member Parole Board and require the governor to reappoint three of five members who have a minimum five years’ law enforcement experience. Wallace told Mississippi Today he believes this perspective is valuable in making decisions to release people.

Currently, only one member, Marlow Stewart of Terry, a former MDOC probation and parole officer, has law enforcement experience. Chairman Belk is a former Chevron executive.

Among the other findings from the PEER report was that the Parole Board conducts unnecessary parole hearings for offenders who could qualify for presumptive parole and has not improved in maintaining minutes documenting its parole decisions.

The bill has been referred to the Corrections Committee and Apportionment and Elections Committee, of which Price is a member.

Senate Bill 2352 by Sen. Angela Burks Hill, R-Picayune, would reconstitute the Parole Board and set requirements for one member to have law enforcement background; two to be licensed attorneys, one with a background in prosecutorial law; and two who own businesses in the state.

The bill would also require parole hearings to be public and broadcast live on the Department of Corrections website. Other information would be required to be posted online, including notice of hearings for violent offenders, parole and revocation outcomes and guidance documents the Parole Board uses to make its decisions. Notification of upcoming parole hearings would be through first class mail. The bill has been referred to the Senate Corrections and Government Structure committees.

Notification before parole hearings

House Bill 844 by Rep. Becky Currie, R-Brookhaven, would require the Parole Board to solicit recommendations from members of the criminal justice system, including the original judge and prosecutor in the case and the attorney general’s office, when a person applies for parole. Before a hearing, notification would need to be sent to the original prosecuting attorney and judge and the police chief and sheriff of the municipality and county where the conviction happened. The bill has been referred to the Corrections Committee, which Currie chairs.

Keeping parole eligibility on the books

House Bill 357 by Rep. Daryl Porter, D-Summit, House Bill 755 by Rep. Fred Shanks, R-Brandon, and House Bill 1454 by Rep. Jansen Owen, R-Poplarville, would extend the repealer on parole eligibility reforms. Under the current law, parole eligibility is set to be repealed July 1, and the bills would push the repealer to 2027.

Under the parole eligibility reforms, those convicted of nonviolent and non-habitual drug offenses would become parole eligible after serving 25% of their sentence or 10 years. Those convicted of violent crimes would have to serve 50% of their sentence or 20 years to be eligible. For specific violent offenses such as carjackings and drive-by shootings, a person would have to serve 60% of their sentence or 25 years.

The reforms also include geriatric parole eligibility for incarcerated people age 60 or older who served at least 10 years.

Owen’s bill has been referred to the House’s Judiciary B Committee, and Shanks’ bill to the House Corrections Committee. Porter’s bill was referred to the Judiciary B and Corrections committees.

House Bill 710 by House Minority Leader Robert Johnson III, D-Natchez, would decrease the amount of time someone convicted of a violent crime would have to serve before becoming eligible for parole.

Johnson’s bill proposes that a person serve 25% of the sentence or 10 years. Under the current law, those convicted of violent offenses would have to serve 50% or 20 years, or 60% or 25 years, for specific offenses such as carjackings and drive-by-shootings.

The bill also would require three yes votes to grant parole to someone convicted of a violent crime after June 30, 1995, and four votes to parole someone convicted of capital murder or a sex offense. The bill has been referred to the House’s Judiciary B and Corrections committees.

FWD.us, a bipartisan group that focuses on criminal justice and immigration issues, lauded efforts to continue parole eligibility in Mississippi.

“Without parole and other commonsense reforms to safely reduce the state’s highest in the nation imprisonment rate, Mississippi cannot continue to improve public safety, strengthen the state’s workforce, and sustain the strong long-term economic development Mississippians deserve,” Mississippi State Director Alesha Judkins said in a Tuesday statement.

Parole eligibility for juvenile offenders

House Bill 1065 by Rep. Jeffrey Harness, D-Fayette, would allow those who were under the age of 18 when they committed an offense, sentenced for a violent crime and otherwise not eligible for parole at an earlier date, to become eligible once they reach the age of 21. A parole hearing would be required before being released. The bill has been referred to the House’s Judiciary B Committee.

House Bill 361 by Rep. Porter and House Bill 571 by Rep. Johnson called the “Juvenile Offender Parole and Rehabilitation Act,” would allow a person who was under the age of 18 and wasn’t eligible for parole at an earlier date to become eligible after serving 20 years. A parole hearing would be required before being released. Both bills have been referred to the House’s Judiciary B Committee.

House Bill 1554 by Joey Hood, R-Ackerman, proposes parole eligibility for those who committed offenses while under the age of 18 and received a life sentence after they have served 40 years. For those sentenced to life without the possibility of parole and were under 18, they would be parole eligible when they reach the age of 65. The bill has been referred to Judiciary B and Corrections committees.

Senate Bill 2022 by Joey Fillingane, R-Sumrall, would allow alternative sentencing and parole for people who were under 18. A court without a jury must hold a separate sentencing proceeding to determine whether to sentence a defendant to life or life without parole.

If the court finds a life sentence is unacceptable, it can sentence 20-40 years for first degree murder, 15-30 for second degree murder and 25-50 years for capital murder. This would apply retroactively regardless of when the offense, arrest and conviction happened.

A death penalty cannot be imposed if the person was not at least 18 when the crime was committed, which is in line with U.S. Supreme Court rulings around sentencing for juvenile offenders. The bill was amended and approved by the Senate’s Judiciary B Committee, which Fillingane chairs.

Parole and probation officers

House Bill 948 by Rep. Harness would limit the number of cases probation officers handle to 75. The bill has been referred to the House’s Judiciary B Committee.

Senate Bill 2024 by Sen. Hill would limit the number of cases of parole and probation officers to 50. If their caseload ratio is greater than an average of 51 for over a 3-month period, the Division of Community Corrections within the Department of Corrections would face a civil fine of $7,500. One half of that fine would be paid directly to the officer or supervisor, and the other half would go to the state general fund. The bill has been referred to the Senate’s Judiciary B and Corrections committees.

The American Probation and Parole Association doesn’t recommend specific caseload standards, but rather recommends agencies adopt a workload strategy to figure out their specific caseload and staffing needs. Some suggested standards for supervision are 20:1 for intensive cases, 50:1 for moderate to high risk and 200:1 for low risk.

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

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Mississippi Today

Mississippi Legislature approves DEI ban after heated debate

Published

5 hours ago

April 2, 2025

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-02 16:34:00

by Michael Goldberg, Mississippi Today
April 2, 2025

Mississippi lawmakers have reached an agreement to ban diversity, equity and inclusion programs and a list of “divisive concepts” from public schools across the state education system, following the lead of numerous other Republican-controlled states and President Donald Trump’s administration.

House and Senate lawmakers approved a compromise bill in votes on Tuesday and Wednesday. It will likely head to Republican Gov. Tate Reeves for his signature after it clears a procedural motion.

The agreement between the Republican-dominated chambers followed hours of heated debate in which Democrats, almost all of whom are Black, excoriated the legislation as a setback in the long struggle to make Mississippi a fairer place for minorities. They also said the bill could bog universities down with costly legal fights and erode academic freedom.

Democratic Rep. Bryant Clark, who seldom addresses the entire House chamber from the podium during debates, rose to speak out against the bill on Tuesday. He is the son of the late Robert Clark, the first Black Mississippian elected to the state Legislature since the 1800s and the first Black Mississippian to serve as speaker pro tempore and preside over the House chamber since Reconstruction.

“We are better than this, and all of you know that we don’t need this with Mississippi history,” Clark said. “We should be the ones that say, ‘listen, we may be from Mississippi, we may have a dark past, but you know what, we’re going to be the first to stand up this time and say there is nothing wrong with DEI.'”

Legislative Republicans argued that the measure — which will apply to all public schools from the K-12 level through universities — will elevate merit in education and remove a list of so-called “divisive concepts” from academic settings. More broadly, conservative critics of DEI say the programs divide people into categories of victims and oppressors and infuse left-wing ideology into campus life.

“We are a diverse state. Nowhere in here are we trying to wipe that out,” said Republican Sen. Tyler McCaughn, one of the bill’s authors. “We’re just trying to change the focus back to that of excellence.”

The House and Senate initially passed proposals that differed in who they would impact, what activities they would regulate and how they aim to reshape the inner workings of the state’s education system. Some House leaders wanted the bill to be “semi-vague” in its language and wanted to create a process for withholding state funds based on complaints that almost anyone could lodge. The Senate wanted to pair a DEI ban with a task force to study inefficiencies in the higher education system, a provision the upper chamber later agreed to scrap.

The concepts that will be rooted out from curricula include the idea that gender identity can be a “subjective sense of self, disconnected from biological reality.” The move reflects another effort to align with the Trump administration, which has declared via executive order that there are only two sexes.

The House and Senate disagreed on how to enforce the measure but ultimately settled on an agreement that would empower students, parents of minor students, faculty members and contractors to sue schools for violating the law.

People could only sue after they go through an internal campus review process and a 25-day period when schools could fix the alleged violation. Republican Rep. Joey Hood, one of the House negotiators, said that was a compromise between the chambers. The House wanted to make it possible for almost anyone to file lawsuits over the DEI ban, while Senate negotiators initially bristled at the idea of fast-tracking internal campus disputes to the legal system.

The House ultimately held firm in its position to create a private cause of action, or the right to sue, but it agreed to give schools the ability to conduct an investigative process and potentially resolve the alleged violation before letting people sue in chancery courts.

“You have to go through the administrative process,” said Republican Sen. Nicole Boyd, one of the bill’s lead authors. “Because the whole idea is that, if there is a violation, the school needs to cure the violation. That’s what the purpose is. It’s not to create litigation, it’s to cure violations.”

If people disagree with the findings from that process, they could also ask the attorney general’s office to sue on their behalf.

Under the new law, Mississippi could withhold state funds from schools that don’t comply. Schools would be required to compile reports on all complaints filed in response to the new law.

Trump promised in his 2024 campaign to eliminate DEI in the federal government. One of the first executive orders he signed did that. Some Mississippi lawmakers introduced bills in the 2024 session to restrict DEI, but the proposals never made it out of committee. With the national headwinds at their backs and several other laws in Republican-led states to use as models, Mississippi lawmakers made plans to introduce anti-DEI legislation.

The policy debate also unfolded amid the early stages of a potential Republican primary matchup in the 2027 governor’s race between State Auditor Shad White and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann. White, who has been one of the state’s loudest advocates for banning DEI, had branded Hosemann in the months before the 2025 session “DEI Delbert,” claiming the Senate leader has stood in the way of DEI restrictions passing the Legislature.

During the first Senate floor debate over the chamber’s DEI legislation during this year’s legislative session, Hosemann seemed to be conscious of these political attacks. He walked over to staff members and asked how many people were watching the debate live on YouTube.

As the DEI debate cleared one of its final hurdles Wednesday afternoon, the House and Senate remained at loggerheads over the state budget amid Republican infighting. It appeared likely the Legislature would end its session Wednesday or Thursday without passing a $7 billion budget to fund state agencies, potentially threatening a government shutdown.

“It is my understanding that we don’t have a budget and will likely leave here without a budget. But this piece of legislation …which I don’t think remedies any of Mississippi’s issues, this has become one of the top priorities that we had to get done,” said Democratic Sen. Rod Hickman. “I just want to say, if we put that much work into everything else we did, Mississippi might be a much better place.”

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

Mississippi Today

House gives Senate 5 p.m. deadline to come to table, or legislative session ends with no state budget

Published

6 hours ago

April 2, 2025

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-02 16:13:00

by Taylor Vance, Mississippi Today
April 2, 2025

The House on Wednesday attempted one final time to revive negotiations between it and the Senate over passing a state budget.

Otherwise, the two Republican-led chambers will likely end their session without funding government services for the next fiscal year and potentially jeopardize state agencies.

The House on Wednesday unanimously passed a measure to extend the legislative session and revive budget bills that had died on legislative deadlines last weekend.

House Speaker Jason White said he did not have any prior commitment that the Senate would agree to the proposal, but he wanted to extend one last offer to pass the budget. White, a Republican from West, said if he did not hear from the Senate by 5 p.m. on Wednesday, his chamber would end its regular session.

“The ball is in their court,” White said of the Senate. “Every indication has been that they would not agree to extend the deadlines for purposes of doing the budget. I don’t know why that is. We did it last year, and we’ve done it most years.”

But it did not appear likely Wednesday afternoon that the Senate would comply.

The Mississippi Legislature has not left Jackson without setting at least most of the state budget since 2009, when then Gov. Haley Barbour had to force them back to set one to avoid a government shutdown.

The House measure to extend the session is now before the Senate for consideration. To pass, it would require a two-thirds majority vote of senators. But that might prove impossible. Numerous senators on both sides of the aisle vowed to vote against extending the current session, and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann who oversees the chamber said such an extension likely couldn’t pass.

Senate leadership seemed surprised at the news that the House passed the resolution to negotiate a budget, and several senators earlier on Wednesday made passing references to ending the session without passing a budget.

“We’ll look at it after it passes the full House,” Senate President Pro Tempore Dean Kirby said.

The House and Senate, each having a Republican supermajority, have fought over many issues since the legislative session began early January.

But the battle over a tax overhaul plan, including elimination of the state individual income tax, appeared to cause a major rift. Lawmakers did pass a tax overhaul, which the governor has signed into law, but Senate leaders cried foul over how it passed, with the House seizing on typos in the Senate’s proposal that accidentally resembled the House’s more aggressive elimination plan.

The Senate had urged caution in eliminating the income tax, and had economic growth triggers that would have likely phased in the elimination over many years. But the typos essentially negated the triggers, and the House and governor ran with it.

The two chambers have also recently fought over the budget. White said he communicated directly with Senate leaders that the House would stand firm on not passing a budget late in the session.

But Senate leaders said they had trouble getting the House to meet with them to haggle out the final budget.

On the normally scheduled “conference weekend” with a deadline to agree to a budget last Saturday, the House did not show, taking the weekend off. This angered Hosemann and the Senate. All the budget bills died, requiring a vote to extend the session, or the governor forcing them into a special session.

If the Legislature ends its regular session without adopting a budget, the only option to fund state agencies before their budgets expire on June 30 is for Gov. Tate Reeves to call lawmakers back into a special session later.

“There really isn’t any other option (than the governor calling a special session),” Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann previously said.

If Reeves calls a special session, he gets to set the Legislature’s agenda. A special session call gives an otherwise constitutionally weak Mississippi governor more power over the Legislature.

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

Mississippi Today

Amount of federal cuts to health agencies doubles

Published

7 hours ago

April 2, 2025

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-02 14:48:00

by Gwen Dilworth, Mississippi Today
April 2, 2025

Cuts to public health and mental health funding in Mississippi have doubled – reaching approximately $238 million – since initial estimates last week, when cancellations to federal grants allocated for COVID-19 pandemic relief were first announced.

Slashed funding to the state’s health department will impact community health workers, planned improvements to the public health laboratory, the agency’s ability to provide COVID-19 vaccinations and preparedness efforts for emerging pathogens, like H5 bird flu.

The grant cancellations, which total $230 million, will not be catastrophic for the agency, State Health Officer Dr. Daniel Edney told members of the Mississippi House Democratic Caucus at the Capitol April 1.

But they will set back the agency, which is still working to recover after the COVID-19 pandemic decimated its workforce and exposed “serious deficiencies” in the agency’s data collection and management systems.

The cuts will have a more significant impact on the state’s economy and agency subgrantees, who carry out public health work on the ground with health department grants, he said.

“The agency is okay. But I’m very worried about all of our partners all over the state,” Edney told lawmakers.

The health department was forced to lay off 17 contract workers as a result of the grant cancellations, though Edney said he aims to rehire them under new contracts.

Other positions funded by health department grants are in jeopardy. Two community health workers at Back Bay Mission, a nonprofit that supports people living in poverty in Biloxi, were laid off as a result of the cuts, according to WLOX. It’s unclear how many more community health workers, who educate and help people access health care, have been impacted statewide.

The department was in the process of purchasing a comprehensive data management system before the cuts and has lost the ability to invest in the Mississippi Public Health Laboratory, he said. The laboratory performs environmental and clinical testing services that aid in the prevention and control of disease.

Mississippi State Health Officer Dr. Dan Edney addresses lawmakers during the Democratic caucus meeting at the State Capitol in Jackson, Miss., on Tuesday, April 1, 2025. The discussion centered on potential federal healthcare funding cuts.

The agency has worked to reduce its dependence on federal funds, Edney said, which will help it weather the storm. Sixty-six percent of the department’s budget is federally funded.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pulled back $11.4 billion in funding to state health departments nationwide last week. The funding was originally allocated by Congress for testing and vaccination against the coronavirus as part of COVID-19 relief legislation, and to address health disparities in high-risk and underserved populations. An additional $1 billion from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration was also terminated.

“The COVID-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago,” the Department of Health and Human Services Director of Communications Andrew Nixon said in a statement.

HHS did not respond to questions from Mississippi Today about the cuts in Mississippi.

Democratic attorneys general and governors in 23 states filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Tuesday, arguing that the sudden cancellation of the funding was unlawful and seeking injunctive relief to halt the cuts. Mississippi did not join the suit.

Mental health cuts

The Department of Mental Health received about $7.5 million in cuts to federal grants from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

Phaedre Cole, president of the Mississippi Association of Community Mental Health Centers, speaks to lawmakers about federal healthcare funding cuts during the Democratic caucus meeting at the State Capitol in Jackson, Miss., on Tuesday, April 1, 2025.

Over half of the cuts were to community mental health centers, and supported alcohol and drug treatment services for people who can not afford treatment, housing services for parenting and pregnant women and their children, and prevention services.

The cuts could result in reduced beds at community mental health centers, Phaedre Cole, the director of Life Help and President of Mississippi Association of Community Mental Health Centers, told lawmakers April 1.

Community mental health centers in Mississippi are already struggling to keep their doors open. Four centers in the state have closed since 2012, and a third have an imminent to high risk of closure, Cole told legislators at a hearing last December.

“We are facing a financial crisis that threatens our ability to maintain our mission,” she said Dec. 5.

Cuts to the department will also impact diversion coordinators, who are charged with reducing recidivism of people with serious mental illness to the state’s mental health hospital, a program for first-episode psychosis, youth mental health court funding, school-aged mental health programs and suicide response programs.

The Department of Mental Health hopes to reallocate existing funding from alcohol tax revenue and federal block grant funding to discontinued programs.

The agency posted a list of all the services that have received funding cuts. The State Department of Health plans to post such a list, said spokesperson Greg Flynn.

Health leaders have expressed fear that there could be more funding cuts coming.

“My concern is that this is the beginning and not the end,” said Edney.

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