Mississippi Today
Senate bill to close most of Parchman hits snag over cost, logistics
A proposal to close most of Mississippi’s oldest and most infamous prison faced its first hurdle Tuesday afternoon in a state Senate committee where a majority of members decided to hold off voting on the bill until they receive better cost estimates.
The Senate Corrections Committee discussed Senate Bill 2353, which proposes a four-year process to phase down the use of the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman by moving incarcerated people, staff and programs to other prisons in the state.
Committee chair and bill author Juan Barnett said a phasedown would be a better use of taxpayer money and a chance to reimagine the state’s approach to incarceration.
“Parchman prison, a name that resonates with both notoriety and despair, has stood for decades as a symbol of systematic failures within our criminal justice system,” said Barnett, a Democrat from Heidelberg, before discussion began.
“We cannot allow a facility to operate under conditions that are antithetical to the principles of fairness.”
Years of neglect and funding have led to deteriorating infrastructure and decrepit conditions at Parchman and fed into the violence and deaths that erupted at Unit 29 and at other state prison facilities, a 2020 investigation by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting and ProPublica found.
The U.S. Department of Justice opened a civil rights investigation into Parchman and three other prisons several months later, and by 2022, the DOJ released a report detailing conditions that violate the Constitution.
Ted Booth, executive director of the Legislature’s Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review Committee, said the bill is in line with PEER’s recommendation to reduce operations at Parchman, which would help maintain a secure environment.
Barnett gave a rough estimate of about $100 million over four years to phase down Parchman. In response to committee member questions, he said that cost wouldn’t include spending on the facilities that would remain on site.
A major part of the phase down bill would involve the state purchasing the Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility to house Parchman’s inmates. The private is located less than 10 miles away in Tutwiler and is run by CoreCivic.
Through that purchase, Barnett said the staff at Parchman would be able to remain state employees with benefits, which would help keep jobs in the Delta. Moving Parchman staff over to Tallahatchie Correctional could also help close vacancies at both prisons and help reach full staffing, he said.
Sen. Joey Fillingnane, R-Sumrall, asked whether there is any kind of binding memorandum of understanding or contract with the owner of Tallahatchie Correctional. Barnett said there is not, and added that the Appropriations Committee would not pass the bill if the financial situation is not figured out.
“We’re just supposed to trust that it’s all going to work out in a sweet by-and-by and send it on down to Appropriations and hope that they take care of all of our miscues?” Fillingane asked.
Instead of spending $100 million to phase down Parchman, that money could be used to update the building, Fillingane said, but Barnett pointed to a similar situation going on in Alabama, which is on the hook for $1 billion to build a new prison because the DOJ found its current ones are unconstitutional.
Fillingane also asked about the conditions at Tallahatchie Correctional, which has had similar problems with violence like Parchman. He wanted to know whether action has been taken to address those problems, to which Barnett replied yes.
After an hour of discussion, a majority of the committee voted to lay the bill on the table with the ability for Barnett to bring it up at a later time. He said he will gather more financial information for the committee to review.
If it passes the Corrections Committee, SB 2353 will also need approval from the Senate’s Appropriations Committee before the entire Senate chamber could vote on it.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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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
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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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