In what has been an already busy session of the Mississippi Legislature, lawmakers have caused the biggest stir not by wanting to expand Medicaid (and possibly running over Gov. Tate Reeves in the process) but by considering the closure or scaling down of four major institutions.
Neither idea — shuttering most of the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman or closing three state universities — is going anywhere this year, and maybe nowhere for a long time.
Both ideas, though, are worth discussing.
Parchman has a longtime and deserved reputation as a hellhole. Created more than a century ago when the idea of corrections was to make life as miserable as possible for those who break the law, it has regularly received the scrutiny of the U.S. Justice Department and the federal courts for the cruel and inhumane conditions imposed there.
Although long gone are the days when inmates were forced to pick and chop cotton while under the watchful eye of armed trusties, spending time at Parchman is still no picnic. Two years ago, the U.S. Justice Department issued a report that said Parchman was negligent in tolerating the violence that gangs throughout the prison perpetrate on other inmates. It said that inmates with serious mental illness were not getting adequate mental health treatment. Worse, the place was driving inmates crazy with the overuse of solitary confinement and by leaving them to swelter in cells without air conditioning during the oppressive Delta summers.
Although air conditioning has been installed in the meantime, Parchman remains a violent, dangerous and dilapidated place.
Senate Corrections Committee Chairman Juan Barnett believes the answer is to shutter a large portion of the penitentiary and move those inmates to other prisons in the state.
He has run into resistance, though, over the cost. His rough estimate for the proposed four-year phase-down is $100 million. It would probably be more than that.
The bigger question is where the state would send these inmates that’s any better.
Barnett wants the state to buy the privately operated prison in nearby Tutwiler, but that prison has had a history of problems with violence, too. It also has the handicap, as with Parchman, of being located in the middle of nowhere, which makes it harder to hire guards and other staff.
Three other state prisons that are much newer than Parchman have their own issues. Just this past week, the U.S. Justice Department said they, like Parchman, are also way understaffed, and as a result violence and gang activity are rampant in them.
Parchman may need to come down, but until the state takes back control of its prisons, the situation throughout the corrections system won’t improve.
As for higher education, Sen. John Polk, a Hattiesburg Republican, knew he was stirring a hornet’s nest when he introduced legislation that would require the College Board to shutter three of the state’s eight universities by 2028.
Although Polk didn’t specify which three, it’s a pretty good guess who would be on the list — Mississippi Valley State, Delta State and Mississippi University for Women, the state’s three smallest universities.
Polk has a point when he says that for a state of just three million people, eight public universities is too many. There already aren’t enough in-state students to spread between them. The competition is only going to get rougher in coming years if the “enrollment cliff” that demographers are projecting comes to pass of fewer students heading to college.
But even though on paper reducing the number of universities may make financial sense, it doesn’t to the communities where they are located.
If Greenwood were to lose Mississippi Valley State or Cleveland were to lose Delta State, it would be devastating to either town. Not only are the universities among the largest employers in their community, they also are a magnet for attracting well-educated professionals to move there. In a region that is struggling to keep people, losing a university or two would only accelerate the depopulation.
Columbus could possibly better weather the loss of MUW, with the much larger Mississippi State University just a half-hour away. Still, MUW’s alums have shown that they can galvanize, too, and will put up a huge fight if they feel their school is threatened. The president at MUW can’t get anywhere on a much-needed name change because of the emotional ties that generations of female graduates have to that school and its traditions. If they thought their school might be closed, these women would storm the Capitol.
Emotions aside, all three of these schools are facing an unpleasant fact. If their enrollments get much smaller, one or more of them will eventually close or merge because they won’t have enough tuition dollars to stay in business. It will be market forces, not the Legislature, shutting them down.
- Contact Tim Kalich at 662-581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
