Mississippi has been stuck in an unhealthy competition for the past two decades.
It’s not technically a competition for jobs, although that’s clearly a motivator and a direct by-product of the tug-of-war.
It’s a competition for inmates.
The situation has pitted state-run prisons, privately operated prisons, multi-county regional jails and other county jails against each other. It drove up wildly the cost of corrections — and the number of offenders incarcerated — until state lawmakers finally realized they couldn’t afford it any longer.
And now, as Mississippi tries to hold the line on corrections costs, some of the “human warehouses” aren’t happy.
The latest to gripe are the 15 regional jails. They are complaining about the Mississippi Department of Corrections’ plan to only send each of them the 200 state inmates that MDOC is contractually obligated to house there. That would be an average cut of about 30 percent from the number of inmates presently housed in these county facilities.
Sheriffs and other county officials contend that private prisons should lose inmates, not them. And they are questioning apparently whether Greenwood’s Delta Correctional Facility, which is going to house low-risk offenders as part of MDOC’s consolidation of community work centers and technical violation centers, is going to siphon off some of their inmates, too.
Greenwood, not too long ago, was at the other end of this see-saw. Twice Delta Correctional Facility, when it was operating as a private prison, was shuttered because the state said it had more prison cells than offenders to put in them.
This overcapacity problem dates back to the mid-1990s, when Mississippi, with the encouragement of then-Gov. Kirk Fordice and the emerging private-prison industry, enacted the nation’s most stringent “truth-in-sentencing” law. It required that all inmates, both violent and non-violent, serve 85 percent of their sentences before being eligible for parole. That rule, combined with mandatory sentencing laws that were also the rage at the time, meant that more people would be locked up, and they would be locked up for longer periods of time.
Before the truth-in-sentencing law was enacted, Mississippi didn’t have a single privately operated prison. By the year following the law’s passage, the state had its first. Soon afterward came the regional jails, which were also built on the expectation of an incarceration boom. Counties needing a new jail to house offenders awaiting trial were able to figure out how to finance one with the state’s help. Besides the $20 per day payment they could count on for housing state inmates (later increased to almost $30 for the first 200), they could reduce other areas of the county budget with the free labor these inmates provided.
By the early part of this decade, the five private prisons (later scaled back to three) and the 15 regional jails, including ones in Vaiden and Lexington, held as many inmates as the entire prison system 20 years earlier.
This boom in prison construction came with a heavy financial and societal cost.
From 1995 to 2008, the inmate population rose 80 percent, and the corrections budget soared almost 200 percent, twice the rate of inflation. Poor neighborhoods, particularly predominately black ones, were decimated of young men, who got increasingly put away for non-violent, drug-related offenses. It became hard to tell whether the motive of these get-tough laws was to reduce crime or keep all the private prisons and regional jails full.
Once it dawned on lawmakers, though, that the incarceration trend was fiscally unsustainable, they began to relax the laws, including scaling back the 85 percent rule. They also became receptive to drug courts, house arrest and other sentencing alternatives that were not only less expensive but also created a better chance at rehabilitation. Today, Mississippi’s inmate population is a little more than 19,000, down 15 percent from its peak of a decade earlier.
It may come down even more if the private prisons and regional jails have lost some of their influence as a result of a recently completed trial that exposed horrific conditions at one of the private prisons and, separately, the Chris Epps corruption scandal. Among those who pled guilty to paying bribes to the former corrections chief were consultants who worked for private prison companies or for some of the regional jails.
Contact Tim Kalich at 581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
