Mississippi answers increased prison violence with half measures

Life in Mississippi’s prisons was dramatically more violent in 2020, according to a brief published last month by PEER, the Joint Legislative Committee on Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review.

 There were 853 assaults between people incarcerated in the state’s prisons from July 1, 2019, to June 30, 2020. The figure represents the most assaults reported by the Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC) in five years and nearly 200 more than the 663 assaults reported during the previous year.

This sharp increase in prison violence was not the only grim statistic in the report. The numbers also show that MDOC continues to have serious problems finding correctional officers to work in its prisons. The Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, the largest prison in the state, had a 54% vacancy rate for correctional officers in FY 2020. And Mississippi’s other large prisons, Central Mississippi Correctional Facility and South Mississippi Correctional Institution, had vacancy rates of 40% and 44% respectively, which is not exactly encouraging.

That Mississippi prisons are becoming more violent at a time when the state is struggling to hire prison staff will no doubt be of interest to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), which opened a new investigation into conditions in four Mississippi prisons in February. The PEER numbers suggest that the answer to the question at the heart of the DOJ’s inquiry — “Can Mississippi protect its incarcerated people from physical harm?” — is far from a resounding “yes.” And as we have seen in Alabama, failure to make life safer for incarcerated people can raise the specter of federal oversight of the prison system or put a gaping hole in a state’s budget.   

An obvious solution to overcrowded, understaffed and unsafe prisons is the safe reduction of the prison population. That is why parole reform measures have received a lot of attention over the last two legislative sessions. Credit the Mississippi Senate and House for passing SB 2123 during the last year’session. This bill would have restored parole eligibility to nearly 10,000 people who were rendered ineligible for parole due to statutory changes made in the 1990s, and it would have saved the state millions of dollars a year by conservative estimates. Calling the bill “too expansive,” Gov. Tate Reeves vetoed it and sent parole reform advocates back to the drawing board.

Under the shadow of the governor’s veto, legislators worked on more modest proposals during the 2021 session and ultimately passed SB 2795. While the bill extends parole eligibility for some, it provides no path to parole for people convicted of crimes when they are children, no relief for our oldest incarcerated people and no change for most people serving time for violent crimes. For these reasons, Mississippi’s latest attempt at criminal justice reform does not offer the promise of a substantial population decrease at its prisons and falls millions of dollars short of the cost savings offered under SB 2123.

Getting a good idea all the way through the legislative process in Mississippi is hard, and the legislators and advocates who helped get SB 2795 across the goal line deserve credit. But it would be a mistake to characterize this year’s reform as anything but modest. Even with this law, Mississippi is likely to remain near the top of states locking up vast numbers of people, and it is hard to see how SB 2795 will do much to relieve violence in our prisons or attract more qualified correctional officers to apply for jobs at Mississippi facilities.

In order to truly change the situation in Mississippi prisons, legislators will have to do some heavy lifting, like revisiting parole eligibility on a scale outlined in SB 2123, creating a reasonable path to parole for children convicted of crimes and changing the state’s arcane habitual sentencing laws. Mississippi’s incarceration crisis remains massive. Any serious solution must match the problem’s scale.

Brandon Jones is policy director for the SPLC Action Fund in Mississippi.

Photo credit: Special to Clarion Ledger via Imagn Content Services, LLC