Recent editorials from Mississippi newspapers:
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May 2
The Greenwood Commonwealth on the restriction on inmate books:
If the Mississippi Department of Corrections has a good reason for restricting inmates’ access to free books, it should provide it.
If not, it seems like an arbitrary decision that runs counter to what should be a priority of the prison system - to rehabilitate those who are incarcerated.
A federal lawsuit has been filed challenging the constitutionality of MDOC’s decision last year to stop allowing a Jackson-based nonprofit group to send anything for free but religious books directly to inmates at two of the state’s prisons - South Mississippi Correctional Facility and the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman.
Why the ban applies just to those institutions and why it applies only to secular books are curious. It can’t be because of fear that contraband could be smuggled inside the packages. Surely, the prison system has the capacity to X-ray any packages at all of its facilities. Besides, if contraband is the issue, a religious book could be as much a potential carrier as a secular one.
One would think that MDOC would not tie the hands of Big House Books, which mails books and other educational materials - including works of fiction and nonfiction, puzzle books, GED manuals and religious texts - that Mississippi inmates request, usually for no cost.
Not only does the reading material give the inmates something productive to do with their time, it builds their literacy skills, which is a big element in rehabilitation since a large percentage of inmates never finished high school.
It’s tough enough for ex-convicts to get hired because of their criminal past. It’s doubly tough for those who are functionally illiterate.
So far, MDOC has hid behind its typically unforthcoming ways, saying it does not comment on active litigation. It has previously said, without explanation, that Big House Books can send the free secular books to the two prisons’ libraries, where any inmate could check them out, or send them to inmates who purchase them.
Maybe MDOC hasn’t provided a rationale for these restrictions because it simply doesn’t have a good one. It is a shame that it takes a lawsuit to force the agency to explain itself.
Online: http://www.gwcommonwealth.com/
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April 30
Sun Herald on Confederate Memorial Day:
It is past time to end Confederate Memorial Day.
For most of the Coast, it has already ended. The vast majority of government bodies and the people of the Coast have chosen to ignore it. For everyone except the employees of Harrison County, Monday will be business as usual.
The state should make it official and strike Confederate Memorial Day from the list of legal holidays. A holiday that will surely be met with derision by a sizable portion of the U.S. population does little to honor Mississippians who fought in the war.
Those who truly wish to remember and honor those who fought in the Civil War have a day to do so: Memorial Day, the last Monday in May. That holiday was born from the ashes of the Civil War to honor all those who died in its battles, be they from the North or the South. In Columbus, at one of the first observances, flowers were placed on Union and Rebel graves alike.
And that is as it should be.
Confederate Memorial Day is divisive. It attempts to obscure the fact that slavery was the reason for the war. It is not, as some will undoubtedly argue, about honoring the bravery and sacrifice of those on the losing side. As we have pointed out, there is a day for that. This is not about erasing history. Mississippi and the former Confederate states have set aside battlefields and museums in the name of preserving history.
The Vicksburg National Military Park and the others present the history of the war from both sides, with monuments and narratives from both sides.
A large share of Mississippi’s population is African American, many of whom had ancestors forcefully brought to the South as slaves. They, we suspect, would rather commemorate the fact that because the South lost the war, their ancestors won their freedom.
The war lasted just four years and that was more than 150 years ago. It pitted American against American. We should not be fighting this battle still. We should not be keeping the greatest lie in our history - that one race holds superiority over another - alive.
We should not fan the flames of the hatred espoused by the Ku Klux Klan and others who wage a covert war against people of color. Instead, we should do everything in our power to show all people that they are all accepted and celebrated here.
We should not be forcing taxpayers to pay for holidays that commemorate causes they do not support. We hope Harrison County takes that into consideration later this year when it sets the 2019 holidays. The Legislature in 2019 should remove Confederate Memorial Day from the list of state holidays.
Online: http://sunherald.com
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April 28
The Vicksburg Post on the speed of trials in Mississippi:
The Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution - a section of the Bill of Rights - guarantees a citizen a speedy trial, along with a fair jury, an attorney if the accused person wants one and can’t afford to provide his own and a chance to confront the witnesses who are accusing the defendant of a crime.
Speedy, however, does not seem to apply to many in Mississippi.
A recent survey (which can be found at msjaildate.com) of Mississippi jails conducted by the MacArthur Justice Center at the University of Mississippi School of Law - released exclusively to The Associated Press - shows that 2,500 defendants - more than one-third of all of those jailed before trial - have been in jail 90 or more consecutive days. More than 600 have been in jail longer than a year.
The most recent census conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 2013, showed an average pretrial jail stay in Mississippi of 40 days, the sixth-longest in the country. The census also revealed that Mississippi had the second-highest number of local jail inmates per capita, behind Louisiana.
According to information from the survey, the average stay in the Warren County jail is 131.4 days. Rankin County was much worse with the average stay of 700 days.
There are a number of reasons why this is the case in Mississippi:
4Most defendants in Mississippi can’t afford their own lawyers or the high bails judges continue to slap on them, despite decades-old federal court rulings that they consider what a defendant can pay.
4Public defenders in Mississippi are overworked and underpaid. Attorneys may spend five minutes with a defendant while a judge sets bail, but defendants may not see lawyers again until after they’ve been indicted. A recent report slamming indigent defense called this period the “black hole” of representation. Judicial leaders plan to ask lawmakers for more funding to increase the amount of help available to poor defendants.
4In many rural Mississippi counties, grand juries and courts meet only twice a year. In 2012, a woman in Choctaw County was jailed for more than three months without a preliminary hearing because the court was out of session.
Money is also a reason for delays in presenting evidence and conducting autopsies. Crime Lab Director Sam Howell says one of the state’s four labs is six months behind on testing, because of a lack of analysts to verify and weigh illegal drugs. Many autopsies from last year remain incomplete because Mississippi only has two medical examiners, Howell said. After news stories about the delays, lawmakers this spring allotted money to hire four more beginning July 1.
And inmates who may be mentally ill face truly extraordinary delays, said Dr. Tom Recore, a forensic psychiatrist with the state Department of Mental Health.
Recore told the AP there are only 15 DMH beds available in Mississippi’s 82 counties.
Recore said 90 to 100 inmates statewide need evaluation at any given time, with most waiting three to four months.
The wait time got shorter after more evaluators were hired and counties began using private contractors. But some of the 60 people currently awaiting treatment have been on a list for years, Recore said.
One of the most sacred principles in the American criminal justice system, holding that a defendant is innocent until proven guilty, may not always be the case.
The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees to every person “equal protection under the law” but in Mississippi it seems this may only apply to those who can afford to pay.
Our criminal justice system can and must do better.
Online: https://www.vicksburgpost.com/
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