Mississippi Today’s Adam Ganucheau, Bobby Harrison, Geoff Pender and Taylor Vance break down Republican Gov. Tate Reeves’ election win over Democratic challenger Brandon Presley. They detail what worked for Reeves, what didn’t work for Presley, and whether Mississippi Democrats can be competitive again.
The post Podcast: Key takeaways from Tate Reeves’ governor’s race victory appeared first on Mississippi Today.
This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Mississippi Today. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.
In Mississippi, many people awaiting court-ordered treatment for mental illness or substance abuse are jailed, even though they haven’t been charged with a crime. Read our full series here.
Fourteen years ago, Mississippi legislators passed a law requiring county jails to be certified by the state if they held people awaiting court-ordered psychiatric treatment.
Today, just one jail in the state is certified.
And yet, from July 2022 to June 2023, more than 800 people awaiting treatment were jailed throughout the state, almost all in uncertified facilities, according to state data.
Mississippi Today and ProPublica have been reporting on county officials’ practice of jailing people with mental illness, most of whom haven’t been charged with a crime, as they await treatment under the state’s civil commitment law. After the news organizations started asking about the 2009 law earlier this year, the state attorney general’s office concluded that it is a “mandatory requirement” that the Mississippi Department of Mental Health certify the facilities where people are held after judges have ordered them into treatment.
The Department of Mental Health, which oversees the state’s behavioral health system and has no other responsibility for jails, responded by sending letters to county officials across the state encouraging them to stop holding people in uncertified jails. But the law provides no funding to help counties comply and no penalties if they don’t.
Under state law, counties are responsible for housing people going through the commitment process until they are admitted to a state hospital. Counties are allowed to put them in jail before their court hearings if there’s “no reasonable alternative.”
The last time the Department of Mental Health tried to ensure those jails met state standards, more than a decade ago, it had little success. After the law passed, the agency got to work to inform counties about the new rules. Some didn’t respond. Others expressed interest but didn’t follow through. By 2013, just two jails had been certified. (One of them no longer is.) After that, the effort apparently petered out, according to a review of state documents.
To be certified, a jail must offer on-call crisis care by a physician or psychiatric nurse practitioner and must have a supply of medications. Staff must be trained in crisis intervention and suicide prevention. People detained during the commitment process must be housed separately from people charged with crimes, in rooms free of fixtures or structures that could be used for self-harm, according to Department of Mental Health standards that took effect in 2011.
“If they’re going to be held in jail, they have to receive some kind of treatment in a semi-safe environment,” a department attorney told The Clarion-Ledger at the time.
Until recently, many county officials weren’t even aware of those requirements, according to interviews across the state — even though they were routinely jailing people solely because they might need mental health treatment. Mississippi appears to be the only state in the country where people awaiting treatment are commonly jailed without charges for days or weeks at a time.
Mississippi jails are subject to no statewide health and safety standards. Many jails treat people going through the civil commitment process virtually the same as those who have been charged with crimes, Mississippi Today and ProPublica found. They’re shackled and given jail uniforms. They’re often held in the same cells as criminal defendants. They receive minimal medical care. Some said they couldn’t access prescribed psychiatric medications. Since 1987, at least 18 people going through the commitment process for mental illness and substance abuse have died after being jailed, most of them by suicide.
Some local officials say getting certified could be expensive. Sheriffs worry it could codify their role as their county’s de facto mental health care provider.
“It looks like the state wants the sheriff to be the chief mental health officer,” said Will Allen, attorney for the Mississippi Sheriffs’ Association. “This is coming down to the state stuffing the cost of this down to the counties, and frankly I just think that’s wrong.”
The genesis of the 2009 law was a conversation state Sen. Joey Fillingane had with his girlfriend at the time, a social worker who worked with troubled youth. She told him that Mississippians going through the commitment process in some counties were locked in jail cells like criminals, while in other counties they were held in hospitals like patients, according to a 2011 news story in The Clarion-Ledger.
Fillingane’s bill addressed that. “Shouldn’t there be some kind of minimum standard where you’re holding people who haven’t committed a crime?” the Republican from Sumrall, near Hattiesburg, said in that story about his legislation.
His bill passed with little fanfare. It made it “illegal for individuals committed to a DMH behavioral health program to be held in jail unless it had been certified” as a holding facility, an agency staffer wrote in a timeline of the law’s implementation obtained by Mississippi Today and ProPublica.
The board overseeing the Department of Mental Health set detailed standards for those facilities. Department staff surveyed counties to see whether they could meet them.
Ed LeGrand was head of the department when the law passed. He said he viewed it as a progressive effort that could spur counties to stop holding mentally ill people in jail. And even if that didn’t happen, the law would improve jail conditions — at least somewhat.
“I didn’t think that everybody would be able to meet those standards. I thought they would give it a try,” he said in a recent interview. “A lot of them did, but some of them didn’t.”
Department staff met with county officials and toured jails to offer assistance. Those visits, which records show mostly took place in 2011 and 2012, were the first time the Department of Mental Health had tried to get a comprehensive look at the local facilities where Mississippians awaited psychiatric treatment in state hospitals, LeGrand said.
Many jails were poorly equipped to care for these people, according to notes by agency staff.
“Toured the current jail (scary),” reads a status update written after staff visited Tishomingo County, in the northeast corner of the state, shortly before the county opened a new jail. In Jones County in south Mississippi, where the jail had 180 inmates and only four staff: “The holding cells are not safe for violent behavior. Too much cement.”
Jones County Sheriff Joe Berlin said the cells have not changed since then, though now detainees are monitored with cameras.
In early 2011, LeGrand told county officials who hadn’t already begun the certification process that they had six months to find a certified provider to house people awaiting treatment.
Sheriffs were frustrated. Some objected to being told they had to upgrade their jails and train guards so they could care for mentally ill people they didn’t think they should be responsible for in the first place.
“What do they expect of me?” one sheriff was quoted as saying in the 2011 news story. “What they need to do is turn around and certify some places that are under Mental Health’s control so they can be responsible for it, not me.”
Some county officials concluded there was little the state could do if they didn’t comply. Mike Harlin, the jail administrator in Lamar County, discussed the standards with a Department of Mental Health staffer in 2012, according to an agency memo. In an interview this year, Harlin said he remembered thinking, “What are you going to do? Are you going to shut the jail down? No.”
By June 2013, jails in just two of the state’s 82 counties had been certified, according to the department’s tally. (A hospital was certified in another county, and a different type of facility was certified in a fourth.)
Six counties said they couldn’t meet the standards. Another 23 had received guidance from the department on how to meet them. Thirty, including a few of the counties that had received advice, eventually said they didn’t jail people, some because they had contracts with providers. Twenty-one never responded.
Mississippi Today and ProPublica requested all Department of Mental Health records since 2010 related to enforcement of the certification law and correspondence with counties. Documents through 2013 included standards, correspondence, memos describing visits to county facilities and a log summarizing contact with each county. After that, the records released show no statewide outreach.
The final entry in the department’s timeline of the law’s implementation reads: “June 2013 was the last attempt to update the information about DMH Designated Mental Health Holding Facilities due to lack of additional responses from the counties.” That timeline is undated, but a department spokesperson said data in the file shows that it was created in January 2015 by a staffer who held positions in the certification and behavioral health divisions.
LeGrand, who served until 2014, said he doesn’t recall any decision to stop contacting counties about the law.
Katie Storr, the current chief of staff at the Department of Mental Health, told Mississippi Today and ProPublica it’s possible staff did communicate with counties beyond what the records indicate. “After more than a decade, a lack of correspondence, email, or other documentation is not indicative that communication and follow-ups did not take place,” she wrote in an email. However, she said the department had no additional records that would show this.
During this time, Storr wrote, the department was focused on trying to get counties to hold people going through the commitment process in short-term crisis stabilization units rather than jail.
The recent effort to implement the certification law stems from inquiries by Mississippi Today and ProPublica.
In January, the news organizations asked the head of the Department of Mental Health, Wendy Bailey, if the department certifies jails where people are held as they await admission to a state hospital. Bailey, who handled communications for the department when the certification law passed, initially said it didn’t apply to jails. In March, after reviewing documents showing prior efforts to certify jails, she said she didn’t believe the law was intended to apply to them.
After our inquiries, Bailey sought an opinion from the attorney general. (Such opinions are not binding, but officials who request and abide by them are protected from liability.)
Around the same time, the Department of Mental Health contacted the four facilities it had previously certified to schedule inspections. The department’s standards say such inspections will happen annually, but this was the first year in which staff had sought to visit all of them since 2017. (Storr said the inspection effort was planned before inquiries by Mississippi Today and ProPublica.)
In March, staffers inspecting the Chickasaw County jail in rural northeastern Mississippi found serious violations. Inmates and people awaiting mental health treatment were housed together in the same cells, where beds were anchored with long bolts that “could be used by a person to harm themselves,” the reviewers recorded.
The department suspended the jail’s certification in August, but reinstated it after the county submitted a compliance plan that included shortening the bolts and providing mental health training for staff.
Lafayette County told the state it didn’t want its jail to be certified anymore. The certification for a holding facility in Warren County, home to Vicksburg, was suspended. A hospital in Alcorn County in northeast Mississippi maintained its certification.
In August, the attorney general’s office confirmed that the department must “ensure that each county holding facility, including but not limited to county jails,” meets its standards. If they don’t, an assistant attorney general wrote, the law allows the department to require counties to contract with a county that does have a certified facility.
When Bailey informed county officials about the opinion in her October letter, she instructed that if a county holds someone in an uncertified facility, including a jail, officials should contact the department to seek certification or work with local community mental health centers. These are publicly funded, independent providers set up to ensure that poor, uninsured people can access mental health care.
Several counties, including Lamar, have taken up the matter in public meetings or have contacted the department to begin the certification process.
Storr told Mississippi Today and ProPublica that the department asked counties to initiate the certification process because the law says it’s up to counties to determine which facility they use.
But the Department of Mental Health already knows which counties have held people in uncertified jails. Starting in July 2021, in response to a federal lawsuit over the state’s mental health system, department staff have tracked how many people come to state hospitals directly from jails for psychiatric treatment.
The tally for the year ending in June breaks down all 71 jails, only one of which is certified, where a total of 812 people who had been civilly committed were held before being admitted to a state hospital. (The tally doesn’t include anyone who was jailed and released without being admitted to a state hospital.)
In Lauderdale County, on the Alabama line: 83. Across the state in DeSoto County: 76. A couple hundred miles down the Mississippi River in Adams County: 33.
Storr and Bailey have emphasized that they have limited authority over counties and no way to force them to do anything. The department’s only means of enforcement, Storr wrote, is to put a jail on probation, then revoke certification — if the jail in question even was certified in the first place — and require the county to contract with another provider.
LeGrand said a law without teeth is effectively optional. “The department’s not really in a good position to boss counties around,” he said.
James Tucker, an attorney and the director of the Alabama Disabilities Advocacy Program, which has sued that state over its civil commitment process, said the agency has a responsibility to make sure counties are treating people properly. “You don’t discharge that duty by sitting on your hands and waiting for every local sheriff to report in,” he said.
Bailey’s department encourages counties to connect families with outpatient services in order to avoid the commitment process. If someone does need to be committed, the department said, counties should hold people in crisis stabilization units operated by community mental health centers.
“I do not believe jails are an appropriate location to hold someone who is not charged with a crime and is awaiting admission to a treatment bed,” Bailey told Mississippi Today and ProPublica in an email. “The person should be in a safe location, receiving treatment.”
But there are only 180 crisis beds in the state, and crisis stabilization units frequently turn people away because they are full, can’t provide the needed care, or deem a patient too violent. Storr said the agency is working to reduce denials and plans to use one-time federal pandemic funding to expand capacity.
Allen, the sheriffs’ association attorney, said the state will need more crisis beds if officials want to keep people out of jail as they await mental health care. He said he’s been meeting with sheriffs and county officials since the guidance was issued.
“This has catalyzed the county governments and law enforcement to do something,” he said. Sheriffs agree on the need for “certified centers, just not in the county jail.”
Mollie Simon of ProPublica contributed research to this story.
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Here’s a Veteran’s Day story for you: Three generations of Mississippians serving our country while working the same job. Meet Retired Chief Master Sergeant Dan Jones (grandfather), soon-to-be pinned Chief Master Sergeant Joel Jones (dad), and Senior Airman Scott Jones (son) who all are Boom Operators in the KC-135 Stratotanker (a flying gas station) based at the 186th Air Refueling Wing based at Key Field in Meridian.
Boom operators help refuel aircraft mid-air, which is vital for long missions. Scott could not be in this video because he was deployed. When asked if he was proud of his son and grandson, Dan Jones replied, “Mission accomplished.”
The post Mississippi Stories: Dan and Joel Jones appeared first on Mississippi Today.
Civil rights leader William Monroe Trotter led a delegation that confronted President Woodrow Wilson.
Raised in Hyde Park, Massachusetts, Trotter had more education than the president. He had graduate and postgraduate degrees from Harvard University, where he became the first Black member of Phi Beta Kappa.
“New Englanders liked to talk as if ‘the Negro problem’ afflicted only the South,” The New Yorker wrote of him, “but Trotter looked around his beloved Boston and saw segregation in the city’s churches, gyms, and hospitals. This ‘fixed caste of color’ meant that ‘every colored American would be a civic outcast, forever alien in public life,’ he wrote.”
In 1901, he started The Guardian with the motto: “For every right, with all thy might.” The newspaper called itself “an organ which is to voice intelligently the needs and aspirations” of Black Americans.”
Both he and his wife, Deenie, published The Guardian each Saturday, only missing two issues: “The Trotters had no children and did not want any; The Guardian was their child.”
In their pages, Trotter leveled vicious attacks against Booker T. Washington and his accommodation policies, calling him “the Great Traitor.” When Trotter began to question Washington at a gathering of 2,000, a fight broke out, which became known as “the Boston riot,” and he was arrested, spending 30 days in jail. The wealth his family once enjoyed turned to poverty because of the money he sunk into his newspaper.
“It has cost me considerable money, but I could not keep out of it,” he wrote. “I can now feel that I am doing my duty and trying to show the light to those in darkness and keep them from at least being duped into helping in their own enslavement.”
He turned his attention to political candidates he felt would support African Americans and began backing Wilson, whom he met and shook hands with in 1912 “with great cordiality.”
A year later, he and Ida B. Wells and other civil rights leaders expressed dismay over the reinstitution of Jim Crow and even shared a chart that showed which federal offices had begun separating workers by race.
In 1914, Trotter and other Black leaders appeared at the White House with 20,000 signatures, demanding an end to Jim Crow in federal offices. The leaders told Wilson they felt betrayed because they had supported him in the election, and he had since reinstituted segregation in the federal government that included separate toilets and dismissed high-level Black appointees.
“Only two years ago you were heralded as perhaps the second Lincoln,” Trotter said, “and now the Afro-American leaders who supported you are hounded as false leaders and traitors to their race.”
He reminded the president — who had been busy championing his “New Freedom” program to restore fair-labor practices — that he had promised to aid Black Americans in “advancing the interest of their race in the United States. … Have you a ‘New Freedom’ for white Americans and a new slavery for your Afro-American fellow citizens? God forbid!”
Wilson responded that “segregation is not humiliating but a benefit” and that he had put the practice back in place because of friction between Black and white clerks. Trotter challenged this claim, calling Jim Crow humiliating to Black workers.
Wilson stuck to his guns, telling Trotter that if he and other Black Americans think “you are being humiliated, you will believe it.” The exchange lasted 45 minutes, and the president challenged Trotter’s “tone” as offensive: “You have spoiled the whole cause for which you came.”
The civil rights leader responded, “I am pleading for simple justice. If my tone has seemed so contentious, why has my tone been misunderstood?”
The argument landed on the front page of The New York Times. During World War I, the State Department refused to give Trotter a passport to Paris. To get around the restriction, he took a job as a cook on a freighter to France, and when he began reporting on the plight of Black soldiers, French newspapers shared his reporting, and he spoke there about discrimination against African Americans.
When Trotter returned home, he was welcomed by 2,000 supporters. He unsuccessfully championed a section added to Wilson’s 14 Points for peace that would say, “The elimination of civil, political, and judicial distinctions based on race or color in all nations for the new era of freedom everywhere.”
Trotter helped found the Niagara Movement, a forerunner of the NAACP. The civil rights organization adopted his proposal to address segregated transportation as a grievance, but the group rejected his proposal to make lynching a federal crime.
He championed cases the NAACP was slower to pursue, including Jane Bosfield, a Black woman was told she could only work for a Massachusetts hospital if she ate separately from her white fellow workers.
When the racist movie, ‘The Birth of a Nation’, appeared on a screen, the national NAACP tried to raise money for a rival film to counter those lies, but Trotter believed in direct action. His protests succeeded in shutting down a play that was the basis for the movie, which depicted Klansmen as heroes. After failing to halt the debut of the film in Boston, he teamed up with Roman Catholics to get a revival showing canceled.
His tactics were later used by the modern civil rights movement “to integrate lunch counters, buses, schools, and other essential spaces,” The New Yorker wrote. And his mindset “incubated the politics of Malcolm X and of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.”
A multicultural center at the University of Michigan bears Trotter’s name, and his first home in Dorchester is now a National Historic Landmark. He made the list of the 100 Greatest African Americans.
The post On this day in 1914 appeared first on Mississippi Today.
Ravin Lovett, an artist and art therapist, says she became fascinated with quilting at a young age, watching her “Big Mama” make magic from scraps of cloth. It was her grandmother that taught her to quilt. And it was this loving grace that eventually sent her on a journey of self-realization and self-healing.
“I was fascinated by quilting,” said Lovett. “Watching my grandmother… the technique, the patience and the beautiful results of a process created from these simple pieces of cloth was magical to me and over time, brought me a special kind of peace. It’s been a journey of peace and self-discovery.”
Lovett, 42 of Jackson, has created her quilts on a professional level since 2000. It was during harder times in her life that she went back to an unfinished quilt that she and her grandmother worked on in the mid-90s.
This discovery awakened the artist in her.
Lovett went back to school to further her education. She has degrees in art education and English, and a Master of Art in Biblical and Theological Studies. She credits her Big Mama, God and quilting for the healing she wants to share with others.
“I want to share my knowledge, my skills, with others. I want to teach them to quilt and help them find peace, too. Being an art therapist, a quilter, I can do that.”
Lovett’s 18 pieces are on display in an exhibit titled, “Freedom,” at the Smith Robertson Museum in Jackson until the end of November.
The post Ravin Lovett, healing quilter and art therapist appeared first on Mississippi Today.
In 2003, incumbent Democratic Gov. Ronnie Musgrove flew into Tupelo to campaign in the final days before the November general election.
Among those meeting Musgrove at the Tupelo Municipal Airport was 26-year-old Brandon Presley, the mayor of nearby Nettleton.
Presley was there to host Musgrove as he campaigned in the area. At the airport, a Musgrove staffer asked a reporter traveling with the governor to report on the campaign if he would mind riding in the car with Presley because a New York Times reporter wanted some alone time with Musgrove.
The reporter, who had been traveling with Musgrove daily during the final days of the campaign, did not object to the request. On the ride from the airport to the first stop — a Nettleton furniture plant — Presley entertained the reporter and others in the car, mimicking first the high-pitched Southern drawl of Musgrove followed by the deep Southern drawl of Haley Barbour, the 2003 Republican nominee for governor.
Later, leaving the furniture plant for the next destination, a Musgrove campaign staffer said the New York Times reporter was finished with his interview and the Mississippi reporter could ride with Musgrove to the next destination.
“That’s all right. I will ride with Brandon,” the reporter replied.
Besides his comedy routine, Presley also provided political commentary that October day. He said the 2003 governor’s election would be a watershed event. If Barbour, a Yazoo City native who had made his name as a Washington lobbyist and national political operative, won the election, Presley surmised, it would usher in a period of dark days for Mississippi Democrats.
Presley predicted that if Musgrove lost that election, it would be many years before a Democrat would win a Mississippi governor’s race. Presley said Democrats could not lose the rural white vote in areas like where he lived in northeast Mississippi and still win statewide.
The 26-year-old mayor proved that day to be both a good comedian and a keen political observer.
Musgrove lost the 2003 election in what was until 2023 the most expensive in state history. That 2003 election still is a high watermark for turnout in a Mississippi’s governor’s election.
Since then, a Democrat has not resided in the Governor’s Mansion. In 2003 as Presley made his observation, so-called rural white Democrats from northeast Mississippi dominated the Legislature, but they began to slowly be replaced by Republicans taking advantage of the modern, sophisticated campaign strategy Barbour brought back from D.C. to his native Mississippi.
Today, Sen. Hob Bryan of Amory, whose district includes Presley’s hometown of Nettleton, is the only rural white Democrat left in northeast Mississippi. Bryan won reelection on Nov. 7 and remains the only Democrat in the Legislature representing a white majority district.
It would have been ironic if Brandon Presley, a four-term public service commissioner from northeast Mississippi, would have been the first Democrat to win the office of governor since he made his foretelling observation during that watershed 2003 campaign. As it turned out, Presley, like another northeast Mississippi native, former state Attorney General Jim Hood, fell short in their quest to become the first Democratic governor elected since 1999. And just like Musgrove way back in 2003, both Hood in 2019 and Presley this year lost by about 5 percentage points.
And also like Musgrove in 2003 and Hood in 2019, Presley lost northeast Mississippi, where Musgrove was campaigning on that bright, cloudless October day.
In his 1999 victory, Musgrove won northeast Mississippi — once known as home of the so-called Roosevelt Democrats who believed government had a role to play in lifting up communities economically. At one time, a Democrat could capture statewide office by winning in northeast Mississippi and in the majority-Black areas of the state.
But Democrats can no longer piece together such a winning alliance. That coalition, as it turns out, was slipping away in 2003 when Musgrove and Presley traveled through Tupelo and down state Highway 6 to Nettleton.
Don’t be surprised if Presley tries again to end that 2003 self-fulfilling prophecy.
“I am not walking off the political stage,” he said this week, not ruling out another run for governor in 2027.
But at least for the next four years, his 2003 prediction remains true for Mississippi Democrats.
The post Brandon Presley’s ominous prediction in 2003 car ride is still haunting Mississippi Democrats appeared first on Mississippi Today.
State revenue collections are continuing to slow as legislative leaders and Gov. Tate Reeves, fresh off their election victories, prepare to release budget recommendations to be considered during the 2024 legislative session.
The state collected $638 million in revenue during October — down $33.7 million from October 2022. For the year, collections are down $52.6 million or 2.09% over the same time period in the previous year, according to information recently released by the staff of the Legislative Budget Committee.
While collections are slowing, the state is still collecting more revenue than the official estimate for the fiscal year. That is important because the official estimate determines the amount of money budgeted to run state agencies. If revenue collections fall below the official estimate, mid-year budget cuts must be made by legislators and/or the governor or reserves funds must be tapped to make up for the revenue shortfall.
Legislative leaders and Reeves set the official estimate last November for the current fiscal year, which began July 1.
For the fiscal year, collections are $75.4 million or 3.1% above the official estimate. But for the month of October, collections are $10.4 million or 1.6% below the estimate.
The governor, fresh off his reelection victory earlier in the week, will meet with legislative leaders next week to adopt an official estimate for the next fiscal year. And soon after that, both Reeves and the Legislative Budget Committee will release separate budget recommendations to be considered by the full Legislature when it meets, starting in early January to adopt a budget. The budget will fund state services ranging from education to health care to law enforcement.
The biggest drag on revenue collections continues to be income tax collections. Income tax collections are down $107 million or 12.1% for the year. The Legislature passed a $525 million income tax cut in 2022 that is being phased in over four years, starting in January of this year. When passing the tax cut, the largest in state history, legislative leaders and Reeves said growth in other areas would offset any loss revenue from the income tax cut. But thus far that is not occurring.
It is too early to determine whether the slowdown in revenue from the income tax is caused by the tax cut or a combination of the tax cut and slowdown in economic growth.
The post Revenue collections continue to slow as state leaders begin work on new budget appeared first on Mississippi Today.
