The Pearl River by Jackson surpassed its flood stage Wednesday night, and officials on Thursday afternoon urged those in downtown and northeast Jackson to start preparing immediately.
The National Weather Service expects the Pearl River to crest on Tuesday, which means that flooding could continue throughout next week as the river drops back below the 28-foot flood stage.
NWS projects the Pearl to crest at 36 feet, which would equal the eighth highest peak ever for the river at Jackson. Of the top ten highest peaks, this would be the only one to occur during the summer. NWS also announced that Wednesday’s rainfall made this month the wettest August ever in the capital city’s history.
Marty Pope, senior hydrologist with the NWS in Jackson, said the area has seen anywhere between five and 15 inches of rain over the last three days, filling up the upper Pearl River basin and its tributaries. The Tuscolameta Creek, an offshoot of the Pearl, is close to record levels near Walnut Grove, Pope said.
WAPT also reported flooding in Canton for the second time in a month, as well as in Scott, Leake and Rankin counties yesterday.
Those in need of sandbags can call the Jackson’s constituent services at 311 to get them delivered or get them in person on Michael Avalon Street. Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba said that information on shelters and which streets may be flooded will be on the city’s website later Thursday.
Mississippi Emergency Management Agency Executive Director Stephen McCraney said the agency is also anticipating impacts to places along the Pearl south of Jackson, including Terry and southern Hinds County, as well as Lawrence and Copiah counties.
MEMA urges anyone who experiences damages to documents those impacts on its self-reporting tool (which can be found at this link) to help receive assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
ROLLING FORK – Patience wore thin in the South Delta Wednesday night.
Several hundred business owners, farmers, families and other Mississippians filled into a high school auditorium, summoned to give their input on flood control solutions. To most of the attendees that night, that solution is the Yazoo Pumps.
Frustration in the room stemmed from decades of what the pumps’ supporters call a broken promise, and what opponents call an illusion.
Sen. Roger Wicker, who hosted the town hall meeting along with Rep. Bennie Thompson, has pressed federal officials in recent months to revisit the pumps proposal after the Environmental Protection Agency shut down the idea for the second time last November.
South Delta residents in attendance for a listening session on flooding in the area. Credit: Staff of Sen. Roger Wicker
Wicker told the audience that the agency, after restoring a veto from 2008, promised an alternative plan to the pumps within 12 to 16 months, or at earliest this coming November.
The federal government first presented the idea of the Yazoo Pumps in 1941 as part of a response to the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.
After decades of planning and design, the EPA first vetoed the idea in 2008, determining that the pumps could drain 67,000 acres of wetlands in the South Delta. The agency briefly brought the project back to life in 2020, when, under President Donald Trump, the EPA decided that an altered proposal that moved the pumps’ location exempted it from the 2008 veto.
Wicker and Thompson – both of whom support the project, although Thompson more tentatively in recent years – sat on the auditorium stage next to Chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality Brenda Mallory, along with representatives from four different federal agencies.
“We want an enduring solution, we recognize that what is going on in this community is unacceptable and not sustainable,” said Mallory, who added that the pumps are “not necessarily what we’re going to need today.”
Backwater flooding surrounds a farm in the lower Mississippi Delta in June, 2019. Credit: Photo by Rory Doyle
Opponents of the pumps, largely scientists and conservation advocates, have pointed to the large price tag, which Thompson has estimated as around half a billion dollars. They also argue that only 17% of the half million acres that flooded in 2019 would have been spared with the pumps, citing data from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
As record-setting rainfall landed across Mississippi Wednesday, many recalled the devastating 2019 backwater flood, which left properties inundated for over six months. Some of the residents who testified on Wednesday said their homes and businesses still need repairs.
“You guys have no idea what it’s like to live through a seven-month flood,” said Ann Dahl, an Eagle Lake resident.
About thirty members of the crowd came up to the microphone over the course of two hours, displaying a wide range of hopes, emotions, and truths about the pumps.
Victoria Garland, who lives in Issaquena County, held back tears as she spoke. In 2019, she had to park at her neighbor’s home and boat through a creek to get to her house.
“The things that we saw on our trips to and from (the house) were indescribable,” Garland said.
“If you’ve never seen deer that just don’t look right, the smell of decaying flesh will more than turn your stomach at eight o’clock in the morning when you’re just trying to leave and go make some money.”
At one point, a commenter asked the audience to raise their hands if they supported building the pumps. A vast majority of hands went up.
Eventually, the crowd directed their feelings towards the bureaucrats on stage.
“Get off your asses,” one of the commentersbegged.
“Have you ever had to fill a sandbag?” another audience member shouted from their seat.
While most in attendance supported the pumps, others were in favor of seeing more options presented to flood victims, such as easements, buyouts, and raising homes.
Chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality Brenda Mallory speaking in front of South Delta residents during a meeting about flooding. Credit: Staff of Sen. Roger Wicker
“‘Finish the pumps’ is a nice slogan,” said Ty Pinkins, an organizer and attorney, after the event. “But one solution won’t satisfy every citizen. Raising a home might be a viable solution for someone.”
The most consistent theme among the speakers on Wednesday was impatience. With generations of families having come and gone since 1941, residents are anxious to see something change in an area where roughly a third of people live in poverty.
“All the political minutia, the arguments between farmers and non-farmers, and all this other crap, I could care less about it,” said Roy Rucker, from nearby Panther Burn. “But what I do care about is the people who live here, and why industry won’t come here.”
Mississippi has opened applications for first-year teachers to apply for loan repayment funds on a first-come, first-serve basis with priority given to those in districts with a teacher shortage.
The Office of Student Financial Aid will award up to 150 first-year, full-time teachers through the William Winter Teacher Loan Repayment Program, which was created by the Legislature in 2021. The program makes loan repayment awards to teachers for up to three years.
Awards are paid to teachers at the end of the school year, and the amount will vary depending on a teacher’s school district. First-year teachers with a valid, five-year state educator’s license who work in a geographical critical shortage district will receive $4,000 in loan repayment, while teachers who do not will receive $1,500.
A school district is declared a geographical teacher shortage area if it has 60 or more teaching positions and 10% or more of them are not appropriately licensed. Not appropriately licensed includes teachers teaching out of field, teachers teaching with no certificate, and long-term substitutes.
A school district with less than 60 teaching positions becomes a geographic shortage area if 15% or more of their teaching staff isn’t appropriately licensed.
Second-year teachers who received funds last year are also eligible to reapply. Second-year teachers in geographical shortage districts will receive $5,000 in loan repayment; those in a non-shortage area will receive $2,500.
To qualify, teachers with undergraduate loans must be graduates of a regionally accredited university and cannot be delinquent or in default.
Teachers who have received funds from other state loan programs targeting the education profession – such as the Critical Needs Teacher Forgivable Loan Program, the William Winter Teacher Forgivable Loan Program, or the Teacher Education Scholars Forgivable Loan Program – are not eligible.
Teachers who don’t qualify might be eligible for Public Service Loan Forgiveness, according to OSFA’s website.
The William Winter Teacher Loan Repayment Program was proposed by Sen. David Blount, D-Jackson, last year as a way to ameliorate the state’s current teacher shortage. It replaced a slew of loan programs targeting teachers that the Legislature had created in the 1990s but left unfunded in recent years.
The hustle and bustle happening at Marshall’s Music and Bookstore is a wondrous sight. Endless customers, deliveries and phones ringing nonstop keep owner Maati Primm on her toes. And she handles all of it herself.
Marshall’s is one of the oldest Black-owned bookstores in the country, and with the exception of the original founder, Greater Pearlie Grove Missionary Baptist Church Pastor Louis Wilcher, the business has been owned and operated on Farish Street in Jackson by Primm’s female family members since 1938. Until the early 1970s, Farish Street was the epicenter of Black businesses in Jackson.
“When I was a little girl, I’d come in here and play bookstore,” Primm says with a smile at the memory. “This was my Disney.”
The bookstore offers a variety of books and music promoting Black history and excellence. It is a sanctuary for those who want to learn history and continue to learn.
“And maybe find out what they didn’t know, what they weren’t taught in school,” Primm said. “It can be an eye-opening, mind-blowing experience.”
An entire wall in the store is dedicated to notable Mississippians who have reached various levels of fame via books they’ve authored, television shows they’ve hosted, activism they’ve led or movies they’ve starred in.
Primm even plays videos of historical events for customers, sharing snippets of history from Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech to Little Richard schooling Arsenio Hall’s audience on their rights as living, breathing human beings.
“My great grandmother was enslaved. When she freed herself, she started a church, school and burial grounds. She was an educator too. To this day, the church and burial grounds still remain,” Primm said, while showing an image taken in 1908 of her grandmother with classmates at Utica Technical Institute.
“Her two daughters, and now I, run this business. We’ve seen some of everything happen economically, socially and racially here and around the world. And Marshall’s is right here, still. That’s commitment,” Primm adds.
“My family has been committed to serving. I’m only three generations born out of enslavement and look at what that commitment has become. I love serving our community, and that’s what Marshall’s Music and Bookstore is … a continuation of the commitment that we have to community.”
Help us feature businesses in Mississippi owned by people of color:
Help us feature women-owned businesses in Mississippi:
Editor’s note: This story contains graphic language.
The U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has affirmed a lower court ruling allowing a provision of the 1890 Mississippi Constitution designed to keep African Americans from voting to remain in place.
The provision places a lifetime ban on voting in most instances on people convicted of certain felonies — crimes that the framers of the 1890 state Constitution said Black Mississippians were more prone to commit.
The framers did not disenfranchise people convicted of murder or rape, for instance, but did strip voting rights of people convicted of several “lesser crimes,” which the writers of the Constitution falsely believed would be committed by African Americans.
The “per curiam” or unsigned opinion of the 5th Circuit said because of actions taken by the Legislature in the 1950s and 1960s allowing voters a chance to amend the constitutional provision, among other things adding murder and rape as disenfranchising crimes, the provision no longer has a racist taint.
“Plaintiffs have not demonstrated that Section 241 as it currently stands was motivated by discriminatory intent or that any other approach to demonstrating the provision’s unconstitutionality is viable,” the majority said.
The majority opinion also cited the Legislature taking up the issue in the 1980s and opting not to change it.
The provision was defended on behalf of the state by the office of Attorney General Lynn Fitch.
The Mississippi Center for Justice among other groups brought the lawsuit on behalf of two Black Mississippians who had lost the right to vote: Roy Harness and Kamal Karriem, convicted of forgery and embezzlement, respectively.
“This provision was a part of the 1890 plan to take the vote away from Black people who had attained it in the wake of the Civil War,” said Rob McDuff, director of the Impact Litigation Project at the Mississippi Center for Justice. “Unfortunately, the Court of Appeals is allowing it to remain in place despite its racist origins. Despite this setback, we will continue this battle and seek review in the U.S. Supreme Court.”
The case was considered by 17 members of the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, considered one of the most conservative judiciaries in the nation. Oral arguments were held in the case in September 2021 in New Orleans.
In a statement, Fitch’s office said, “We are pleased with the court’s decision. As the court noted, ‘Plaintiffs’ proposal that a state constitutional amendment must be voted on word for word to avoid any vestigial racial taint is radically prescriptive…. No subsequent case law supports plaintiffs’ novel, judicially crafted political theory of public consent.’”
”Seven of the 17 members dissented with the majority opinion. Circuit Judge James Graves Jr., previously a member of the Mississippi Supreme Court, wrote a lengthy dissent detailing the state’s sordid racist past, including events from the 1960s when the Legislature allowed the electorate to vote on the constitutional provision. That vote allowed murder and rape to be added as disenfranchising crimes, but did not give the electorate the opportunity to vote on whether other changes needed to be made to the provision or whether the entire Jim Crow provision should be stricken from the Constitution.
As part of Graves’ history of the state’s racial past, he cited progress that led to the election of Black officials — including him as a judge — and led to the replacement of the old Mississippi state flag that contained the Confederate battle emblem as part of its design.
Citing that the state had not been allowed to vote on the provision, Graves wrote: “Mississippians have simply not been given the chance to right the wrongs of its racist origins. And this court … deprives Mississippians of this opportunity by upholding an unconstitutional law enacted for the purpose of discriminating against Black Mississippians on the basis of race.”
In his opening, Graves quoted segregationist former Mississippi Gov. James K. Vardaman.
“There is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter … Mississippi’s constitutional convention of 1890 was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the nigger from politics … In Mississippi we have in our Constitution legislated against the racial peculiarities of the Negro … When that device fails, we will resort to something else.”
In Mississippi, people with felony convictions must petition the Legislature to get a bill passed by a two-thirds majority of both chambers to regain voting rights. Normally only a handful (less than five) of such bills are successful each session. There is also the option of the governor granting a pardon to restore voting rights, but no governor has granted pardons since Haley Barbour in 2012.
For a subset of those who lose their rights, the courts can expunge their record. In some instances that expungement includes the restoration of voting rights, while for others it does not. That outcome depends on the preference of the judge granting the expungement.
Those crimes placed in the Constitution where conviction costs a person the right to vote are bribery, theft, arson, obtaining money or goods under false pretense, perjury, forgery, embezzlement, bigamy and burglary.
Under the original language of the Constitution, a person could be convicted of cattle rustling and lose the right to vote, but those convicted of murder or rape would still be able to vote — even while incarcerated.
The Mississippi State Department of Health will host a monkeypox vaccination clinic on Friday inside the Jackson Medical Mall from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Due to the limited supply, the vaccine has only been available to Mississippians aged 18 and older who have had close, intimate contact with an infected person or who are a member of the LBBTQ+ community at high risk for infection.
Mississippi’s initial allotment of the Jynneos monkeypox vaccine included enough doses to inoculate 300 people. The department still does not know how many more doses the state will receive through the rest of the year.
Individuals interested in receiving the monkeypox vaccine are encouraged to call the health department at 1-877-978-6453 to verify their eligibility and make a vaccination appointment, though walk-ins are welcome.
Monkeypox vaccinations are also available by appointment at the health department locations in Lee, Panola, Leflore, Lowndes, Lauderdale, Adams, Hinds, Forrest and Harrison counties.
“If you are at risk for monkeypox, you can help prevent infection by avoiding close skin-to-skin or intimate contact with people who may be infected, and you should be vaccinated if you are eligible,” the health department said in a press release. “If you develop a new or unexplained rash, especially if you have been in close contact with someone who has monkeypox, isolate at home and contact your healthcare provider for testing.”
The monkeypox virus has spread to dozens of countries and infected more than 44,000 people worldwide since the outbreak began in May. Nearly 16,000 of those infections have occurred in the United States, and 21 cases have been identified in Mississippi.
Monkeypox, which is part of the same family of viruses as smallpox, produces many painful symptoms, but deaths from the disease are rare.
Symptoms of monkeypox can include: Fever, headache, muscle aches, swollen lymph nodes, chills and exhaustion. Infected people often experience a rash that looks like pimples, or blisters that appear on many parts of the body. The illness typically lasts for two to four weeks.
The Biden administration declared the monkeypox outbreak a national health emergency on Aug. 4. The World Health Organization declared monkeypox a global public health emergency on July 23, the first time it has taken this step since the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020. Monkeypox, COVID-19 and polio are the only diseases that have this designation.
Hundreds of thousands of Mississippians could benefit from student debt relief plans announced by the Biden administration, as many others now face the prospect of resuming loan repayment come next year.
Under plans announced by the U.S. Department of Education Wednesday, borrowers who make less than $125,000 a year will be eligible for up to $10,000 in loan forgiveness. Pell Grant recipients with federal loans could see up to $20,000 forgiven.
Relief is capped at the amount a borrower owes.
The department also announced student loan payments will resume in January 2023; these had been on pause since 2020 under the Trump Administration.
The plan will not benefit those with private loans but could wipe away some debt for more than half of the nearly 439,000 Mississippians with federal student loans, according to an analysis by the Education Data Initiative. The average Mississippian with federal student loans owes about $37,000, one of the highest average debts in the country.
The median earning for a Mississippian with a bachelor’s degree was approximately $43,500 in 2019, according to data from the Institutions of Higher Learning, while those with a graduate degree earned about $55,500.
Details on how borrowers can get their loans canceled will be announced later this month. To qualify, a borrower must have taken out loans before July 2022 and made less than $125,000 in either 2020 or 2021, the Washington Post reported. Current students are eligible if their parents fall under the income cap.
In order to receive relief, the department must have a borrower’s income data. The Biden administration is planning to launch an application in the coming weeks for borrower’s to upload this data, according to studentaid.gov. Borrowers can sign up here to be notified when the application opens.
The department also announced a proposal that will significantly reduce future monthly payments for borrowers on income-driven repayment plans. The White House said it hopes these changes will lead more borrowers to sign up for income-driven repayment plans even as consumer watchdogs have decried the program’s “abysmal track record.”
The proposed changes to income-driven repayment programs will halve monthly payments for those with undergraduate student loans and make it so borrowers with graduate loans would pay an average weighted rate. Borrowers making less than $15 an hour would not have to make any monthly payments under the proposal.
Current and future borrowers would see their average annual payments drop by more than $1,000 under these proposed changes, according to a White House fact sheet. The federal government would also start forgiving loan balances after 10 years of payment, down from 20 years, and make it so that interest won’t accumulate as long as a borrower makes monthly payments.
In a press release, U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona cast the plan as a way to restore faith among Americans that student loans can lead to opportunity rather than a cycle of debt.
“For too many people, student loan debt has hindered their ability to achieve their dreams—including buying a home, starting a business, or providing for their family. Getting an education should set us free; not strap us down,” he said.
The announcement was met with criticism Wednesday from the left and the right. On Twitter, Gov. Tate Reeves called the plan an unfair use of taxpayer dollars from working-class people who don’t have student loans.
Progressive groups said President Joe Biden’s plan doesn’t do enough to help borrowers who struggle to repay their loans. Many noted that Biden had campaigned on a more far-reaching pledge to forgive all undergraduate tuition-related federal student debt for borrowers making under $125,000 who graduated from public colleges and universities and private historically Black colleges and minority-serving institutions.
“On one hand, I’m happy about any type of loan forgiveness and leniency and extended grace periods,” said Stephen Brown, the assistant director of outreach at Get2College. “I think where the biggest conflict comes in — as far as arguments from people that (Biden) needs to cancel it all — was it was one of his campaign promises.”
Get2College is a nonprofit that advocates for college access and affordability and helps high school seniors fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Financial Aid.
In an op-ed Wednesday, Derrick Johnson, the CEO of the NAACP, and Wisdom Cole, the NAACP’s national director of youth and college, called Biden’s plan “bad public policy and a devastating political mistake.” The NAACP had called for Biden to cancel up to $50,000 in student debt as a way to address the widening racial wealth gap among millennials.
Student debt disproportionately burdens borrowers in Black, brown and low-income communities, who have higher averages of student debt than white borrowers.
“Many privileged and predominantly White Americans, who inherited generational wealth, have had the fortune of not depending on expensive loans to begin with,” Johnson and Cole wrote. “They will likely benefit from $10,000 in cancellation to cover the remaining sum. But what about those in our society who did not inherit generational wealth?”
In Mississippi, Black borrowers take on higher amounts of undergraduate student debt than those of other races, according to data from a recent National Postsecondary Aid study. Black students in Mississippi borrowed an average of $10,800 in undergraduate student debt during the 2017-18 school year, while borrowers of other races took out an average of $7,400.
Black borrowers in Mississippi also took out more loans during the school year than the average Black borrower across the country, while borrowers of other races took on less debt than average.
While Biden’s announcement will benefit borrowers with past loans, it does little to address one of the primary reasons many Mississippians will go into debt to pay for college in the future — the rising cost of tuition.
Jennifer Rogers, the director of the Mississippi Office of Student Financial Aid, said she hopes Biden’s announcement will result in more legislative efforts to reduce the cost of college.
“The President’s executive action will certainly benefit past borrowers,” Rogers said. “I hope this action will also create momentum in the college affordability movement that results in additional bipartisan action to make college more affordable and therefore reduce the need for borrowing by current and future students.”
Since 2008, the cost of college has steadily increased in Mississippi — due in part to a dearth of state funding — but family income hasn’t kept pace. At the same time, the Legislature has cut the amount of state grant aid available to college students. A 2019 study from LendEDU found that the average student loan debt in Mississippi is rising at the ninth fastest rate in the country.
About 50% of students at public universities in Mississippi borrowed money to pay for college during the 2019-20 school year, according to federal data.
Nearly half of borrowers who have defaulted on their student loans — meaning they haven’t made payments for 270 days — could see their balances erased under Biden’s plan.
Brown, from Get2College, said this will benefit many adult students he has worked with who want to go back to college but can’t because their loans are in default. Mississippi’s educational attainment goals depend on increasing the number of adult college students.
Graduates of for-profit colleges will also benefit from this plan, Brown said. He noted that these institutions, which typically charge pricey tuition rates for non-accredited degrees, tend to target students of color and non-traditional college students, like single parents and veterans. Borrowers who attended for-profit colleges also default at higher rates than those who did not.
“You really can’t tell this story without highlighting that a large percentage of student debt is from for-profit institutions,” Brown said.
Brown added that he would like to see Biden’s plan kickstart more local initiatives to reduce the price of tuition, particularly for teachers.
Student debt is a significant factor in Mississippi’s teacher shortage, said Toren Ballard, the director of K-12 policy education with Mississippi First, a policy nonprofit. In order to become a teacher, students typically have to take on loans to pay for college tuition — only to make meager salaries that often do not cover the monthly payments.
Teachers with student debt are more likely to leave their positions within a year than teachers without debt, according to a survey that Ballard conducted in late 2021. For teachers with student debt, 58% reported being likely to leave the classroom within a year, Ballard found, compared to 49% of teachers without debt.
Student debt also causes Black teachers in Mississippi to leave the profession at significantly higher rates than white teachers, Ballard found, which contributes to larger racial inequities in the state’s public schools.
“The attrition gap between Black and white teachers is being driven solely by a disproportionate debt load that Black teachers have,” Ballard said.
Biden’s plan will help Mississippi teachers, but Ballard said the state needs to look at more long-term solutions to the high tuition rates that lead teachers to take on unaffordable student debt.
“This is just a temporary Band-Aid for a really wide-reaching problem,” he said.
Editor’s note: Get2College is a program of the Woodward Hines Education Foundation, a Mississippi Today donor.
Greenwood Leflore Hospital is reopening some of its inpatient operations as of Wednesday, but its intensive care unit remains closed.
The 208-bed hospital suspended inpatient services last week following a sewage leak that caused patients to be transferred to other facilities and clinics to be shut down for three days.
Twelve of the hospital’s medical and surgical beds will be reopened. They will be utilized by post-surgery patients, medical admissions and patients who require less than 24 hours of medical supervision.
Hospital officials said that the beds will be staffed by employees of the hospital, not contract laborers.
“The hospital has committed to continuing service availability without the use of contract labor,” hospital officials said in a press release.
The hospital is continuing to analyze inpatient services it has closed, including its intensive care unit. Its labor and delivery unit is currently staffed at the minimum level required by federal law for providing emergency medical treatment.
“This analysis was required to determine, with labor shortages and higher labor costs, how the hospital can continue to operate inpatient services while covering the cost of providing those services,” the press release stated.
The hospital, which is jointly owned by Leflore County and the city of Greenwood, laid off 30 people in May to offset losses during the pandemic. It announced in June that it is in talks with the University of Mississippi Medical Center on a joint operation agreement.
Hospital officials have not answered questions about the number of employees affected by the changes in services.
Last week, clogged manholes forced sewage into the crawl space below the hospital. As a result, at least 17 patients were transferred to six other hospitals across Mississippi and one hospital in Arkansas. At least 16 patients were discharged.
After the sewage problem was resolved, the hospital resumed all outpatient services and reopened the clinics located outside of the main hospital building.
The hospital is one of the largest employers in Leflore County with 770 employees.
Weeks after a federal judge ordered a receiver be appointed to run the Hinds County jail, county officials say they don’t agree with the mandated oversight.
In an Aug. 12 court filing, attorneys representing the county and Sheriff Tyree Jones said imposing a receiver would take the jail out of local control, which is a “debilitation of the democratic process” and departure from the court’s typical work.
Judges need to show receivership is a last resort, the filing states, but Hinds County isn’t at that point. A new injunction order, which scaled back a 2016 consent decree, was put in place three months before U.S. District Court Judge Carlton Reeves decided in July he will appoint a receiver for the jail, attorneys argue.
“Defendants maintain and preserve the arguments that they have made in this case, do not waive or forfeit any of their arguments, and maintain that, among other things, the Raymond Detention Center is not in violation of constitutional minimums, and no receiver is warranted,” the court filing states.
The receiver will be in charge of day-to-day management of the jail to follow the injunction order: bring the jail into compliance and meet a minimum standard of living for detainees, which is a constitutional right.
In his July 29 order, Reeves wrote receivership is necessary because there is a risk of unconstitutional harm to jail detainees and staff. He stated issues highlighted during a three weeks of hearings: Seven detainees died in 2021 by suicide or were killed by other detainees. There is violence and contraband. The jail is chronically understaffed and infrastructure needs repair.
“While the Court has considered other sanctions, it must be noted that the County has never suggested any other alternative. It has simply argued against a receivership,” Reeves wrote.
“It continues to plead for more time, but we have been there and done that. There is no sense in granting the County more time to do nothing.”
He set a deadline of Nov. 1 to appoint a receiver. Reeves asked the county and U.S. Department of Justice to present potential candidates for the jail receiver role. The county proposed one person and the department recommended three, according to court documents.
The county requested a hearing be held to consider qualifications of the potential receivers and for both parties to ask the candidates questions.
A status conference is scheduled for Aug. 29 at 10 a.m. and will be held over Zoom. The link to watch the hearing will be available on the Southern District’s website under the “News & Announcements” section.
The county’s recommendation for a receiver was Frank Shaw, the current interim jail administrator.
In his July 29 order, Reeves said Shaw is “wholly unqualified for the role” because he was in charge of a privately-run prison in Arizona where riots broke out. Reeves also said Shaw’s contract with the county is expected to expire soon.
The DOJ’s candidates are Wendell France Sr., who has worked in prisons and the now-closed Baltimore City Detention Center and Susan McCampbell, who has worked as a court monitor at jails and prisons in multiple states, according to court filings.
The name of the DOJ’s last candidate is not mentioned in recent court records. A spokesperson for the department was not immediately available for commentand attorneys for Hinds County did not respond to a request for comment.
Reeves eliminated Shaw as an option and said he will select a receiver from the remaining three candidates.
In its Aug. 12 court filing, attorneys representing the county objected to France and McCampbell as potential choices for jail receiver because of their previous work with the DOJ. France has consulted for the department and McCampbell has provided expert litigative services.
Despite the objections to having a jail receiver, the county submitted an order detailing what kind of duties, powers and authority the receiver should have, according to court documents.
Within 90 days of the receiver’s appointment, that person must develop and submit an action plan. The receiver is encouraged to seek input from the Hinds County Board of Supervisors, county administrator and the U.S. Department of Justice. The sheriff must approve the action plan.
Generally, the receiver can ask for the sheriff’s input, but it is not required.
The county said the receiver would only have power over staff at the jail, not those employed by the sheriff’s office or county.
The receiver will also not have power or authority over planning, design and operation of a new jail, the order proposes.
County officials plan to build a new jail on McDowell Road in Jackson with a projected completion date in June 2025, according to court documents. The jail is expected to cost over $60 million, have 200 beds and allow for direct supervision of inmates – an issue raised during hearings in federal court and in numerous court monitor reports.
The county asked for the receiver’s term to end when the new jail opens or upon “reasonable implementation” of the injunction order at the current jail, according to court records.
In ordering the receivership, Reeves wrote the opening of a new jail can be seen as a “natural projected end-date” for the receiver. Regardless, it is challenging to gauge how fast a receiver can fix a jail, he said.
The county proposes a maximum $75,000 annual salary for the receiver and $50,000 for up to two staff members to work with the receiver.
The receiver will draft a budget for jail operations and present it to the board of supervisors. If it is not approved, they can try to negotiate and reconcile the receiver’s budget and an alternate one proposed by the board. If there is no agreement, the budgets will be submitted to the court for resolution, according to court documents.
The county said there can’t be more than a $1 million increase for the total jail operation budget from each fiscal year to the next. If requesting a higher increase, the receiver must show “clear and convincing evidence” the increase is essential to implement the injunction order and achieve compliance, according to court documents.
