Mississippi Today reporters Anna Wolfe and Michelle Liu and a team of collaborators won the 2021 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, considered the top investigative journalism award in the nation.
Their investigation, reported for Mississippi Today and The Marshall Project, exposed Mississippi’s practice of forcing individuals convicted of low-level felony offenses to work off their fines and other court debts at low-wage jobs during the day while they are confined in locked facilities at night until the debts are paid.
The reporting beat out several other Goldsmith Prize finalists including Politico, Reuters, Tampa Bay Times, Indianapolis Star and AL.com.
The investigation was a collaboration between The Marshall Project and Mississippi Today, and was also published by the USA Today Network, the Clarion-Ledger, the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, and Mississippi Public Broadcasting. Data analysis was provided by The Marshall Project’s Andrew R. Calderon. Leslie Eaton of The Marshall Project and R.L. Nave of Mississippi Today edited the project. Liu, who was a reporter for Mississippi Today between 2018 and 2020, now works for The Associated Press.
This is the fourth national award the investigation has won. In March 2020, the project won the John Jay College/Harry Frank Guggenheim awards for Excellence in Criminal Justice Reporting. In February 2020, the reporting won the Sidney Award. In September 2020, it won the Online News Association’s Al Neuharth Innovation in Investigative Journalism Award.
COVID-19 vaccination efforts in the United States were slowed by an unexpected hurdle on Tuesday after federal health agencies recommended a pause in the use of Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose coronavirus vaccine after six recipients developed an extremely rare blood clot.
“We are recommending a pause in the use of this vaccine out of an abundance of caution,” Dr. Peter Marks, director of the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, and Dr. Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a joint statement. “Right now, these adverse events appear to be extremely rare.”
Health officials have said that the pause is only expected to last a few days. In response, state health departments across the country, including in Mississippi, have either instructed or advised health providers to halt the use of the vaccine while the blood clotting issue is investigated. The pharmacy giants CVS and Walgreens have also said that they will stop administering the Johnson & Johnson vaccine and will reschedule the appointments of affected patients as soon as possible.
Mississippi State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs tweeted Tuesday morning that the Mississippi State Department of Health is instructing vaccine providers in the state to refrain from using the Johnson & Johnson vaccine until more guidance is available from federal health agencies.
MSDH is instructing all physicians, clinics and hospitals to refrain from using Johnson and Johnson until additional guidance available from CDC/FDA https://t.co/2O3jMhiVHg
Dobbs also told the nearly 42,000 Mississippians who have received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine not to worry, noting that the window of risk for developing the rare blood clot after receiving the vaccine appears short, and the likelihood of it happening at all is very slim.
During a press briefing on Tuesday, State Epidemiologist, Dr. Paul Byers, said that MSDH will work with vaccine providers that have received Johnson & Johnson shipments to replace those doses with Pfizer or Moderna doses if needed.
All six patients known to have developed the rare blood clot, known as cerebral venous sinus thrombosis, were women between the ages of 18 and 48 and developed the clotting within two weeks of vaccination. One of the six has died from the illness, and another has been hospitalized in critical condition.
The CDC will hold a meeting of its Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) on Wednesday to further review these cases and assess whether they were caused by an immune system response triggered by the vaccine. The FDA will review these findings alongside their own investigation to determine the future status of the vaccine’s Emergency Use Authorization.
Treating the type of blood clot observed in these cases is another area of concern, as it might be dangerous to administer the drug commonly used to treat blood clots. Dobbs said that the federal review of this issue was important “in part, to ensure that the health care provider community is aware of the potential for these adverse events and can plan for proper recognition and management due to the unique treatment required with this type of blood clot.”
Nearly seven million people in the U.S. have received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, according to CDC data. This represents only a tiny fraction of the more than 187 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines that have been administered across the country.
The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to act on Attorney General Lynn Fitch’s motion to pause a lawsuit filed on behalf of African American parents saying the state violated federal law by spending less on majority-Black schools than majority-white ones.
Will Bardwell, an attorney for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which filed the lawsuit on behalf of Black Mississippi parents, said the ruling denying Fitch’s request “almost certainly means that the Supreme Court isn’t going to take the case, at least for now, which clears the way for us to move forward in district court.”
Colby Jordan, a spokesperson for the Attorney General’s office, said of last week’s decision by the Supreme Court: “We are in the process of reviewing our options.”
Fitch was asking the nation’s highest court to halt any advancement of the lawsuit in district court while her office had time to file an appeal of a narrow ruling of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals saying the case could move forward. Samuel Alito, one of the Supreme Court’s more conservative justices, acting on behalf of the entire panel, rejected Fitch’s request last week.
What is at issue in the unique case is whether the state is in violation of the Mississippi Readmission Act of 1870 that was passed by the U.S. Congress after the Civil War. As a condition of readmission, the federal act, in part, prohibited Mississippi from making changes to its laws that lessened the guarantee of an equal or uniform school system. Bardwell said the language placed in the state Constitution recognizing the state’s commitment to public education has been watered down through the years, especially as state leaders strived at times in the state’s history to have separate school systems based on the students’ race.
Bardwell said the goal of the lawsuit is “to re-establish Mississippi’s obligation to maintaining a uniform school system and to hold the state accountable for not upholding that obligation.”
The lawsuit by the SLPC cited what it said were numerous examples where African American students still receive an inferior education in Mississippi. For instance, in the 2015-16 school year, of the 19 F-rated school districts, 13 had a Black enrollment of more than 95%, and all had enrollment of African Americans of at least 85%.
In its motion to dismiss the case, Fitch argued, “At the end of the day, it should go without saying that education is of the utmost importance to all of the state defendants and the state’s citizenry. And, of course there is always room for improvement in this area in the state of Mississippi. But the tactics utilized by the SPLC in this lawsuit are not, and could not be, the answer.”
All states have clauses in their constitutions establishing their public education commitment.
Mississippi’s 1868 Constitution states: “As the stability of a republican form of government depends mainly upon the intelligence and virtue of the people, it shall be the duty of the Legislature to encourage, by all suitable means, the promotion of intellectual, scientific, moral and agricultural improvement, by establishing a uniform system of free public schools, by taxation or otherwise, for all children between the ages of five and twenty-one years, and shall, as soon as practicable, establish schools of higher grade.”
The state’s current Constitution, enacted in 1890, weakened that commitment by among other things removing the word “uniform” and adding a new section, mandating separate schools for “children of the white and colored races.”
That language establishing separate education system based on race was not removed from the Constitution until 1978. Even with that removal, the lawsuit contends the state’s current constitutional commitment to public education is much weaker than it was in the 1868 Constitition when Mississippi was re-admitted to the Union.
U.S. District Judge Henry T. Wingate of the Southern District of Mississippi is scheduled to hear the case.
Mississippi women who have given birth will likely continue to receive Medicaid health care coverage until at least the end of 2021 even after legislation recently died that would have extended the coverage.
During the 2021 Mississippi legislative session, Senate leadership attempted to place in state law a requirement that postpartum coverage would be expanded from 60 days to 12 months for mostly low-income women. That coverage is particularly important in Mississippi, the poorest state in the nation with high rates of infant and maternal mortality.
The Senate tried to include the postpartum coverage expansion in the Medicaid bill passed during the 2021 session designed to make various technical amendments to the complex federal-state health care program. The House rejected that proposal.
But Matt Westerfield, a spokesperson for Mississippi’s Division of Medicaid, told Mississippi Today that federal emergency orders “will likely” keep the coverage in place through 2021.
“Because of the federal Families First Coronavirus Response Act enacted in March 2020, Medicaid recipients, including pregnant women, are receiving continuous Medicaid coverage for the duration of the federal public health emergency,” Westerfield said. “The Biden administration has informed states that the federal COVID-19 public health emergency will likely remain in place for the entirety of 2021.”
When the legislation failed this year, House leaders pointed out that the coverage would remain in effect because of the federal health care emergency status. House Speaker Philip Gunn contended that adding the postpartum expansion to the Medicaid technical amendments bill was not allowed under legislative rules.
“The code section that involved that was not in the bill and it was subject to a point of order,” Gunn said, adding, “there was an individual who had informed us he was going to raise the point of order.”
When asked if expanding the postpartum coverage should be considered in the 2022 session, Gunn said, “I don’t know if Medicaid is the answer to that, but certainly we are concerned… We will probably be looking at ways to address that. Expansion may or may not be a way to address that. It is just something we need to look at.”
Mississippi has the highest infant morality rate in the nation with 9.07 deaths per 1,000 births, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Mississippi also has the 19th-highest maternal mortality rate at 20.8 deaths per 100,000 births, according to a study released by USA Today in 2019.
Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann has said that the Senate will be studying issues surrounding health care access and outcomes in the coming months.
Twelve states, including Mississippi, have not expanded Medicaid as is allowed under federal law to provide health care coverage for primarily the working poor. With Medicaid expansion, presumably poor women who give birth would have continuous coverage as long as they are in lower income levels. The Medicaid expansion would not entitle people who qualify to any additional funds, but instead would make them eligible for health care coverage.
There have been proposals that would mandate any Medicaid expansion in Mississippi to include a minimal co-pay for health care for people covered by the expansion.
While pregnant women in Mississippi are now receiving the continuous Medicaid coverage, the state is receiving extra funds from the federal government to pay for it. Under the March 2020 Families First Coronavirus Response Act, the federal government is providing a matching rate of near 85% for Mississippi Medicaid recipients. In other words, for each dollar of health care provided through Medicaid, the federal government is paying almost 85 cents and the state is paying the remainder.
In addition, under the more recent American Rescue Plan, the federal government would provide incentives of about $600 million for Mississippi over a two years to expand Medicaid to cover primarily the working poor. Thus far, state leaders, including Gunn and Gov Tate Reeves, have rejected the incentive package. Hosemann has indicated that all avenues of improving health care access, including for postpartum coverage, will be studied this summer.
In the meantime, the Mississippi Hospital Association voted last week to back a ballot initiative that would ask voters to approve expanding Medicaid in the state. Supporters of that effort believe they can start gathering signatures by May 1, 2021, and that the question could be placed on a statewide ballot by 2022.
The National Collegiate Athletic Association Board of Governors said it may ban future championships — including college baseball and softball regionals — in Mississippi and other states that have passed legislation barring transgender athletes from competing on teams that align with their gender identity.
The NCAA decision resembles one they made in June 2020, when Mississippi lawmakers were considering whether to change the state flag, the last in the nation containing the Confederate battle emblem. Many believe that decision from the NCAA — a more definitive ruling than the one made this week — helped spur lawmakers to change the flag.
“Inclusion and fairness can coexist for all student-athletes, including transgender athletes, at all levels of sport,” the NCAA board said in a statement on Monday. “Our clear expectation as the Association’s top governing body is that all student-athletes will be treated with dignity and respect. We are committed to ensuring that NCAA championships are open for all who earn the right to compete in them.”
In a rare public ceremony on March 11, Gov. Tate Reeves signed a bill that bans transgender girls and women at public schools and colleges from playing on sports teams that align with their gender identity. The bill is set to become law on July 1.
Neither Reeves nor any legislator that supported the bill could cite any example of a transgender athlete competing with their cisgender classmates in Mississippi.
Though Mississippi was the first to do so in 2021, it is far from the only state taking up the issue. Lawmakers in the neighboring states of Arkansas and Tennessee have passed similar bills this year. Last year, Idaho passed a similar bill. A federal judge kept that law from going into effect as hearings continue. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, more than 30 state legislatures are considering bills that would target transgender athletes.
In June 2020, the NCAA banned Mississippi from hosting tournaments until lawmakers changed the state flag. That economic pressure, put on lawmakers by many business leaders, played a considerable role in getting the legislature to adopt a new flag early this year.
Former Gov. Ronnie Musgrove used to say the most important item addressed each legislative session is the budget because it establishes the priorities of the state.
For decades, that priority in terms of where the most state funds are spent has been public education. While arguments can be made that Mississippi could be spending a modest amount more of existing funds on education than say on public safety or other entities, the real issue is not the share of state revenue spent on public education, but that Mississippi’s limited tax base does not cover all the needs of the state.
During the 2021 session, legislators found themselves in an enviable and somewhat unusual situation in that by Mississippi standards the state coffers were flush — well, relatively flush.
Based on that situation, legislators passed a state-support or general fund budget that totaled $6.56 billion or $249.6 (almost 4%) above the amount budgeted the previous year.
“The main highlight would be the budget …,” House Speaker Philip Gunn said when talking about the recently completed 2021 session. “Obviously, revenue continues to be good. This allows us to fund all state agencies. It actually has allowed us to restore the cuts made last year.”
Last year, in the midst of COVID-19 and fearing what the pandemic would mean for the state economy, legislators cut most state budgets. The overall cut was $125 million or almost 2%. But the impact on the state economy and especially on revenue collections has not been as negative as once feared.
While there have been recent downticks in the state economy in terms of job losses, most economist believe that the outlook for the coming year is bright. Revenue collections through February are 9.5% or $338 million above the amount collected through the same period last year.
Gunn cited “good conservative, budgeting practices” over time for what he described as the budget highlight achieved during the 2021 session.
Truth be known, legislators might have had a little help in reaching that budget highlight, and it came via government spending, not conservative policies.
Economists cite the multiple federal stimulus packages passed to address the pandemic for fueling the Mississippi economy and revenue collections. After all, the average Mississippian has received at least $3,200 in direct payments from the federal government. And thanks to enhanced federal unemployment payments, many Mississippi workers who lost their jobs during the pandemic most likely were making more money than when employed in the state with the second-lowest per capita income.
“We attribute much of this (economic) performance to the federal transfers,” economist Corey Miller of the University Research Center wrote back in September, even before the latest two rounds of stimulus were passed by Congress.
It should be noted that legislators did use a significant portion of that additional revenue to invest in that priority of education. According to figures compiled by the staff of the Legislative Budget Committee, funding for kindergarten through 12th grade education was increased almost $72 million or about 2.8%. When lottery revenue is added, the total additional funding for public education will be about $102 million.
In addition, funding for the eight public universities was increased $47.6 million, or 7%, and funding for the 15 community colleges was increased $16.7 million, or 7.9%.
Nearly every agency garnered additional funding when compared to the amount they received last year. Modest pay raises of about $1,000 a year were provided to teachers. Enough funds were appropriated to provide pay raises of 3% to most state employees and 1% for community college and public university faculty and staff. It should be pointed out not all state employees and university staff will receive those raises.
Importantly, the Legislature provided the funds to cover the increase in costs in the state health insurance plans to ensure the premiums paid by state employees and teachers would not go up. If the Legislature had not covered the increased costs, state employees and teachers would have had to, resulting in a reduction in their take home pay.
Another one of the big-ticket items in the state budget — Medicaid — was essentially funded at the same level as last year, about $900 million. The level funding was made possible, in large part, because the federal government, through the COVID-19 relief packages, is picking up more of the costs for the states’ Medicaid programs — another example where the work of Mississippi legislators was made easier by the largess of the federal government.
Despite all that, when the dust clears, Mississippi still will be near the bottom in funding of teacher, state employee, university faculty pay and in many other areas.
Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson has drawn criticism and national attention this week for comments made on WLOX-TV that the automatic voter registration provision of the federal For The People Act would lead to “woke” and “uninformed” college students voting.
“Think about all these woke college university students now who would automatically be registered to vote, whether they wanted to or not,” Watson said during an appearance on News This Week on the Coast television station. “Again, if they didn’t know to opt out, they would be automatically registered to vote. And then they receive this mail-in ballot that they didn’t even know was coming because they didn’t know they registered to vote. You have an uninformed citizen who may not be prepared and ready to vote, automatically it’s forced on them. Hey, go and make a choice and our country’s going to pay for those choices.”
The bill Watson decried during the interview was passed by the House mostly along party lines last month and now faces unified Republican opposition in the Senate. If passed, the bill would represent the largest expansion of federal election rules in decades.
The passing of the bill represents the largest effort by Democrats to push back against Republican-controlled state legislatures across the country pushing legislation that restricts ballot access. The moves at the state level have been criticized by Democrats as blatant power grabs by Republicans using false claims of rampant election fraud in the 2020 presidential election as cover.
If the bill were to become law, states would be required to automatically register eligible voters. These potential voters would not be forced to cast a ballot, as Watson stated. Among other sweeping changes to how elections are conducted, the bill would also expand early voting for federal elections and make it harder to purge people from voter rolls.
Watson supported a bill proposed during the 2021 Legislative Session that would have started the process of purging a voter from Mississippi voter rolls after they failed to cast a ballot for two consecutive election cycles. The legislation passed in the Senate on a party-line vote in February, but was later killed by the House Elections Committee.
During the WLOX interview, Watson joined the chorus of Republican elected officials in characterizing the For The People Act as an unprecedented overreach of the federal government into how states manage their elections. He also acknowledged it as an existential threat to his party, saying “I don’t know if a Republican could win another national election” if the bill were to pass.
Watson’s decrying of certain eligible populations casting a ballot is reminiscent of a comment made by Cindy Hyde-Smith after a campaign event in 2018 where she supported making voting “a little more difficult” for certain “liberal folks.”
“And then they remind me that there’s a lot of liberal folks in those other schools who that maybe we don’t want to vote,” Hyde-Smith said to supporters. “Maybe we want to make it just a little more difficult. So I think that’s a great idea.”
Watson’s comment has been criticized by voting rights groups and activists.
“We should be empowering students who take an interest in learning about our political processes and are putting in the effort to make it better and more equitable for everyone,” the civic engagement organization Mississippi Votes said in a statement. “It does all Mississippians a disservice to discount the intelligence of our young people.”
The Mississippi Hospital Association’s board of governors on Friday voted to join in the drive to put Medicaid expansion — Initiative 76 — before voters in 2022.
“We will start by May 1 collecting signatures,” said MHA president Tim Ford.
Mississippi is one of 12 states that has refused to expand Medicaid via the Affordable Care Act, with the state’s GOP political leadership rejecting at least $1 billion a year in federal funds that would provide health coverage for hundreds of thousands of working poor people in the poorest state in the country. Health advocates and hospitals have lobbied lawmakers and governors for years to no avail and now will push to let voters decide.
Moore and others created the Healthcare for Mississippi nonprofit and recently filed the initial paperwork to try to put the issue before voters. Now, those involved would have to collect about 106,000 signatures of registered voters to put the issue on the 2022 midterm ballot in Mississippi.
MHA represents 115 facilities, including about 100 acute-care hospitals in Mississippi that employ nearly 60,000 people. Moore said he expects numerous other groups that have championed Medicaid expansion to sign on and help with the initiative drive.
“I’ll be on the phone starting Monday morning,” Moore said. “It’s going to take a lot of folks — from the business community to all the health care community — a lot of effort.”
Many health advocates have pushed for Mississippi to expand Medicaid under the federal Affordable Care Act and draw down billions in federal dollars to a state already heavily reliant on federal spending. The COVID-19 pandemic, in particular, has highlighted health care disparities in the state, which is home to one of the highest percentages of uninsured residents in the nation. Congress further incentivized Mississippi to expand Medicaid in its latest stimulus package, upping the federal match to the 12 states that have resisted expansion.
But state GOP leaders, starting with former Gov. Phil Bryant, have opposed the move, saying they don’t want to help expand “Obamacare” and that they don’t trust the federal government to keep footing the bill, eventually leaving state taxpayers on the hook.
Meanwhile, hospitals — especially smaller rural ones — say they are awash in red ink from providing millions of dollars of care each year to uninsured and unhealthy people in Mississippi. The cost of uncompensated care for Mississippi hospitals was about $600 million in 2019. Some hospitals in recent years have gone under, while others teeter on the brink of bankruptcy.
Gov. Tate Reeves this week reiterated his opposition to Medicaid expansion upon news of the ballot initiative push. He noted the initiative “is a long way from getting on the ballot, much less approved.”
Mississippi voters last election took matters in hand on another long-running health care issue, overwhelmingly approving a medical marijuana program by enshrining it in the state constitution.
