More Mississippi children could face prison time under proposed legislation that state law enforcement officials, including Attorney General Lynn Fitch, say is aimed at quashing statewide gang violence.

Senate Bill 2710 and House Bill 1165 would lead to harsher punishment for an unknown number of children in the state by creating new avenues for prosecutors to charge minors as adults.

Under current state law, most minors accused of crimes in Mississippi are placed into the youth court system where the primary goal is rehabilitation, not punishment. 

Only when children commit felonies that carry a life sentence or execution, or felonies involving the use of a deadly weapon, do they end up in circuit court, where they face the same punishment as adults.

The proposed legislation would create a new carveout so that a child who possesses a gun while committing or attempting to commit a violent felony would also be charged as an adult – even if the child did not brandish the weapon during the crime.

The Senate bill would go further, punishing children as adults for committing any felony – even nonviolent offenses – while possessing a firearm that is stolen. It would also add bringing a gun to school among the crimes for which children could be imprisoned.

These provisions are particularly worrisome to criminal justice advocates, who note that children in Mississippi grow up in a state with one of the highest rates of gun ownership in the country. 

“You’re going to catch a lot more kids in the net,” said Andre de Gruy, the state public defender. “These aren’t high-risk kids with serious problems and they would be better served in youth court.” 

Once a child has been convicted in circuit court as an adult, they can never be tried in youth court again. For children 15 years or older, de Gruy added that there will be no way for circuit court judges to move their cases back to youth court if the bill is passed, due to existing state law. He said the difference in courts is not a legal quirk – it is a matter of facing a few months in a juvenile detention center versus years in Parchman. 

Proponents of the legislation – including the Mississippi Prosecutor’s Association and the Mississippi Sheriff’s Association – say that gang members target youth to commit crimes on their behalf, knowing children will receive more lenient punishment than adults. 

But so far, they have not offered data to support that assessment. The attorney general’s office did not respond to questions from Mississippi Today by publication time.

“There are more than 200 gangs in Mississippi, and they recruit minors to do a lot of their dirty work, knowing that punishment is often disproportionate to the severity of the crime,” Fitch said in the press release. “We are taking on this problem by making the penalty fit the crime, both making juvenile recruitment less attractive to gangs and getting criminals off the streets.” 

The bills would also make it a crime to shoot into a group of people, conduct that current state criminal code does not directly address, and create harsher sentences for adults who give firearms to children. Each bill passed out of their respective chambers last week with no floor debate. 

The Republican representatives who authored the House legislation, Jansen Owen from Poplarville and Dana McLean from Columbus, did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication. 

Sen. Joey Fillingane, a Republican from Sumrall who authored the Senate legislation, told Mississippi Today that mayors across the state want to see the Legislature take action after shootings during football games claimed the lives of at least nine Mississippians last year. 

“If the current situation isn’t working, if we’re having a proliferation of youth crimes using deadly weapons, then we’ve got to try something different and see if we can get a different result,” he said. 

But de Gruy and other advocates argue this bill represents more of the same: More incarcerated people in a state with one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. 

“To the claim that youth crime is on the rise and it’s being driven by gangs, there is no evidence of that,” he said. “I don’t care how many times they say it, that doesn’t make it true.”

Nationally, police are arresting youth for violent crime far less than they did three decades ago, according to FBI data. But in Mississippi, creating a statewide assessment of the same trend is difficult, as many police departments do not report crime numbers to the FBI. 

In the state youth courts, weapons offenses consistently account for a fraction of delinquency cases. Annual reports from the Mississippi Department of Human Services, which oversees services and programs for delinquent juveniles, show that youth weapons offenses recently rose, from 479 in 2019 to a high of 846 in 2023. Weapons offenses fell in 2024 to 780.

De Gruy noted this increase occurred during an overall spike in crime corresponding with the coronavirus pandemic.

As for the shootings at football games cited by Fillingane, de Gruy noted that most of the 19 people arrested during a particularly deadly October weekend were adults. Law enforcement agencies have not released the names and ages of all suspects, but a review of news reports show that of the 13 people whose ages were confirmed, only one was a minor. 

In Heidelberg, the minor was arrested along with six others who were 18 or 19 years old and whose cases would not be tried in youth court. It is not known if they had a history in youth court.

“Youth court judges for right or for wrong look at the youth as somebody who could be saved,” Sen. Brice Wiggins, R-Pascagoula, a former youth court prosecutor, said during a Senate committee hearing last month. “When you get into the adult system, the bottom line is you’re pretty much done and you’re not saved.” 

Wiggins has introduced legislation to bring more transparency to youth courts, which are secret in Mississippi — another fact that prosecutors bemoaned at the hearing. 

“These youth that are committing these violent crimes have no visibility,” said Gregory Austin, the deputy director of the attorney general’s policy division. “They’re getting before the circuit court for the first time with nobody knowing their records because the youth court records are sealed.”

Prosecutors’ surprise can quickly turn into frustration upon learning they had unsuccessfully tried to persuade a youth court judge to transfer a juvenile’s case to circuit court. 

“They’re causing all this bedlam and mayhem and all this other stuff,” said Bryan Buckley, the president of the Mississippi Prosecutors Association, but youth court judges are “like, ‘No, we’re going to try to work with them some more,’ and it happens a few months later.”

If children face harsher punishment, Fillingane told Mississippi Today he envisions them turning on gang leaders or deciding not to follow orders. 

“I think that’s the thought and the hope,” he said. 

But researchers are mixed at best about whether more prison time can deter violent crime, with widely accepted studies finding that lengthy sentences are especially ineffective if the targeted population doesn’t understand the potential punishment of a particular crime. That is especially likely to be the case with youth, whose decision-making faculties are still developing. 

Fillingane said he was aware of this research. 

“I think there are also probably studies out there that argue the other way,” he said. “I think the bottom line is the public is tired of youth offenders committing particularly violent crimes especially with firearms.” 

After speaking with Mississippi Today, Fillingane asked the attorney general’s office and the prosecutors’ association to provide data on youth crime. 

“The perception around the state at least seems to be that these folks are not getting the punishment that they ought to get, and we’re just slapping wrists and saying, ‘oh well, because they’re only 15 or 16, that that’s all we can do, we really can’t do anything else with these folks’ and hope for the best,” the senator said. “That mentality seems to be out there and the citizenry is just not happy about it all.”