"It's a futile system that penalizes the poorest residents of the poorest state in the country"

[Tactical Peek]

Last edited Sun Jan 12, 2020, 07:39 PM - Edit history (1)

Mississippi Today https://mississippitoday.org/

Working Toward Freedom

To pay off fines and other debts, inmates in Mississippi’s little-known restitution centers must work grueling low-wage jobs, pay rent and endure strip searches.

In this world between prison and freedom, they often don’t know when they’ll get to go home.

By Anna Wolfe and Michelle Liu | January 9, 2020
Data analysis by Andrew Calderón, The Marshall Project

JACKSON, Miss. – During her shifts at a Church’s Chicken, Annita Husband looked like the other employees. She wore the same blue and red polo shirt, greeted the same customers, and slung the same fried chicken and biscuits.

But after clocking out, Husband, a mother in her 40s, had to wait for a white van with barred windows and the seal of the Mississippi Department of Corrections on its sides. It delivered her to the Flowood Restitution Center, a motel converted into a jail surrounded by razor wire, nestled among truck stops and an outlet mall. Here, Husband slept in a room with seven other women, sharing a mirror to get ready in the mornings, enduring strip searches for contraband at night.

A judge sentenced Husband to the restitution center in 2015 to pay off almost $13,000 she owed from an embezzlement conviction in 2009. The corrections department would not release her until she earned enough money at her $7.25-an-hour part-time job to clear her debts and cover $11 a day for “room and board” at Flowood.

“If I wasn’t at work, I was in prison,” Husband said.

The corrections department took her paychecks, she said, giving her back just $10 a week — all in quarters — so she could buy things like soap and deodorant.

The state of Mississippi had locked Husband into a modern-day debtors prison. She had other plans.

Mississippi appears to be the only state where judges lock people up for an indefinite time while they work to earn money to pay off court-ordered debts. While there is no comprehensive data, legal experts who study fines, fees and restitution say Mississippi is unusual at the very least.

“We don’t know of any other states that have a program quite like Mississippi’s,” said Sharon Brett, a senior staff attorney with Harvard’s Criminal Justice Policy Program.

A handful of states experimented with restitution programs starting in the 1970s, but abandoned them as expensive and ineffective.

Not Mississippi. Judges have sentenced hundreds of people a year to four restitution centers around the state, almost always ordering them to stay until they pay off court fees, fines and restitution to victims, according to four years of government records analyzed by Mississippi Today and The Marshall Project.

People sent to the centers had been sentenced for felonies but didn’t commit violent crimes, according to the program rules. When we tracked down the cases of more than 200 people confined there on Jan. 1, 2019, we found that most originally got suspended sentences, meaning they did not have to go to prison.

They didn’t usually owe a lot of money. Half the people living in the centers had debts of less than $3,515. One owed just $656.50. Though in arrears on fines and court fees, many didn’t need to pay restitution at all — at least 20 percent of them were convicted of drug possession.

But people spent an average of nearly four months — and up to five years — at the centers, working for private employers to earn enough to satisfy the courts. Meanwhile their costs continued to balloon, since they had to pay for room and board, transportation to their jobs, and medical care.

They didn’t get paid much. Between 2016 and 2018, workers at the centers made an average of $6.76 an hour in take home pay, according to our analysis of state data.

It’s a futile system that penalizes the poorest residents of the poorest state in the country, said Cliff Johnson, director of the MacArthur Justice Center at the University of Mississippi.

“Debtors prisons are an effective way of collecting money — as is kidnapping,” he said. “But there are constitutional, public policy and moral barriers to such a regime.”

(continued . . . )
https://mississippitoday.org/2020/01/09/restitution/

More in this excellent series ...
https://mississippitoday.org/restitution-series/

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https://twitter.com/MSTODAYnews

This investigation was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, the USA TODAY-Network, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger and the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting. The Marshall Project is a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system; sign up for The Marshall Project’s newsletters, or follow them on Facebook or Twitter.

(published under Creative Commons license)

[pwb]

1. Change is slow in the south.

Real slow in this regard. Sounds like a bunch of really mean people doing this.

[Wounded Bear]

2. Slavery, plain and simple...nt

[Baltimike]

3. Are there any white males who owe tens of thousands due to crime?

Just curious...

[lunatica]

4. Did you mean to say Feudal system?

[whathehell]

5. My question as well..

I think.he.meant "feudal".
There seems to be an emerging spelling crisis in this country.

[lunatica]

7. It's the spell check on the iPhones and iPads

It’s a real battle sometimes to write with them. There is no rhyme or reason to what they choose. They automatically change words and sometimes when you go back to revise what you wrote the substitutions don’t make any sense and what is written has very little connection with what you meant to write. Sometimes it’s so bad you can’t even remember what you wrote.

The smaller screens on the iPhones makes it hard to catch the substitutions too, so many aren’t caught.

[Evolve Dammit]

8. My first thought exactly.

[Newest Reality]

6. Regardless...

Regardless of where it is or who is imposing it, indentured servitude is a complete disgrace and an affront to a country that has a Constitution like ours.

Not only that, but it is a frightening model that should alarm and concern the rest of us. This needs to be addressed and eliminated pronto. It is like floating a Neo-Feudal solution even if we are seeing it in a state that seems to strive to be backwards and slave-oriented as it exploits its citizens.

Alabama deserves all the boycotts they can get for insulting our Constitution in such a bold manner. This is totally unacceptable.

[Johnny2X2X]

9. Sick

This is indentured servitude and what a Republicans would like to install across the country for the bottom half.