By John Howell
Publisher
Reports from the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman indicate that Department of Corrections Commissioner Marshall Fisher’s efforts to reign in the bribery-pocked administration of his predecessor may have unintended consequences.
Prison Legal News (PLN), a publication of the non-profit Human Rights Defense Center, reports that 18 prisoners died in the six months between Nov., 2015 and May. Five deaths were from medical causes, one from suicide and one from homicide, PLN states. Causes of death for the 11 other inmates remain undermined, pending reports from the state medical examiner.
Six of the prisoners who died were inmates in Unit 29 where prison officials under Fisher’s administration have conducted extensive lockdowns — denying all prisoners their usual privileges as punishment for violations by a few.
Fisher has cited a legislative mandate to operate the Department within its budget and to root out corruption as rationale for his actions, some of which have proved abrasive to Mississippi supervisors and private interests whose oxen have felt the gore.
Against this backdrop, many inmates have come to feel like they are pawns in a power struggle that does not consider their interests and needs. Mississippi has never held inmate interests high on its list of concerns, but there comes a breaking point or, more accurately, a boiling point when temperatures and humidity soar with the summer.
MDOC is steadily reducing its inmate population with early releases and probations and that may help, but there are many who need not or cannot be released. It stretches us to accept we must provide a basic level of decency and security to inmates who never demonstrated that toward their victims, but society is worse off when it does not.
We favor swift arrest and prosecution for crimes and appropriate punishment for the guilty. But once that has been accomplished we have assumed, like it or not, the responsibility to provide for the basic rights and needs of them as prisoners. When we don’t meet that responsibility, the chancre that grows inside those fences cannot be held within them.