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Beverly Pool worries about her brother, Marvin Pernell, who was in the Oktibbeha County jail in Starkville, Miss., from July 2021 until January 2023 and is now at the Mississippi State Hospital, a state-funded psychiatric hospital in Whitfield, Miss. Now 48, Pernell is a military veteran who served in the U.S. Marines from 1994 to 1998.
Hinds County Board of Supervisors President and District 4 Supervisor Vern Gavin said on Jan. 11, 2023, that the suspension of the receivership order for the Hinds County Detention Center in Raymond, Miss., will give the sheriff “the opportunity to implement a plan of action.”
Mississippi Free Press Editor & CEO Donna Ladd announces the promotion of Ashton Pittman to news editor and Kayode Crown to senior reporter.
Disability Rights Mississippi agreed that the court could terminate the consent decree in the running of the Henley-Young-Patton Juvenile Detention Center in Hinds County after 10 years.
Federal Judge Carlton Reeves is placing control of the Hinds County Detention Center in Raymond under a yet-to-be-determined receiver to oversee the beleaguered and dangerous facility. Reeves said he had considered detaining county officials due to the dangerous conditions at the jail—and that a new jail would not solve deep-seated problems with management and staffing.
The Mississippi Free Press was the big winner at the 2022 Society for Professional Journalists’ Diamond Awards in Little Rock, Ark, on June 30, 2022. Sixteen members of the MFP team took 15 honors total, eight of them first-place awards for journalism published in 2021.
U.S. Southern District of Mississippi Judge Carlton Reeves wrote his second contempt order against Hinds County leadership on the A-Pod of the 596-bed facility, which opened in 1994.
The Hinds County Detention Center in Raymond, Miss., had been under a consent decree since 2016. On April 13, 2022, U.S. Southern Mississippi District Judge Carlton Reeves modified it, leaving and adding strong demands while removing others.
State senators from Jackson are asking the Mississippi Legislature for millions of dollars to help fund additional police and misdemeanor jail beds to keep those charged with low-level crimes who cannot afford bail locked up as a strategy to prevent violence as it rises in the capital city, they say. They are not asking for funds to support earlier interventions that a BOTEC Analysis study of Jackson crime recommended in 2016—which the Legislature authorized for $500,000 in taxpayer dollars. Kayode Crown reports.
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