Hinds County Youth Court Judge Carlyn Hicks gives awards, says court has made progress in two years.
Ellen Reddy, who lives and works in Holmes County, Miss., is a long-time advocate for the rights of young people. She is also a school-discipline expert who, in 2003, helped start the the Mississippi Coalition for the Prevention of Schoolhouse to Jailhouse to identify and end the systemic factors contributing to the “pipeline” between schools and prisons.
John Knight, Terun Moore and Benny Ivey have all experienced life in prison and now mentor criminal-justice-system-involved young people as credible messengers with the Strong Arms of JXN, which launched in 2018. The Strong Arms of JXN gathers formerly incarcerated individuals devoted to showing young people alternate paths from the ones they at one point chose and have since turned away from.
Children at the Henley-Young Juvenile Justice Center were abused, a lawsuit filed in 2011 alleged, which led to a federal consent decree forcing Hinds County to make changes to its operations. Magistrate Judge F. Keith Ball is holding a hearing in his chambers today concerning the settlement that Southern Poverty Law Center and Disability Rights Mississippi reached with the county. The Zoom hearing, which is closed to the public, is part of an ongoing federal court supervision of the settlement agreement’s implementation.
Pritchett is one of 370 Mississippi inmates serving virtual life sentences, meaning they are on the inside for 50 years or more. Of those “virtual lifers,” 22 were juveniles like him when they committed the crimes that led to their incarceration, as a recently released national report “No End in Sight: America’s Enduring Reliance on Life in Prison” by The Sentencing Project revealed. In addition, Mississippi has 2,041 incarcerated people serving life sentences, with 1,600 of them serving life with parole, Mississippi Department of Corrections data show.
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