A month into a federal trial years in the making—a multi-organization effort to hold officials accountable for the adequate care and treatment of Mississippi prisoners—there’s cause to worry that justice is getting short shrift.
The state officials responsible for conditions at East Mississippi Correctional Facility (EMCF) have to prove they’ve not been “deliberately indifferent” to conditions at the facility posing a serious risk to inmates. It should be an impossible task.
Filed with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), and Elizabeth Alexander, the prisoners’ 2013 complaint against Mississippi officials listed countless harms and detailed facially unacceptable conditions. Little has changed.
In their complaint … prisoners claimed the state prison commissioner and other officials had failed to hold the companies that run EMCF accountable for “grossly inhumane conditions” that “cost many prisoners their health, and their limbs, their eyesight, and even their lives.” The inmates’ original complaint told the stories of multiple prisoners who lit fires to obtain emergency medical attention. According to EMCF records, 1,217 inmates and 47 staff members were injured by fires in 2016. In addition to Beasley’s testimony, deputy warden Norris Hogans testified that as of February, inmates were still lighting fires outside their cell doors three times a week.
EMCF has ignored basic needs as well as medical conditions.
Prisoners also are underfed. According to the lawsuit, a correctional health expert notified the Mississippi Department of Corrections of this problem after reviewing prisoner records that showed a pattern of prisoners losing significant amounts of weight at the prison – some more than 20 or 30 pounds.
EMCF was supposed to be a more sophisticated facility.
The facility, operated by the Management and Training Corporation with health care provided by Health Assurance, LLC, is supposed to provide intensive treatment to the state’s seriously mentally ill prisoners, many of whom are locked down in long-term solitary confinement.
The combination of horrific conditions, understaffing, and severely mentally ill patients has been tragic.
On Jan. 31, 2016, T.H. stuck glass into his arm. Instead of sending him to the emergency room, a nurse merely cleaned the wound with soap and water. The following day, he broke a light bulb and inserted the shards into his arm. This time he required eight stitches.
Less than two weeks later, he cut himself with a blade hidden in his cell and then tried to hang himself. It was only later that month, after he reopened his arm wound with more glass, that mental health staff finally placed him on special psychiatric observation status.
Even on special status, T.H. did not receive a suicide risk assessment and was not treated or monitored adequately. He succeeded in killing himself on April 4, 2016.
To verify reports, two ACLU attorneys visited EMCF with two medical and mental health experts.
When I walked into one of the solitary confinement units, the entire place reeked of smoke from recent fires. I tried to speak to patients about their experiences, but I could barely hear them over the sounds of others moaning and screaming while they slammed their hands into metal cell doors.
Expert witnesses have put EMCF in context, to the detriment of the defendants.
Terry Kupers, a professor at the Wright Institute in Berkeley, California, and a nationally recognized specialist on solitary confinement ... testified that [the prison segregation unit’s] conditions were the worst he had ever seen. Jammed locks on cell doors left inmates free to roam and attack others, and broken lights went unfixed, leaving inmates in darkness for days. He found little record of mental health care examinations or therapy.
These conditions—particularly the failure to provide treatment for known medical needs—are flagrantly unconstitutional. Acting as a class, prisoners are alleging seven violations of the Eighth Amendment, which bans cruel and unusual punishment. They cite deficient health care, including mental health care; the overuse of isolation; the application of excessive force; failures of protection from harm; environmental conditions; and nutritional and food safety concerns.
The Mississippi Department of Corrections hasn’t really had much to say for itself. It won’t even admit that EMCF, which doesn’t even have a full-time psychiatrist on staff despite 1,000 prisoners with known mental health needs, is understaffed.
The Mississippi Department of Corrections, which pays MTC $26 per day for each minimum-security inmate, denies that the prison is understaffed.
MDC doesn’t seem to have made any effort to reform. Though one major change since the 2013 inception of the lawsuit could have ushered in a new era at the agency, it hasn’t.
In 2015, former state prison Commissioner Chris Epps pleaded guilty to a federal bribery charge after distributing more than $800 million in contracts to prison companies while receiving at least $1.4 million in bribes and kickbacks, mostly funneled through a former state legislator to whom companies had paid thousands of dollars in “consulting fees.” Those companies included Management and Training Corporation, a Utah-based firm that received a contract from Epps in 2012 to operate EMCF, and Health Assurance, a vendor that provided medical and mental health care at the facility between 2012 and 2015.
Unfortunately—and startlingly—the judge hearing the prisoners’ case has been not just unsympathetic but hostile, exhibiting a not-so-judicial temperament.
As evidence of the dire conditions at East Mississippi Correction Facility has accumulated during the monthlong trial, Judge Barbour has often appeared impatient with the inmates and their legal team. He has urged prisoners not to “lollygag around” before they are transported to court each morning and has admonished their lawyers for going into too much detail about the poor conditions. “Suppose I tore up your pad of questions. Could you question this witness? No,” the judge interrupted Eric Balaban, another ACLU lawyer, after listening to Balaban question an expert witness for several hours on March 22. “You’ve made your point. The mental health in this prison is not good.”
Should he rule against the prisoners, the judge’s disregard for the details could support an appeal. The question of whether officials were deliberately indifferent to unconstitutional conditions requires examining those conditions, after all. The lives of the 1,200 people imprisoned at EMCF are at stake.