3 Mississippi state prisons put inmates in ‘hazardous’ conditions, violating their constitutional rights, DOJ report finds

The report marks the conclusion of a federal investigation into whether three state prisons in Mississippi failed to protect incarcerated individuals from violence and puts hundreds of individuals in “hazardous” restrictive housing units that are a “breeding grounds for suicide, self-inflicted injury, fires, and assaults.”

“Our investigation uncovered chronic, systemic deficiencies that create and perpetuate violent and unsafe environments for people incarcerated,” Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, said in announcing the report’s finding Wednesday.

The release comes amid increased scrutiny into whether state and federal prisons are failing to protect inmates. Earlier this month, the Justice Department’s inspector general released another blistering report that found chronic failures by the Bureau of Prisons contributed to the deaths of hundreds of federal prison inmates in federal custody.

As Wednesday’s findings were announced, the director of the Bureau of Prisons, Colette Peters, was testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the inspector general’s report. Peters was set to describe the federal prison system as an “agency is in crisis” that’s working to recruit and retain staff and implementing new policies to prevent inmate deaths, according to a copy of her prepared statement.

The Mississippi Department of Corrections runs the three state prisons that the Justice Department investigated: the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility, the South Mississippi Correctional Institution and Wilkinson County Correctional Facility. About 72,000 inmates are housed in the three facilities, according to the Justice Department.

All three were physically inspected as part of the investigation, the department said.

Each facility fails to protect inmates from violence, the department found, through inadequate supervision of incarcerated people, uncontrolled flow of contraband, deficient investigations of incidents that resulted in serious harm and failure to fix poor living conditions.

The facilities also suffer from a lack of staffing, Clarke said Wednesday, that have allowed “gangs to amass control and exert improper influence.

“The mismatch between the size of the incarcerated population and the number of security staff means that gangs dominate much of prison life, and contraband and violence, including sexual violence, proliferate,” the report reads. “Prison officials rely on ineffective and overly harsh restrictive housing practices for control.”

Additionally, the prisons’ use of restrictive housing units is mismanaged, Clarke said, allowing violence and self-harm to proliferate. Hundreds of individuals at Central Mississippi and Wilkinson are held in restrictive housing for “prolonged periods in appalling conditions,” the report says, calling the units “unsanitary, hazardous, and chaotic, with little supervision.”

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