Court confirms federal takeover of a Mississippi jail but limits power over budget

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — An appeals court says a federal receiver can proceed with a takeover of a Mississippi jail where a judge found unconstitutional conditions and “a stunning array of assaults, as well as deaths.”

A panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Thursday that U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves acted properly in 2022 when he appointed a public safety consultant to act as a receiver for the Raymond Detention Center in Hinds County. The judges also wrote that “we find that some constitutional violations remain current and ongoing” at the jail outside Jackson.

The takeover has been blocked pending the appeal by Hinds County, which argued that a federally appointed consultant would be “utterly unaccountable” to voters and taxpayers.

However, the appellate judges told Reeves to reevaluate the scope of the consultant’s work and remove his budgeting power, ruling that the judge had given him “overly broad” authority to determine the annual budget for the jail, including for staff salaries and benefits, medical and mental health services and facility improvements.

Giving those financial decisions to the consultant would allow him “to ignore the budgetary constraints that the Hinds County Board of Supervisors has had to deal with” in managing the jail, they wrote.

Reeves put the jail into receivership in July 2022 after citing poor conditions, including deficiencies in supervision and staffing. Seven people died in 2021 while detained at the jail, he said.

At that point, federal and state judges had ordered receiv­er­ships or a similar trans­fer of control for pris­ons and jails only about eight times across the country, according to Hernandez Stroud, an attorney at the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law.

In October 2022, Reeves appointed Wendell M. France Sr., a public safety consultant, former correctional administrator and 27-year member of the Baltimore Police Department, to improve conditions at the jail. France was scheduled to assume operational control of the jail on Jan. 1, 2023.

When he ordered a receivership, Reeves wrote that cell doors did not lock. A lack of lighting in cells made life “miserable for the detainees who live there” and prevented guards from adequately watching detainees, he wrote. He also said that guards sometimes slept instead of monitoring the cameras in the control room.

Hinds County Sheriff Tyree Jones has said county officials are committed to fixing the jail’s problems, many of which stem from staffing shortages. In October 2023, Jones announced that one of the worst parts of the jail had been closed and 200 inmates had been transferred to a privately run prison in Tallahatchie County, nearly 150 miles (241 kilometers) to the north.