Mississippi Inmates Lawsuit Describes Violence and Neglect in a Private Prison

[Hermit-The-Prog]

“This is a trip back to the old days of prison conditions.”

Madison Pauly Apr. 4, 2018

Last August, when Terry Beasley and other inmates noticed a man had died in his cell, they pounded on the window of their dayroom for at least 30 minutes. “Still wouldn’t nobody come on the zone,” Beasley recalled. Finally, an officer opened the door to their housing area, allowing an inmate to slip past and run to get help from the guard captain. Knowing how long it took to get help in an emergency “made me feel kind of scared,” Beasley said, “because I’m a diabetic, and you don’t know when my sugar might drop.”

Beasley described life inside the East Mississippi Correctional Facility during the first week of a federal trial over conditions at the for-profit state prison located 90 miles east of Jackson. EMCF is the state’s designated facility for inmates with psychiatric needs, and around 80 percent of the prison’s roughly 1,200 inmates have been diagnosed with a mental illness. Five years ago, prisoners there sued the Mississippi Department of Corrections, claiming that its top officials had failed to keep tabs on the prison’s corporate operators and allowed dangerous conditions to go unaddressed. The prisoners’ class-action lawsuit describes a crumbling facility with broken locks on cell doors, frequent assaults by inmates, and a critical shortage of guards and medical staff.

“What I’ve seen at East Mississippi Correction Facility, I have not seen for decades,” said Elizabeth Alexander, one of 13 attorneys representing the inmates. “This is a trip back to the old days of prison conditions.” The case went to trial in March after multiple failed attempts to settle outside of court, according to American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Carl Takei. It’s being heard by US District Judge William H. Barbour, Jr., who will decide whether the state has been “deliberately indifferent” to conditions at EMCF that posed serious risk of harm to inmates.

[...]

https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2018/04/mississippi-inmates-lawsuit-east-mississippi-mtc/

[For-profit prisons are wrong for many reasons.]

[notdarkyet]

1. Obama tried to get rid of them. They should not exist.

[heaven05]

2. racial breakdown

of prisoners in Mississippi prisons. I looked at the Federal Bureau of Prisons racial breakdown and whites outnumber blacks as prisoners, yet if I go on a state by state look at racial breakdown of prisoners I find AA are incarcerated three times more that whites and many times more than any other race IN ALL STATES. SOMETHING IS AMISS here and all who know how racist ameriKKKan culture is know AA are no more crime prone than any other race. Just one state Mississippi racial breakdown, whites 503 per 100,000, AA 1742 per 100,000, latino 611 per 100,000. AmeriKKKa is just toxic to all not white, asian or latino. Period.

[Skittles]

3. "for profit prison"

the very idea is sickening