Hinds County Board of Supervisors President Robert Graham leaned over the wooden barrier dividing the courtroom from the sparse audience inside the federal courthouse in downtown Jackson.
“This is a waste of time,” Graham said of Tuesday’s hearing about the troubled Hinds County Detention Center in Raymond.
Technical difficulties with a projector had just led U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves to pause the proceedings. Reeves had been in the midst of unpacking a thorny dispute over the jail’s budget between his appointed receiver, Maryland-based public safety Wendell France Sr., and Hinds County.
France contended the county was providing him with too little information about the jail’s budget, impeding his efforts to improve unconstitutional conditions at the Raymond Detention Center, the county’s most troubled facility and the one under his direct control.
“My only recourse was to come to court and say we didn’t approve a budget,” France told the judge. “I’m not sure what else I’m supposed to do as the receiver.”
Through Nick Morisani, a private attorney hired to fight the federal consent decree, the county claimed it had, in fact, provided France with adequate information and resources.
But when the court finally got its projector working, Morisani presented Reeves with a spreadsheet showing France had received significantly less money than he requested for salaries and capital improvements.
The back-and-forth ultimately concluded with Reeves suggesting he would order the county to move detainees out of the Raymond Detention Center if it continues to obstruct France’s efforts to improve the unconstitutional conditions.
“I’m not sure that anybody needs to be in the RDC period right now,” Reeves said.
Morisani defended the county, asserting that France had $2 million left over from last year’s budget that he hadn’t spent. To this, France said he had overspent the jail’s budget, citing a line-item for professional services the county spent $3 million on last year despite originally allocating $150,000.
France said he did not know what caused the overspending. “Tell me what the money is for,” he said.
The path forward, Morisani said, could be clearer if the receiver would spend the money the county already gave him.
“Maybe cooler heads can prevail that way,” Morisani said.
“I don’t know if there are uncool heads around, Mr. Morisani,” Reeves responded.
A Hinds County Sheriff’s Office van passes by the entrance to the Hinds County Detention Facility in Raymond, Miss., Monday, Aug. 1, 2022. On Friday, July 29, U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves, placed the center into receivership after citing “severely deficient” conditions at the facility. Credit: AP Photo/Rogelio V. SolisReeves, the county, and Christopher Cheng, an attorney with the U.S Department of Justice, also haggled over how to interpret a 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals order limiting the receivership’s scope.
At one point, Morisani suggested the county would appeal if Reeves tried to direct its budget – an argument that drew a sharp response from the judge.
“Well, I know we stayed at the 5th Circuit for over a year, and conditions got far worse,” Reeves said. “We can go back down that path again if that’s where Hinds County is going to drag the court.”
The contentious hearing came more than a year after France finally assumed operational control of the Raymond Detention Center, a rare move that has occurred in a handful of jails and prisons around the country.
In that time, the jail has continued to be crowded and deadly.
“We should not get so tied up in the abstract budget issue that we miss the whole point,” Cheng said.
In April, three men charged in a shooting at a south Jackson apartment complex were attacked within 24 hours of each other. Two of the suspects were housed in Raymond and a third suspect was housed at the Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility in the Mississippi Delta.
Over the summer, an 18-year-old was stomped to death in the Raymond jail, just days after he was booked and arrested in connection to a killing at the same south Jackson apartment complex. A video of the beating circulated on social media.
The county also admitted to Reeves that it was going to miss yet another self-imposed deadline on its main solution to the problems at its Raymond jail: Finishing construction on a new detention center just south of downtown Jackson.
Reeves asked the county if it was going to hire enough people to staff the new facility. The county admitted it did not have a plan.
“It’s a national problem, but it seems like when it comes to Hinds County that it’s only a Hinds County problem,” John Hall, an attorney representing Sheriff Tyree Jones, said of staffing at jails and prisons.
In 2016, the U.S. Department of Justice sued the county alleging a pattern or practice of unconstitutional conditions in its detention facilities. The county and DOJ entered a consent decree with a list of changes to address jail conditions.
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