The Reforms of Mississippi’s Most Notorious Prison – Coming to a Jail Near You

In the August issue of Governing Magazine, John Bunton (author of the excellent, LA Noir) has written a highly intriguing—and hope producing—article about how, as Bunton put it “…America’s reddest state—and Mississippi’s most notorious prison—became a model of reform.”

(Good journalism comes from interesting places these days.)

The reform was triggered by a tough-minded and passionately determined ACLU lawyer named Margaret Winter, and brought into being by an unusually courageous head of the Mississippi Department of Corrections, a guy named Christopher Epps.

But here’s the kicker for those of us in LA. After the success of the unlikely and politically risky reform process in Mississippi, Margaret Winter told Buntin she is next setting her sites on the Los Angeles County Jail System.

I’ve spoken to Winter in the past about conditions in LA’s Men’s Central Jail in particular and I know her to be extremely well-informed—and quite dangerous to bureaucrats and the status quo when riled.

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Okay, now here are some clips from Buntin’s article. The whole thing is a fast read and a good one, so I recommend reading it all.

In January 2002, Margaret Winter, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) National Prison Project, received a letter from Willie Russell, an inmate on Mississippi’s death row.

“I am on a hunger strike to the death,” the letter began. In highly idiosyncratic language, the letter then described conditions at the facility where death row was housed, Unit 32.

Unit 32 was one of seven prisons located on Mississippi’s fabled penal institution, Parchman Farm. As described by Russell, it was also a lot like hell. Inmates were locked in permanent solitary confinement. In the summer, the cells were ovens, with no fans or air circulation. Russell’s was even worse: He was in a special “punishment” cell with a solid, unvented Plexiglas door. The cells were also sewers, thanks to a design flaw in cellblock toilets that often flushed excrement from one cell into the next. Prisoners were allowed outside — to pace or sit alone in metal cages — just two or three times a week. Inside was a perpetual dusk: One always-on light fixture provided inadequate light for reading but enough light to make it hard to sleep.

Then there were the bugs. The only way to avoid being eaten alive, Russell wrote, was to wrap himself in clothes like a mummy, which made the brutal Delta heat even more unbearable. Worst of all, though, was the noise. Psychotic inmates screamed through the night. Conditions were so bad, Russell continued, that some dozen-odd other inmates — about one-quarter of Mississippi’s death row population — had also joined the hunger strike.

“I had heard this sort of thing before,” Winter says, “but I was gripped by the power of this letter. It was like something out of the Book of Genesis. It had a biblical grandeur to it. And I believed it.”

[LARGE SNIP]

…..And so the scene was set for a classic — and wholly predictable-showdown, one pitting an idealistic civil liberties organization against a beleaguered corrections system.

Except that in the case of Mississippi, that’s not what happened. Instead, in 2006, Sparkman’s boss, MDOC Commissioner Christopher Epps, decided to do something very different: He invited the ACLU in. Shortly thereafter, Epps and Sparkman began a series of deeply counterintuitive reforms that risked their careers.

Epps didn’t just take on Parchman Farm. He also challenged Mississippi’s commitment to a punitive penal code that had doubled the state’s inmate population and tripled its corrections budget in 10 years time….

PERSONAL NOTE TO MR. CHRISTOPHER EPPS: How do you feel about a move to California? Sure, the state’s broke and LA has a teensy, weensy traffic problem. But we’re a fun group, and—all in all—we’ve got a great city (and state). (Honestly, the taco trucks alone are worth the move.) So com’on down. We….um…need you.