Strickland noted that it costs the state roughly $43 per day to lock people in Mississippi facilities, and that none of the inmates in Stone County were looking forward to being moved. “They treat them rough up there,” he said of the state prisons.
Jeffrey Schwartz, a consultant who has advised jails and prisons, said Mississippi’s battle is a strange turn of events. “It is a state that has had lots of problems within corrections. This is quite a new twist,” he said. “In the great overcrowding days, there were battles between the counties and the state over whether the state had to take inmates from the counties, and the states said we’re not taking any more, and the sheriffs said, well you have to.” A sheriff, Schwartz recalled, once dropped inmates off at a state prison, handcuffed them to the fence, and drove off.
But local officials are investigating whether the state inmates are instead winding up in private prisons. “According to their reports, they have some private prisons that they are actually paying up to $80 a day. I think it’s political favors going around, the reason they’re doing that, but that’s neither here nor there,” Strickland said.
Mississippi contracts with a Utah company called Management and Training Corp. to house some of its prisoners. Stone County Supervisor Dale Bond questioned why the state would send inmates to the private prison at more than double the cost of transferring them to a county facility. “Some of these private prisons have got 1,000 inmates and they’re getting that large per diem,” he lamented. Management and Training Corp. wasn’t immediately able to comment.
“By the end of May, we’ll be well over a quarter-million in the red on that facility,” said Bond of Stone County’s facility. “If they do not send us our inmates back, we can’t make it.”
Bond said the county supervisors have asked for permission to bring prisoners from out of state to cover the shortfall, but he worried red tape will slow the flow of human traffic. “I don’t know how reliable that is. By the time we get that approved, we’re gonna be broke,” he said.
At a recent meeting with state officials, Bond said, the state Corrections Department offered to pay off one sheriff’s bond and close the county facility, but he turned down the offer. “No, we don’t want that, we want the jobs,” the sheriff said.
For Strickland, something has to give. “In a way, we were sort of devastated. That revenue needs to be made up,” he said.
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