Sitting on my desk is a pile of articles and documents portraying the Mississippi Forensics Laboratory as grossly underfunded, overwhelmed and behind.
Mississippi Today, WAPT, WLBT and the Clarion-Ledger have all done recent exposes on the state crime lab and its woes.
The Mississippi Forensics Laboratory (the state crime lab) is part of the Mississippi Department of Public Safety. Its backlog is over 1,000 autopsies dating back over 10 years. The lab’s compensation levels are about half compared to neighboring states. It’s a mess. It has been a mess for a long time. None of our state leaders seems to be taking this seriously.
We can add all the judges and police and prosecutors we want to help solve the Jackson crime disaster but without a functioning crime, lab murder cases will stall and fall through the cracks.
I am a free market, less government guy, but keeping law and order is a necessary function of government. When cutting taxes starts to interfere with locking up murderers, something is wrong.
The underfunding of our criminal justice system isn’t limited to the state crime lab. Our prisons are woefully underfunded, making it difficult to recruit competent guards. Without competent guards, the gangs start running the prisons, giving gangs a powerful base from which to grow and prosper. Not good. Crime increases.
This is classical penny wise, pound foolish behavior. We have state leaders so interested in cutting taxes and furthering their careers that they forget their main responsibility — properly running our government.
About a third of our prisoners are mentally ill and need special medical attention. This too is not funded, creating a living hell for those individuals cursed by mental illness.
The best way to lower crime is to rehabilitate prisoners. Confined prisoners are a captive audience. It’s a perfect chance to turn their lives around, give them spiritual guidance, educate them in life skills and train them to have employable skills. But we don’t. Our rehabilitation programs are sadly lacking.
One bright star is the ongoing construction of chapels and creation of spiritual rehabilitation programs being implemented by the new head of Mississippi Department of Corrections Burl Cain. This is real progress. But without money, the pace of improvement is far too slow.
If our state leaders don’t act now and start properly funding our criminal justice system, the feds will force them to do it. That route will be far more expensive.
The 2023 state budget for corrections is $362 million. In neighboring state Alabama, the federal courts ordered the legislature to spend $2 billion dollars reforming their prison system.
Mississippi dodged that bullet several years ago, winning its federal lawsuit thanks to a federal judge sympathetic to the state. But future federal legal action is already in the works.
With state leadership, we could begin increasing our funding by a reasonable amount, make significant improvements and avoid a federal takeover that would cost vastly more money.
This is reminiscent of the Jackson water crisis. City officials refused to spend the money to maintain the water plant leading to its failure and no clean water. The feds intervened and took over the city’s water department. Fortunately, in that case, the federal takeover came with an $800 million gift of federal funding. It’s unlikely a federal takeover in our prisons will be so fortunate.
For those quick to criticize the Lumumba administration for its mismanagement, take note that our Republican state officials are doing exactly the same thing by failing to properly fund our state crime lab and our prisons. The sword of bureaucratic incompetence cuts both ways.
As I have argued above, there are purely practical and financial reasons to properly fund our state crime lab and prisons. It will lower crime, further economic development and move our state forward. It will save us from a far more expensive federal takeover.
But there is a moral reason as well. As the most Christian state in the nation, indeed, one of the most Christian places in the entire world, we should be ashamed of ourselves for letting the helpless mentally ill waste away and be abused in criminal facilities without proper medical supervision.
During the federal trial between the U.S. Department of Justice and the Mississippi Department of Corrections, I sat through hours and hours of testimony. Believe me, it was not time I had to spend. The huge challenges of the local news industry is a whole other subject.
But I took the time because I knew I would never get another chance to hear these prisoners, guards, prison manager, etc. testify under oath what was really going on behind the prison walls. I was shocked and appalled. It was far worse than I had ever imagined.
I’ll never forget leaving one day of the trial and walking down the hall of our beautiful federal court building. Big spots of blood were on the floor, leaving a trail from the courtroom to the exit door a hundred yard away.
I often wondered how that trail of blood came to be. Ultimately, I concluded that it was a cry for help by one of the mentally ill prisoners who testified. They must have cut themselves intentionally, leaving a sign for others to see the desperation of their hopeless situation. I will never forget that.
Jesus was clear on this issue in Matthew 25:31.
“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.
“Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’”
