Broken promises and lost funding: how Mississippi prison reform failed
Source: Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting/ProPublica
Broken promises and lost funding: how Mississippi prison reform failed
It was a model on which the Trump administration based its criminal justice reform efforts. But it isn’t working
By Jerry Mitchell, Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting
Thu 9 May 2019 11.00 BST
Last November, as he rallied support for federal prison reform, Donald Trump visited Gulfport, Mississippi, touting the legislation and what Mississippi had accomplished.
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The Mississippi law promised to send offenders to drug courts for treatment rather than to prison; provide ID cards to all offenders leaving prison to help them secure housing and jobs; offer training for offenders eligible for parole; and keep offenders guilty of technical probation violations from returning to prison.
But in each case, those efforts have faltered.
When the state governor, Phil Bryant, a Republican, signed house bill 585 into law in 2014, the measure drew widespread praise from conservatives and liberals alike because it promised to reduce the prison population, save millions and reinvest some of the money into programs for offenders.
Instead, all of those savings have gone back into the state’s coffers, helping to pay for huge corporate tax cuts at a time the state was struggling to meet revenue estimates.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/09/mississippi-prison-reform-failed-first-step-act