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| Mississippi: Inmate population triples |
| By The Sun Herald |
| Published: 09/03/2001 |
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The number of prisoners in Mississippi climbed by more than 200 percent in the last decade, making the inmate population roughly the size of Pascagoula, the state's 10th-largest city. U.S. Census Bureau data released recently shows that nearly 25,800 people are incarcerated in Mississippi. The steep increase in prisoners is the result of a get-tough-on-crime stance that dominated many of the annual sessions of the Mississippi Legislature in the early 1990s. Perhaps the most well known move by the Legislature was the 1995 'truth-in-sentencing' law, which required that felons serve at least 85 percent of their sentences. The law, which was softened earlier this year, meant that two-thirds of the people in jail in 2000 who were convicted of shoplifting, selling drugs or other non-violent crimes had to serve as much of their sentences as rapists or murderers. Before that law, felons could be considered for early release after serving just a quarter of their sentences, which didn't do much to deter crime, said Sen. Rob Smith, D-Richland. Since the law has been in place, crime is down in nearly every category, said Smith, chairman of the Senate Corrections Committee. However, prison populations grew rapidly and so did the cost to taxpayers. To cope, the state Department of Corrections was forced to expand. Since 1994, MDOC opened 10 regional correctional facilities, contracted with five private prisons and added capacity at two of its three state prisons, for a total of nearly 9,700 new beds throughout the system, said Ken Jones, department spokesman. As a result, the budget for the Department of Corrections tripled between 1992 and 2000, and the cost of housing a single inmate grew to roughly $15,700 per year. Because of that cost, legislators this year changed the law to allow first-time, non-violent offenders, convicted on or after the first of the year, to be considered for parole after serving just one-fourth of their sentences. Between 1,200 and 1,400 inmates will now be eligible each year for the early release program, Smith said. |
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