In the early morning hours of Oct. 18, 2021, Michael Richardson was beaten, stomped on and dragged to his death by at least two others inside Hinds County’s Raymond Detention Center. His body remained undiscovered by guards for at least eight hours.
He was one of seven incarcerated people who died that year in the Hinds County jail, including two who died by suicide and one of an apparent drug overdose, according to court records.
These deaths were the latest in a yearslong saga of litigation over the county’s failure to protect people in the jail. The facility, located about 25 minutes west of downtown Jackson in Raymond, currently holds about 400 people, according to Sheriff Tyree Jones.
Though the county has had an agreement with the federal government since 2016, called a consent decree, complaints about the jail stretch back to its opening more than three decades ago. The day it opened in 1994, the electronic door locks malfunctioned. In 1996, a correctional officer testified that the new jail’s doors were “inadequate to provide security.” Nearly three decades later, U.S. District Court Judge Carlton W. Reeves wrote, cell doors did not lock.
A consent decree is a legal agreement enforced by a court in which both parties must settle on a plan to fix a problem, such as the jail’s unsafe conditions. A judge, in this case a federal judge, must sign off on these terms and ensure they are being met.
That 2016 consent decree stems from an investigation conducted by the Department of Justice that found the county repeatedly violated incarcerated people’s constitutional rights. The Justice Department cited rampant violence, poor staffing, malfunctioning locks and a steady flow of contraband into the jail. As part of the consent decree, court-appointed monitors have visited the jail and written 18 reports documenting the county’s progress in the facility, which held an average daily population of around 750 people at the time of the last report.
The county has since closed A-Pod, its most dangerous housing unit, and transferred some incarcerated people to Tallahatchie County, about two hours north.
Since taking over the case in 2018, Judge Reeves has twice declared that the county was not holding up its end of the bargain. He held the county in contempt of court for failing to correct the jail’s conditions, especially in A-Pod. The county asked the judge to reconsider the second order of contempt but was denied.
A road sign points toward the Raymond Detention Center in Hinds County, Miss.
Instead, Reeves made a rare decision that has happened only about a dozen times to U.S. prisons and jails. He ordered that the jail be placed under receivership.
A receivership takes control of the jail from the local government and puts it in the hands of a neutral party appointed by the court. In 2022, Reeves appointed Wendell M. France Sr., a public safety consultant and former Baltimore assistant jail warden, to be the jail’s receiver.
However, the county challenged the receiver’s far-reaching powers, a move that delayed France’s start date. On March 12, attorneys for the DOJ submitted proposed changes to the scope of the receiver’s duties. The parties have 21 days to file any recommended changes. The jail currently remains under the control of the county.
The Marshall Project – Jackson reached out to Hernandez D. Stroud, a senior fellow in the Justice Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, a nonpartisan think tank and advocacy group that focuses on systems of democracy and justice. Stroud has written extensively about prison and jail takeovers through receivership. Responses have been edited for length and clarity.
What is the purpose of a receivership and what is the receiver’s main job?
The purpose of receivership is to eliminate constitutional violations like extreme levels of violence, overcrowding, understaffing, that the government either has proven incapable of or unwilling to resolve. That’s the receiver’s main job. It is to bring a facility or system of jails and prisons back in line with the Constitution.
What changes would people inside the jail see, if any, when a receiver is in charge? Can a receiver order the county to spend more money on health care or food, for example?
The receiver’s job will be tailored to the constitutional violations. And so if health care was unconstitutional, then people could expect to see whatever reforms the receiver might think necessary in order to improve health care, to get it constitutionally adequate. That might mean more health care providers. It might mean better quality health care providers. It really depends on what the constitutional violations are.
In this case, the constitutional violations really do seem aimed at curbing extreme levels of violence as well as addressing staffing deficiencies. Here, people in the facility behind bars might see changes to how the staff looks, how many staff there are, the qualifications around staffing. There might be changes behind the scenes that people might not see, like incentives to get more and higher quality staff at the facility. So in terms of violence reduction, that’s really going to depend on what the causes of the violence are. It could be that the staffing is very much related to the violence. On Rikers [Island, the New York City prison], for example, there are cell doors that don’t have locks, which is hard to imagine how you run a jail or prison without locking cell doors, and so depending on what the causes of the violence are, that is what the receiver will be looking at to figure out the reforms needed to reduce violence.
The nature of these problems and what makes the receiver’s job so difficult is that there may be many contributing factors to the constitutional violations.
Litigation around the jail has been going on for more than a decade, and the jail has been under a consent decree since 2016. That seems like a long time for these conditions to persist. Is this typical for a jail that gets taken over by a receiver?
Yes. Receivership is an extreme remedy. It is a measure of last resort and judges generally are reluctant to impose receivership, simply because it is not the usual thing for a court, especially a federal court that’s unelected and unaccountable to people to essentially install itself as operator of correctional functions, primarily because courts don’t have the competence, really, to run these institutions.
But also courts aren’t accountable to people, and so when you think about taxpayer dollars and political accountability, judges really are uncomfortable putting themselves in the shoes of elected officials and their designees. At the same time, though, judges have an obligation to uphold the Constitution and so in this case, and in most cases like it, judges really try to give government defendants multiple opportunities to cure constitutional violations. And in this case, Judge Reeves gave the county numerous opportunities to comply with the consent decree and at every step of the way. While there might have been some progress in certain ways, some of these constitutional violations are stubborn. They persist.
Given that mandate to curb constitutional violations, receivership exists as a remedy of last resort. There have only been a dozen receiverships [over prisons and jails] in U.S. history, and they go all the way back to Brown against Board of Education [in 1954] when judges were confronted with staggering noncompliance with [the ruling,] mostly in the South, but not entirely. It started out in the school desegregation context, and judges then began using it to resolve constitutional violations in other public institutional settings.
You said receiverships are often a measure of last resort. What else could a judge do before appointing a receiver?
Hinds County actually provides some examples. If you think about the judicial interventions in jails and prisons as a spectrum, maybe the first step is the imposition of the consent decree, where the government agrees to undertake certain changes. When the government fails to implement those changes, what’s next? In a lot of consent decrees, a monitor is appointed to assess progress. In this case, a monitor was appointed. Judge Reeves, in one of his opinions, talked about how he could have imposed fines on the defendant, and fines typically are associated with civil contempt, where you want to not punish but encourage compliance with a court order. And so here, Judge Reeves thought about imposing fines, but really thought at the end of the day that would not be sufficient to nudge compliance in the right direction.
Sometimes courts will impose special masters, which are like monitors, but have a bit more authority than monitors. They can make certain rulings. They’re not themselves judges, they are agents of the courts, but have a bit more power than doing what a monitor does, which is watching and reporting back to the court on conditions and the government’s actions. So receivership, along the spectrum, is either a partial or total displacement of the government from management of the jail or prison.
Are there any further consequences that can be enforced if a receivership just doesn’t work?
Before the Prison Litigation Reform Act [in 1996], judges would threaten to shut down jails and prisons, and that, to me, is a more drastic step than the court imposing receivership. And Judge Reeves, in his receivership opinion, noted that step as being more severe.
I’m unaware of any judge shutting down a jail or prison since the enactment of the PLRA. The PLRA has played a major role in this case, and that law did a couple of things. Number one, it sought to reduce the amount of litigation being filed by incarcerated people in the federal courts. The other thing it did was limit the powers of federal courts to interfere or to interject into the management of jails and prisons.
Tell me more about the PLRA. How has that played a role in Hinds County?
The PLRA basically says that any prospective relief, so any step that the judge is taking, has to be narrowly tailored, go no further than necessary and be the least restrictive way of addressing the constitutional violation.
Once Judge Reeves imposed receivership, the county challenged the appointment order as not complying with the PLRA, so that caused the 5th Circuit [Court of Appeals] to ask, well, what, if not a receivership, is a lesser remedy that could address the constitutional violations, if you’re saying that the receivership is going further than necessary, [and] that there might be lesser means. That was a part of the case at the 5th Circuit, which upheld most of the receivership order. The 5th Circuit did remand the case back to Judge Reeves to reconfigure the receiver’s duties and responsibilities. Primarily, it said that Judge Reeves could not give the receiver power to decide unilaterally the jail budget or certain staffing determinations or contractual obligations that were outside of or inconsistent with the spirit of the PLRA, and so now the parties are talking about what the receiver’s responsibilities ought to look like in light of that ruling.
What would a successful receivership look like?
That is a million-dollar question. On the one hand, I do think that eliminating the constitutional violations represents one version of success. I worry about how that happens and whether that change is sustainable by the government.
Judge Reeves can’t control the extent to which the government will continue the reforms after the receivership ends. However, if there are things that Judge Reeves can do to make it more likely that the government will maintain those reforms, that, to me, is a successful receivership.
Hinds County’s Raymond Detention Center on March 13.
How long could it take for a receiver to turn the jail around?
The short answer is, and Judge Reeves’ order reflects, as long as it takes to end the constitutional violations. I don’t know how long that will take.
Sometimes, judges will, rarely, impose a term limit on a receivership, but allow themselves to revisit that date whenever the period expires. For example, the D.C. jail receivership lasted only five years and the judge in that case said it would last only five years unless good cause showed that a longer receivership period was necessary.
What else should citizens of Hinds County, particularly those who cross paths with the justice system, know about the situation this jail is in?
If you are in the Hinds County detention center or criminal justice system, Judge Reeves essentially has taken control of the jail because government leaders have proven incapable of or unwilling to improve conditions. Judge Reeves is unelected and unaccountable to the people, but he is accountable to the Constitution, and that means that the receiver, who is an extension of Judge Reeves, will be making decisions not based on politics. The only sort of consideration for the receiver and the court will be, what does it take to get these constitutional violations improved or resolved?
When you have a leader who’s not thinking about getting reelected, or how much money something costs, but whose only North Star is improvement of these facilities, then the hope is that conditions will improve. In every receivership case because of that, because receivership unchains the reform work from politics, there have been improvements. The question is, will the government sustain those improvements after the court leaves the picture?
