[To pay off fines and other debts, inmates in Mississippi’s
little-known restitution centers must work grueling low-wage jobs, pay
rent and endure strip searches. Caught between prison and freedom,
they often don’t know when they’ll get to go home.]
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WANT OUT OF JAIL? FIRST YOU HAVE TO TAKE A FAST FOOD JOB.  
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Anna Wolfe and Michelle Liu
January 9, 2020
Mississippi Today
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_ To pay off fines and other debts, inmates in Mississippi’s
little-known restitution centers must work grueling low-wage jobs, pay
rent and endure strip searches. Caught between prison and freedom,
they often don’t know when they’ll get to go home. _

,

 

 
JACKSON, Miss. – During her shifts at a Church’s Chicken, Annita
Husband looked like the other employees. She wore the same blue and
red polo shirt, greeted the same customers, and slung the same fried
chicken and biscuits.

But after clocking out, Husband, a mother in her 40s, had to wait for
a white van with barred windows and the seal of the Mississippi
Department of Corrections on its sides. It delivered her to the
Flowood Restitution Center
[[link removed]],
a motel converted into a jail surrounded by razor wire, nestled among
truck stops and an outlet mall. Here, Husband slept in a room with
seven other women, sharing a mirror to get ready in the mornings,
enduring strip searches for contraband at night. 

A judge sentenced Husband to the restitution center in 2015 to pay off
almost $13,000
[[link removed]]she
owed from an embezzlement conviction in 2009. The corrections
department would not release her until she earned enough money at her
$7.25-an-hour part-time job to clear her debts and cover $11 a day for
“room and board”
[[link removed]]at Flowood. 

“If I wasn’t at work, I was in prison,” Husband said. 

The corrections department took her paychecks, she said, giving her
back just $10 a week — all in quarters — so she could buy things
like soap and deodorant.

The state of Mississippi had locked Husband into a modern-day debtors
prison. She had other plans.

Mississippi appears to be the only state where judges lock people up
for an indefinite time while they work to earn money to pay off
court-ordered debts. While there is no comprehensive data, legal
experts who study fines, fees and restitution say Mississippi is
unusual at the very least.

“We don’t know of any other states that have a program quite like
Mississippi’s,” said Sharon Brett, a senior staff attorney with
Harvard’s Criminal Justice Policy Program.

A handful of states experimented with restitution programs starting in
the 1970s, but abandoned them as expensive and ineffective. 

Not Mississippi. Judges have sentenced hundreds of people a year to
four restitution centers around the state, almost always ordering them
to stay until they pay off court fees, fines and restitution to
victims, according to four years of government records analyzed by
Mississippi Today and The Marshall Project.

People sent to the centers had been sentenced for felonies but
didn’t commit violent crimes, according to the program rules. When
we tracked down the cases of more than 200 people confined there on
Jan. 1, 2019, we found that most originally got suspended sentences,
meaning they did not have to go to prison. 

They didn’t usually owe a lot of money. Half the people living in
the centers had debts of less than $3,515. One owed just $656.50.
Though in arrears on fines and court fees, many didn’t need to pay
restitution at all — at least 20 percent of them were convicted of
drug possession.

But people spent an average of nearly four months — and up to five
years — at the centers, working for private employers to earn enough
to satisfy the courts. Meanwhile their costs continued to balloon,
since they had to pay for room and board, transportation to their
jobs, and medical care.
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FROM INSIDE
During a nine-month stay at the Flowood Restitution Center starting in
September 2018, Dixie D’Angelo worked four different restaurant jobs
trying to pay down over $5,000 she owed for damaging a friend’s
car.  She said she struggled with depression and anxiety and got no
treatment for her alcoholism. “I was in a really, really dark
place,” she said.

They didn’t get paid much. Between 2016 and 2018, workers at the
centers made an average of $6.76 an hour in take home pay, according
to our analysis of state data. 

It’s a futile system that penalizes the poorest residents of the
poorest state in the country, said Cliff Johnson, director of the
MacArthur Justice Center at the University of Mississippi.

 “Debtors prisons are an effective way of collecting money — as
is kidnapping,” he said. “But there are constitutional, public
policy and moral barriers to such a regime.”

Many states are reconsidering
[[link removed]]
the practice of jailing the poor,
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especially because of its inordinate impact on people of color. Since
2018, Mississippi has required judges to find that people willfully
failed to make court-ordered payments before sending them to jail or
prison
[[link removed]]. 

But that hasn’t affected the number of people entering
Mississippi’s restitution center program, which our reporting shows
mostly affects those on probation for low-level offenses related to
drug addiction or poverty.

Mississippi Today reviewed hundreds of documents, spoke with more than
50 current and former restitution center inmates and interviewed legal
experts over the course of 14 months
[[link removed]]. 

Our investigation with The Marshall Project found:

* The INMATES WORK AT LOW-WAGE, SOMETIMES DANGEROUS JOBS,
[[link removed]] such as
slaughtering chickens or gutting catfish at processing plants. Private
citizens hire them to work as handymen and landscapers at their homes.

* When they can’t get jobs, sometimes for medical reasons, they sit
in the centers, accruing $330 a month in room and board costs. Some of
them say the centers don’t offer programs to deal with addiction or
earn high-school diplomas.

* Just a quarter of all money earned by the inmates went to pay
restitution, with the remainder going to the corrections department
and the courts, according to state data from July 2014 through June
2018. In some cases, the courts added unrelated debts, such as child
support. One man’s charge for meth possession turned into debt
totaling $72,500.

* INACCURATE AND CONFUSING RECORD-KEEPING BY THE STATE
[[link removed]]makes
it hard for workers to know if they are making progress toward paying
off their debts and how soon they might be eligible for release. 

* Black people are overrepresented at restitution centers, accounting
for 49 percent of inmates, COMPARED WITH 38 PERCENT OF THE STATE
POPULATION
[[link removed]],
according to our analysis of center data for January 2019. MORE THAN
60 PERCENT OF PEOPLE IN PRISON IN MISSISSIPPI ARE BLACK.
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The Mississippi Department of Corrections, or MDOC, repeatedly
declined our requests to visit the restitution centers and to discuss
them with state officials. But in a statement issued in late December
in response to our findings,
[[link removed]]the
department noted that it follows state law when operating the
restitution program.

Emphasizing that judges are in charge of sending people to the
centers, the statement says the program “provides an alternative to
incarceration for minimal risk offenders by facilitating their
transition to the community.”

“While individuals in this program are required to work, the MDOC
does not force them to work,” the statement says. “The MDOC merely
assists them in finding employment.” 

Eric J. Shelton, Mississippi Today/Report for America

The entrance to the Delta Correctional Facility, where the Greenwood
Restitution Center was relocated in 2018. The facility also houses
inmates finishing their sentences while working for government
agencies and a technical violation center for people on probation and
parole.

The state has a long history of forcing prisoners — especially black
men — to work. After slavery was abolished, Mississippi leased a
soaring number of prisoners to private industry
[[link removed]].
Public outcry over deaths and mistreatment forced the state to end
that program in 1890. Mississippi then founded the state penitentiary
known as Parchman Farm,
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was modeled after a slave plantation. It still houses over 3,000 of
the state’s 21,000 prisoners. 

The restitution-center program has unfortunate parallels with
Mississippi’s past, said Alex Lichtenstein, a historian who has
written a book on convict leasing in the South. “It’s a form of
penal labor, there’s no question about it.” 

Today, employers benefit from access to cheap and reliable labor from
the restitution program. “If it weren’t for the restitution
center, I would seriously have trouble running my business,” said
Barry Porter, the owner of a Sonic Drive-In near Jackson. Several
workers described him as a fair and accommodating boss.

Some judges say the program helps those sentenced to it. Charles
Webster, a circuit judge in Clarksdale, said that the program teaches
them about responsibility by requiring them to show up for work and
meet financial obligations. He had sentenced two of the people in the
centers in January 2019.

“Going to the restitution center’s better than going to prison, I
would think,” he said. 

FROM INSIDE
Darrell Bridges says he earned almost $2,000 working at Checkers
during his stint in the Pascagoula Restitution Center in 2013. But the
money was never applied to the $3,403 debt he owed from an attempted
robbery when he was 17, records show. He still wonders what happened
to his money.

One June morning in 2007, while Husband worked at a payday loan store
near Biloxi on the Gulf Coast, she looked at a surveillance monitor
and watched as the dealership repossessed her white Chevrolet
Suburban.

Like many of her clients, Husband lived paycheck to paycheck.
Supporting three sons and her injured spouse on her own, she had
fallen behind on making her monthly payments. 

To get the truck back, she began creating fake loans, pocketing about
$11,000 in cash from her employer, Money Now.
[[link removed]]Several weeks later, an internal audit
uncovered the scheme. Husband, who in the past was convicted of
writing bad checks and of stealing $300 from Sears, pleaded guilty to
embezzlement. She was sentenced to seven years in prison. 

But the judge allowed her to serve five years of probation instead as
long as she paid $50 a month to the corrections department for
monitoring her, plus $200 a month toward her fines, fees and
restitution. 

Over the years, she struggled to keep up with the payments as she
worked at mostly low-paying housekeeping jobs at hotels and cared for
her husband until he died in 2009. She said her probation officers
threatened her: “‘Next time you come in and you don’t have any
money, you’re going to jail.’”

Fearing she would be thrown in prison for nonpayment, she stopped
reporting.

This led to a cycle of probation violations that landed Husband in
jail for weeks and on house arrest in 2011. In 2015, she was back in
court again. When she explained her fears of being imprisoned for
failing to pay, the judge replied, “That's no excuse for not
reporting to your probation officer where they can keep up with
you.”

Judge Roger T. Clark told Husband she had to “attend and
successfully complete the restitution center program” at Flowood,
according to the hearing transcript.
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But the court order he signed spelled out something more: She had to
stay until she paid her $12,685.50 balance — restitution, fines and
fees — with the court.

A judge ordered Annita Husband to complete the restitution center
program. She said she didn't know until later what that meant: She had
to earn nearly $13,000 working at a fast food restaurant before she
could go home.

 

The restitution center was 170 miles from her home in Biloxi. When
Husband arrived at the work camp in May 2015, she called one of her
sons to let him know she had made it.

“He said, ‘Happy Mother’s Day,’” Husband said. “It was
just so hurtful, because here I am, basically in prison.” 

Judges are at the heart of the system. Three judges accounted for
almost a third of the people at the restitution centers in January
2019. Clark and a colleague also on the Coast, Judge Christopher
Schmidt, declined to comment. Judge Dal Williamson, of Jones County in
south Mississippi, said he typically sends people to the restitution
center when they have refused to pay their debts. “And you’ve got
a victim out there that needs to be made whole.”

It’s the sentences — for a dollar amount rather than a period of
time — that make the restitution center program so unusual, and so
onerous, inmates and experts agree. 

Our review of orders for more than 200 people revealed that judges
sent about 80 percent to a center for violating the terms of their
probation. In 16 orders, the only violation listed was the
defendant’s failure to pay. Almost all of the people in the program
were given a specific amount of money they must earn before their
release. In 15 cases we found, the judges sentenced defendants to the
restitution centers for an amount of money _and _a time limit of 90
days to three years.

Eric J. Shelton, Mississippi Today/Report for America

Church’s Chicken, located by a Jackson civil rights monument called
Freedom Corner, employed people imprisoned in the restitution centers
in 2015. Husband, who ran away from custody during her Church’s
shift, said it paid her minimum wage.

While Husband was at the restitution center, the state didn’t call
her an inmate (it uses the word “resident”), and she did not have
to wear a striped prison uniform. Flowood does house women finishing
prison sentences who perform community service for government agencies
and local charities.

But Husband and the 36 other women at the Flowood restitution center
at the time slept on the same prison-issued mattresses, ate the same
food, and had to follow most of the same restrictions as the other
prisoners. 

Even when they’re at work, restitution program inmates are not
allowed to see friends or family, talk on the phone or smoke
cigarettes. At the centers, they are assigned chores
[[link removed]]
— Husband said she cleaned the center’s vans and washed dishes
after meals. 

Like others, she had no idea how much money she was accumulating or
how long it would take to pay her way out. Inmates can get printouts
showing debits and credits in their accounts, which the state calls a
monthly balance sheet. But they find the information hard to
interpret. 

Husband said she couldn’t stop thinking about someone she met who
had been in the center for two years, trying to pay off $2,000. She
began plotting her escape. 

On July 9, 2015, Husband got up before the other women in her room,
she said. She put on jeans and a white Nike T-shirt under her
Church’s Chicken uniform. She called the restaurant to tell her
supervisors she would be taking the day off. 

Husband rode with other residents in the back of a white prison van
from the Flowood compound until they reached the Church's Chicken.
It’s at Jackson's Freedom Corner, a civil rights landmark honoring
the intersection of Martin Luther King Drive and Medgar Evers
Boulevard.

The van dropped her off before the restaurant opened. Husband asked a
coworker to drive her to downtown Jackson.  She had already exchanged
her quarters for $5 bills that she smuggled into the center by rolling
them tight in her ponytail. Now, she used that cash to buy a ticket at
the Greyhound station.

Then she hopped on the first bus headed down to the Coast — and
home. She was one of roughly 70 people who ran away from the
restitution centers each year between 2015 and 2017, according to
state data.

“I wasn’t even thinking about those fines anymore,” she said.
“I was just thinking about, ‘I got to get out of here.’”

Two months after Husband escaped, the corrections department sent
$1,179 to the Harrison County court. At the rate she was earning
money, Husband would have spent more than a year and a half in the
restitution center working to pay off her debts, according to our
analysis of her earnings reports.

As a worker makes money, the corrections department takes the first
cut in room and board, then usually holds the remaining earnings until
there’s enough to pay the entire debt. When someone leaves the
program, the corrections department sends their earnings to the court
to cover its costs. It distributes the rest to victims, then to pay
criminal fines. 

In Husband’s case, the payday lender she stole from received just
over $600 in restitution, according to county records. Paul Goldman,
who runs Money Now, told Mississippi Today that he rarely receives
restitution when he deals with worker embezzlement at one of his
family business’s two dozen locations. 

Without repayment, Goldman said, he wants to see those employees
locked up. “Just for the sake of justice.” 

FROM INSIDE
Gaylia Mills needed to earn $2,893 at her Sonic Drive-In gig to get
out of the Flowood Restitution Center, where she had been sent in 2018
for violating the terms of her probation on a drug possession charge.
A guard stole $660 of her earnings, according to court documents.
“Not knowing when you’re coming home is the worst part,” she
said.

About six months after Husband left Flowood, officers found her when a
son crashed her car and, not knowing she was evading law enforcement,
gave them her address, she said. 

A judge sentenced her to her original prison term. She spent almost 10
months at Central Mississippi Correctional Facility in rural Rankin
County. 

That’s about half as long as she would have spent at the restitution
center.  

In the years after she left prison, Husband said, she met with her
parole officer each month and paid what she could, usually $20 a
visit. She still owed more than $10,000 when she finished parole in
September, more than a decade after she was first sentenced for her
crime. Husband’s criminal case is closed.  

Now 52, Husband lives in a small apartment surrounded by palm trees.
She works two jobs as a hotel housekeeper, she said, earning about
$25,000 a year for 55 to 60 hours of work every week. 

Looking back, Husband said she was punished for being poor, saddled
with debts she could never repay. She called her time in prison
bittersweet. She felt embarrassed to be there, but relieved to know
that when she got out, she would be finished with her punishment at
last.  

In the restitution center, “You’re there without an end. You do
not know when you’re getting out, when you’re going to be
finished,” she said. “That’s torture.”

_This investigation was published in partnership with The Marshall
Project
[[link removed]],
the USA TODAY-Network [[link removed]], the Jackson
Clarion-Ledger [[link removed]] and the Mississippi
Center for Investigative Reporting [[link removed]].
The Marshall Project is a nonprofit news organization covering the
U.S. criminal justice system; sign up for The Marshall Project's
newsletters [[link removed]], or follow
them on Facebook [[link removed]] or
Twitter [[link removed]]. Read the rest of the
investigation here [[link removed]]._

This article [[link removed]]
first appeared on Mississippi Today [[link removed]] and
is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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