JACKSON, Miss.–Locking up kids who have done wrong or are a danger is a tall order in Mississippi. In fact, in central Mississippi only one county has the facility to do that: Scott.
“Over 50 percent of the judges responded to the survey stating they had a child they felt was a danger to themselves or others and they had to let them go because there was no bed,” testified Stacey Bevill, a Youth Court judge from Lee County, talking to the state Senate Judiciary Committee in a Friday hearing.
“These are [people that are committing serious crimes,” she said. We did not ask about the misdemeanors. These are people that had a hard time sleeping that night because they didn’t have a place to put them.”
The purpose of the committee hearing in getting ready for the upcoming legislative session, was to look at the difficulties that judges face in dealing with youthful offenders and how the state can better handle them.
Bevill was one of three judges who made a presentation.
Having enough places to put the offending juveniles is one of the big problems. Facilities cost money.
Counties that don’t have proper facilities rely on neighbors who do, paying them to keep the offenders if there are spaces available. But, those spaces only come at the generosity of the county.
“Don’t think that these places represent hundreds and hundreds of beds,” said Bevill, who said the facility in Lee County has 25. “These are not large numbers of beds even though we have these detention centers.”
Though possible solutions are being tossed around, the state often doesn’t have enough money to address all of the issues it faces in a particular year, and funding facilities costs millions of dollars. You may hear more about it beginning in January.
