The Mississippi Department of Corrections’ decision to close the Community Work Center in Yazoo City was a major setback for our community.
It’s going to cost Yazoo County and Yazoo City residents with either more taxes or less services.
The jobs that these inmates were performing for the city and county will now either have to be done by paid employees (new employees added to the payroll), done by existing employees who will have less time to focus on other duties or left undone.
Many of those services are too important to be left undone. Others will be noticeable soon. If you think the litter problem in the county is bad now – and it is ridiculous – wait until we go awhile without the crew of inmates who were picking up trash every day.
The city’s current cemetery sexton is a lot more efficient than his predecessor, but you may recall how bad the cemetery looked when the city lost the use of inmate labor for awhile. Hopefully they will be able to keep up.
The county has already had to hire someone new to help keep up with the cleaning and maintenance at the Courthouse.
Marshall Fisher, commissioner of the Mississippi Department of Corrections, blames the closing of our Community Work Center, and some in other communities on staff shortages. Fisher says the state needs to pay correctional officers more money to attract and retain quality employees.
I agree with Mr. Fisher on that point. One of the reasons that their is so much corruption in our jails is that the low paid workers are often tempted by bribes to look the other way. It’s also hard to keep good employees with lower wages. The best workers are going to find better opportunities.
But dismantling part of the corrections system that actually allows some of the inmates to give something back to society in an effort to convince the Legislature to appropriate more money seems like a bad idea to me.
These Community Work Centers don’t just benefit the communities they serve. They also benefit the inmates who participate in the program.
Many of those inmates found themselves in trouble because they didn’t know the meaning of an honest day’s work in the first place. The Community Work Centers teach them that not only that hard work isn’t going to kill you, but it’s also very rewarding to look back on a job well done.
I hope state lawmakers are able to find a way to improve the pay for our state’s correctional officers within the state’s budget, but I also hope that they demand the work centers be re-opened immediately as part of the deal.
