LUCEDALE, Miss. (WKRG) – The Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC) could apparently reopen the community work center in Lucedale four years after its closing, according to the city’s mayor.
A deputy commissioner and a handful of MDOC staff showed up unannounced to city hall on Monday, May 1, to take a look at the old community work center building.
“It came out of the blue. We hadn’t heard anything about it,” said Mayor Doug Lee. “It sounded to me like what they’re looking at is a pilot program for people that are sent back to jail for violating probation.”
Aldermen had been planning to move its public works department from its current shop on Oak Street into the vacant CWC building later this year.
The timing of the visit seemed nearly too good to be true for city leaders. That morning, the George County Board of Supervisors had just approved an agreement to give the city a block of 24 beds in the regional jail to fill with state inmates on a work release program.
Lucedale aldermen were due to vote on the agreement in its board meeting Tuesday and likely move forward with paying MDOC $120,900 for a six month trial basis. They tabled the agreement instead until the state indicates whether or not it will reopen the CWC.
Mayor Lee said Tuesday another group of MDOC staffers is due to visit the city on May 9. He told the department he would like to know its plans by the next board of aldermen meeting on May 23.
“The next visit will be to get an idea of how much work it will take to bring the building back,” Lee said. “It sounded promising. We got a good feeling that they are serious about moving forward.”
Lee first approached the county in September about housing state inmate laborers for the city. Any maintenance and procedural work to reopen the CWC could prolong their return by a few weeks or months, but Lee estimates it will save the city $271,000 annually. It was planning to pay $31 per bed per day to house 24 state inmates that would do work for the city.
Lucedale has had a revolving door of public works employees over the past 14 months. At least 25 city workers were hired and later left in that time. Aldermen voted in September to raise the starting wage from $9.50 to $11 per hour for full-time employees.
Department heads say it has helped retain a few employees but they have still struggled to recruit new workers to fill vacancies. Under the mayor’s directive, the public works department has not sought to hire any new employees in recent months with the anticipation of receiving inmates to fill that work.
The city is currently hiring for one laborer position with the department down to 11 employees. 19 are needed to be fully staffed, Director Tammy Cochran said.
The city owns the CWC building and would lease it to MDOC for $1-per-year to operate. In exchange, the city, and likely the county, get free labor from the inmates housed there.
From 1985 until July 2019, the city had a long history of using inmate laborers from the Community Work Center (CWC) adjacent to the regional jail. At its peak, it hosted 100 state inmates to work for the county and city.
MDOC announced its plan to close the center in April 2013, citing a budget shortfall and fewer non-violent inmates eligible to be housed at the centers. County supervisors started a petition to Governor Phil Bryant and met with lawmakers and MDOC leaders in Jackson to try to reverse the decision.
They estimated it would cost the county alone an additional $3.5 million per year in salaries for hired employees to replace the inmates. They argued the savings to the state were minimal if the program was still operational and inmates were just moved to a different center.
The center remained open as MDOC Commissioner Chris Epps was convicted of bribery and resigned and the department faced federal investigations and lawsuits during the tenures of three different commissioners over the next six years.
Mississippi currently boasts the second-highest per capita incarcerated population of any other state or nation in the world, second only to Lousisiana. Imprisonment has remained mostly steady over the last 20 years from 22,816 inmates in Jan. 2003 to 21,387 in Jan. 2023.
Ultimately, the George County and Harrison County CWCs were the latest of eight centers to close since 2015, leaving seven currently open.
George County has maintained its own block of state inmates in the regional jail since shortly after the local CWC closed in 2019. 24 inmates at a time perform mostly janitorial, lawn care and maintenance work at county buildings and the road department.
Some of the 45 inmates used by the county at the time the CWC closed worked as garbage collectors. The work was then contracted out for about $240,000 per year. Even with some inmate laborers back in the county, supervisors opted to keep the contract ever since, saying waste collection was more efficient with the hired staff.
When the CWC was last operational, Mayor Lee said issues with inmates were typically rare. MDOC reports indicate only a few inmates over 34 years tried to escape from the county and were later caught.
The largest liability in that time came when a pick-up truck caused a three car collision that hit and killed Robert Prine while working on the back of a garbage truck in 2017. The county and the driver at fault was ordered to split a $1 million payment to Prine’s family to settle a wrongful death lawsuit.
Mayor Lee said the inmates will mostly do maintenance work on city buildings, roads, water lines, parks and the cemetery.
It is unclear where the inmates will come from and how many will be housed in the center. An April 3 report from MDOC listed 520 inmates in community work programs with enough space in its current centers to accommodate 248 more inmates. An MDOC spokesperson did not reply to a request for information by publication.