Jackson Free Press

Crime is a hard thing to solve. It is the tragic confluence of poverty and generations of miseducation, not to mention institutional racism, patriarchy, childhood abuse and other structural biases.

So it's no wonder that jail and prisons are among the nation's most difficult institutions to manage.

Mississippi seems to be the poster child for this difficulty—in large part because Mississippi has long been the poster child for poverty, poor education, family violence, and oppression of minorities and women. We've seen these tensions play out time and again right here in Hinds County, which serves the state's largest city and, thus, has one of the state's highest inmate populations.

A new round of scrutiny on the jail and, specifically, its management recently came to light in the form of a grand jury probe that dinged Sheriff Tyrone Lewis as "incompetent" to run day-to-day jail operations, one of his elected office's main functions. In turn, this touched off a new round of finger-pointing between Lewis and the Hinds County Board of Supervisors, which must sign off any time the sheriff needs to fix a cell door that doesn't lock.

All this comes on the back of a U.S. Justice Department investigation of the conditions at the Hinds County jail and a holding facility in downtown Jackson, which follows two decades of handwringing and kicking the can down the road for future sheriffs, supervisors and, indeed, citizens to deal with.

We have reached the end of that road; it's time to stop kicking the can and face the problem.

Not only must the political beefs must be set aside, officials have to sit down together to find near-term solutions for the violence and corruption that seem so commonplace inside the walls of the jail but also to start a real conversation about longer-term planning.

Ideally, Lewis and each Hinds County supervisor as well as the mayors and police chiefs of all the municipalities within the county need to go into a room as soon as possible to work out a plan.

This is not an impossible task. When a different grand jury inspected the jail last year and recommended that Lewis reassign deputies to shifts at the jail, he did just that and said he saw some success. County taxpayers may have to spend more for overtime or hiring additional officers, but that cost likely pales in comparison to the loss of prisoners' lives and the health-care costs associated with treating inmates injured in riots (there have been two in recent years), not to mention the legal liability of continued inaction.

And they should regularly communicate and engage with citizens to carefully explain each step as they take it rather than avoid media questions. Interestingly, elected officials in Jackson and Hinds County frequently beat their chests about working with neighboring communities in Madison and Rankin counties when it comes to economic development and law enforcement.

Because of the problems at the jail, it's time for that same spirit of cooperation to turn into a sense of urgency right here in Hinds County.