A federal judge has cleared the way for a class-action lawsuit against Mississippi's state prison system.
In an opinion handed down this afternoon, U.S. District Judge William Barbour certified a class of prisoners incarcerated at East Mississippi Correctional Facility in Meridian.
In 2013, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Southern Poverty Law Center filed the federal class-action lawsuit on behalf of 16 named plaintiffs against the Mississippi Department of Corrections for "massive human rights violations" at EMCF.
The 1,500-bed EMCF houses the state's severely mentally ill prisoners, and is run by Management & Training Corp., a Utah-based firm that is one of the nation's largest private corrections-management companies.
Attorneys involved with the lawsuit have described the prison as "hyper-violent, grotesquely filthy and dangerous." The complaint details numerous claims, including broken plumbing systems that result in people sometimes having to defecate in trash bags or food. It charges that chronic understaffing often leads to prisoner-on-prisoner altercations and rapes, as well as excessive use of force by corrections officers.
MDOC had asked the court to exclude testimony from a medical- and mental-health expert, but Judge Barbour denied that request in his ruling today.
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