Parole Reform, Pay Raises and COVID-19: 2021 Legislative Preview by Nick Judin
Photo courtesy Brice Wiggins
Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann is fighting to delay the 2020 session, hoping to stave off another outbreak of COVID-19. When the session does begin in earnest, Hosemann plans to push forward on pay raises for state employees, including teachers, in spite of the financial crunch of the virus.
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As of press time, that delay seems unlikely, with Speaker Gunn dedicated to getting through the session to avoid the endless procession of 2020 repeating. ‘We Couldn’t Have Quorum’ Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann spearheaded the effort to delay the session, citing the danger posed by another legislative outbreak and the high transmission of the virus in Mississippi. “I propose that we come in on January 5, adopt our flag, do whatever other things we have to do, perfunctorily, and then adjourn until March 1st,” the Senate leader said at a Dec. 29 press event. Hosemann told the Jackson Free Press that part of the difficulty of holding the session during the pandemic was the strict necessity of quarantining after exposure. “If, in fact, you have been with someone (infected with COVID-19), under Dr. Dobbs’ orders, you are supposed to be quarantined for 14 days. Now, if that were enough of the Senate, we couldn’t have quorum. We wouldn’t have enough people to vote,” Hosemann said. Not all legislators share Hosemann’s desire to see the session delayed. Sen. Brice Wiggins, R-Pascagoula, said that the session should continue as planned, with improved safety measures to avoid an outbreak. “As I saw one of my colleagues comment, teachers and other public employees
Parole Reform, Take Two Distinct from COVID-19 struggles was the last-minute collapse of the Legislature’s criminal-reform push, which failed to overcome a gubernatorial veto in early July 2020, despite broad support in both chambers. Now, however, a breakthrough in negotiations between reform-minded legislators and law-enforcement organizations signals a promising opportunity for a successful attempt in 2021. At the bill’s center was a long-awaited package of parole reforms intended to standardize a pathway to parole eligibility lacking for many incarcerated Mississippians. Senate Bill 2123 would have provided parole eligibility for incarcerated Mississippians serving time for nonviolent offenses after 25% of their sentence or 10 years, whichever was less. For Mississippians serving time for violent offenses, eligibility would have required the lesser of 50% of their sentence or 25 years of incarceration. Legislators supporting the bill, spanning both parties in both chambers, argued that it addressed a growing prison population derived from excessively harsh sentencing guidelines established in the 1990s. Senate Minority Leader Derrick Simmons, D-Greenville, lamented the bill’s failure in July. “Mississippi has the secondlargest incarceration rate in the world.
SB 2123 addressed Mississippi’s growing prison crisis,” Simmons said. “It was bipartisan policy.” But for Gov. Tate Reeves, the bill went too far. “Right now, you’re eligible to get out of prison at 60 unless you’re a trafficker, habitual offender or violent criminal. This totally eliminates those protections,” he wrote on Facebook upon vetoing the bill. The governor’s concerns didn’t match the content of the bill, which did nothing to guarantee parole, merely provided the incarcerated with the opportunity for a hearing before the parole board. But Reeves later admitted to the Jackson Free Press that his concerns about who might sit on that parole board after his term in office ended fueled his skepticism about signing the bill into law. “I have a maximum of seven years and five months left serving as governor. And I have no idea who is going to be the next governor,” he said at a press event. Reeves’ veto held in no small part thanks to the backing of two powerful professional organizations, the Mississippi Sheriffs’ Association and the state Prosecutors Association, both of which publicly voiced opposition to SB 2123. Jasper County Sheriff Randy Johnson, president of the MSA, told the Jackson Free Photo AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis
January 6 - 19, 2021 • jfp.ms
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asked legislators tapped fists as the 2021 legislative session began on Jan. 5, a familiar scene awaiting an uncertain future. The state’s latest legislative gathering during a pandemic quickly gave way to the first of 2020’s many lingering threads: the codifying of the state’s new flag. Only moments after the gaveling-in, House Bill 1 sped through a Rules Committee hearing, on track to put declarative punctuation to one of 2020’s vanishingly few moments of unity. House Speaker Philip Gunn, R-Clinton, opened the proceedings by putting the flag bill before a House floor that voted it through 119-1. “Today would be a most appropriate day for us to put that into the code,” he said. With the flag settled in one chamber, after only Republican Stephen Horne of Meridian opposed it (and Dan Eubanks, of Walls voted “present,”) enormous work remains. The 2020 session, though it dragged on for nearly the entire year, left much unfinished. Public employee pay increases, criminal-justice reform and COVID relief all loom in the near future. In spite of the monumental work ahead of the Legislature, there is good reason to question the wisdom of holding the session now at all. With a two-thirds vote, the House could begin the process of delaying the session until March.
have been working through this pandemic, and us legislators should do that, too,” Wiggins told the Jackson Free Press. Hosemann, who was infected during the 2020 legislative outbreak, said contact tracing revealed that last-minute budget talks held in private offices caused much of the transmission between legislators, which infected at least 49 of them. “(We) let our guard down, actually. We weren’t as good about it as we needed to be,” he said. But while legislators are likely to be more wary of the virus after so many were infected in the last session, it is unlikely that a repetition of the same security measures from previous months—voluntary mask usage, temperature checks at the door and loads of hand sanitizer—is a guaranteed protection against a large-scale outbreak. In 2021, just as in 2020, it is the uncaring virus that will determine if the session continues uninterrupted, not legislators.
Sen. Juan Barnett, D-Heidelberg, chairman of the Corrections Committee, is enthusiastic about the prospect of parole reform surviving this session, citing productive talks with Mississippi’s sheriffs and prosecutors.
