Justice Department Says a Small Mississippi Town Ran a Dickensian Debtor’s Prison
A Justice Department investigation concluded that a small Mississippi town piled more than $1.7 million in fines on its residents and then jailed them in an unconstitutional debtor’s prison when they couldn’t pay up.
The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division released a report Thursday detailing a litany of alleged constitutional violations by the 10-member police department of Lexington, Mississippi, a majority-black town of about 1,200 people. Justice Department investigators found that Lexington police violated residents’ rights at every stage: engaging in illegal traffic stops and searches, unconstitutionally jailing residents for unpaid fines and “investigative holds,” and retaliating against anyone who criticized them. That’s in addition to racial discrimination and numerous reports of sexual harassment by officers. The report concludes that a complete lack of leadership and oversight has “created a system where officers can relentlessly violate the law.”
“Lexington has turned the jail into the kinds of debtors’ prisons Charles Dickens described in his novels written in the 1800s,” U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi Todd Gee said in a press conference announcing the report’s findings. “Only this is happening in Mississippi in 2024.”
The Justice Department opened an investigation into Lexington in November of 2023, a year after the former Lexington police chief resigned because he was secretly recorded using racist slurs and bragging about killing 13 people. The Justice Department report notes that, on the same day the department opened the investigation, “LPD officers chased a man accused only of disturbing a business and tased him nine times.”
In 2022, the Lexington Police Department adopted an expansive arrest policy for low-level and noncriminal conduct. It paired this with aggressive debt collection practices that jailed residents for unpaid fines, whether or not they could afford to pay.
“Over the past two years, LPD has made nearly one arrest for every four people in town, primarily for low-level offenses and traffic violations,” the report says. “That is more than 10 times the per capita arrest rate for Mississippi as a whole. Many of these arrests were for non-criminal conduct, like owing outstanding fines and using profanity.”
Justice Department investigators found that Lexington adopted the arrest policy, its revenue from fines increased from $30,000 per year to over $240,000, roughly a quarter
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