Mississippi has a crime problem.
Conservatives in the state are concerned about it, and rightly so. Last week 7 people were shot in an Ocean Springs restaurant, and 6 others were shot in Bay St. Louis on April 30th. Three people were killed in those incidents. Just yesterday a man was shot and killed in Jackson. Mississippi’s homicide mortality rate leads the nation, and FBI data shows a 66% increase in Mississippi’s homicide rate from 2017 to 2020. The conversation about criminal justice in Mississippi should begin and end with public safety, and it is clear that current policies are not adequately addressing the problem.
As conservatives wrangle with potential solutions to improve public safety, it is important to admit that Mississippi also has an overincarceration problem. This is yet another indicator of a broken justice system; a system that has failed to make Mississippi safer, stretched the state budget, and adversely impacted Mississippi families and communities.
The answer to Mississippi’s public safety woes is not more incarceration.
Over the past 30 years, Mississippi has over-relied on incarceration to improve public safety. I’ll use the term “overincarceration” to describe the policies and practices that have firmly established Mississippi as the world leader in incarceration rate while failing to improve public safety. The state’s prison population has more than doubled since 1990, and now Mississippi locks up more people per capita than oppressive government regimes such as Russia and China by significant margins.
If incarceration was the answer to improving public safety, Mississippi should be the safest place in the world to live.
Conservative policy solutions to address public safety must look at the justice system holistically. We can acknowledge that both violent crime and overincarceration are problems that need to be addressed. In fact, we must address both if we’re to improve public safety in a cost-effective way that minimizes harm to Mississippians.
The World Population Review points out, “a high incarceration rate does not actually increase public safety”, and it is clear the “tough-on-crime” policies intended to incarcerate us to safety simply have not worked. In 2016, Mississippi ranked
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