Mississippi prisons may soon have to provide protective gear like face masks and gloves to incarcerated individuals on work assignments involving dangers like toxic chemicals under a new bill.
Lawmakers in the Mississippi House voted 115-0 to pass House Bill 658 on Feb. 10. House Rep. Justis Gibbs, D-Jackson, who drafted the legislation, told the Mississippi Free Press on Monday that he expects the Senate’s Corrections Committee to vote on the bill in the next few weeks.
‘We Are Not Doing Our Job’
Days before members of the House voted to pass House Bill 658, Rep. Justis Gibbs held a press conference at the Mississippi Capitol Building on Feb. 5, saying that it is up to lawmakers to “right the wrongs with prison reform.”
“We are not doing our job as state legislators if we are not protecting those who do not have the capacity to protect themselves” Gibbs continued. “House bill 658 seeks to do just that.”
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The proposal comes a year after Susan Balfour filed a federal lawsuit on Feb. 14, 2024, alleging that in her thirty-three years at the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility, prison officials forced her and other inmates to “clean the prison with chemicals known to cause breast or other cancers without any protective equipment, including but not limited to glyphosate.”
Balfour, 63, now suffers from “stage IV breast cancer which has metastasized and is now present in her lymph nodes, bones and liver,” the lawsuit says. She believes that mixing the raw chemicals without protective equipment and the failure of prison medical staff to provide adequate medical treatment led to her prognosis.
Susan Balfour filed a federal lawsuit saying that while she was incarcerated in the Mississippi Department of Corrections, she was required to mix potentially cancer-causing cleaning materials without protective equipment and eventually developed cancer. She is pictured here at a press conference outside the Thad Cochran United States Courthouse in Jackson, Miss., on Feb.
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