Despite Justice Department scrutiny of the state penitentiary in Parchman, some housed in Unit 29 say conditions are worsening because of the extreme heat.
Inside the sole unit without air conditioning at Mississippi’s largest prison, inmates hang wet sheets from their cell ceilings to dampen the air and lay drenched towels strategically across their bodies.
A temporary reprieve comes from scoops of ice handed out twice a day.
As punishing heat spreads across the Deep South this summer, inmates in Unit 29 at Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman say they are sweltering inside cells where temperatures can easily climb into the triple digits.
The issue drew the scrutiny of the U.S. Justice Department four years ago, but despite efforts to upgrade the only maximum-security prison for men in the state, inmates say the situation has not improved.
Death by heat, fungal infection or plague. Take your pick, it could happen if you’re incarcerated in this Mississippi prison. It’s a good thing we don’t have some sort of constitutional amendment barring cruel and unusual punishment, isn’t it?
SCOTUS soon to rule that if heat, vermin, and disease are common enough, they’re no longer “unusual” and therefore comply with “originalist” interpretation of the Constitution that specifies that a punishment must be both cruel and unusual to be unconstitutional.
SCOTUS has gone back and forth over the years on whether a punishment must be both cruel and unusual for it to be prohibited. A simple legal reading would be a logical and, meaning yes it must be both cruel and unusual, and since in Mississippi, this is probably the usual, it would be allowed.
Personally, I’m fine with unusual punishments, if they fit the crime. I recall a case where a guy was sentenced to wear a sandwich board with some message on it for a while, which is certainly unusual, but it had relevance to the crime. But nobody should be sentenced to cruelty, as here or in the plantation labor stories we’ve been hearing about recently.