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Mississippi Center for Justice
Mission:
Phone number: 601-352-2269
Fax: 601-352-4769
Street address: 5 Old River Pl. [P.O. Box 1023]
City, State, ZIP: Jackson, MS 39215
URL for Web site: http://www.mscenterforjustice.org
E-mail address:
Annual Events:
(Also send info to: events@jacksonfreepress.com and click here to add to Annual Events calendar.)
What Volunteers Do:
Donating Process:
What is needed right now:
Additional information: With the advent of the 21st century, Mississippi no longer had concerted, statewide capacity to combat continuing problems of discrimination and poverty. In the 1960s and 1970s, nonprofit law firms provided critical legal support to Mississippi’s civil rights movement. In the 1980s and 1990s, federal funding from the Legal Services Corporation supported statewide advocacy for low-income people. As of 2002, the legal needs of Mississippi’s low-income people and communities of color were addressed by a committed and overwhelmed few.
In response, the Mississippi Center for Justice has committed itself to creating an infrastructure for legal advocacy that achieves social justice through multiple strategies. Equality continues to elude most Mississippians in the areas of housing access, fair credit, quality public education, consumer protection, voting rights, employment opportunities, and fair working conditions. If the Center were to employ only traditional methods of legal advocacy to address these problems, a focused effort in any one of these areas could occupy the full attention of a small staff. Instead, the Center economizes its resources and accomplishes its goals by enlisting existing legal talent within the state and recruiting additional resources to supplement local efforts.
Since its founding, MCJ has made a lasting impact on Mississippi’s social justice landscape. In its brief history MCJ has:
• prevented 65,000 poor and disabled Mississippians from losing their healthcare
• dismantled a Jim Crow-era school board election system in the Mississippi Delta
• stopped the torture of juveniles in the state’s training schools, successfully fought for their right to access to counsel, and help pass sweeping juvenile justice reform
• attacked predatory lending practices in the migrant poultry worker community
• prevented the funneling of children from the schoolhouse to the jailhouse by teaching grassroots community organizers and defense attorneys how to navigate the state’s convoluted juvenile justice system
• Connected economic justice advocates from across the Deep South to develop a comprehensive strategy to eliminate poverty
Following the nation’s worst natural disaster, MCJ opened Katrina Recovery Office at Biloxi and staffed it with a progressive, aggressive and highly experienced team of attorneys to fight for a fair and just recovery for low- income, minority and elder communities in coastal Mississippi.
Since establishing its Katrina Recovery Office in September, 2005, MCJ’s efforts have:
• expanded eligibility for homeowner grants aimed at low and medium income households by $400 million and won $125 million in rental rehabilitation grants tied to ten year affordability criteria pegged at 60% to 80% of the region’s median income;
• forced FEMA to abandon a wholesale eviction of 3,000 Katrina trailer occupants at the opening of the 2006 hurricane season;
• resisted unfair processes in the disposition and sale of public housing properties by organizing and advocating on behalf of 350 tenants in three public housing authority projects;
• served as a conduit for 200 volunteer law students from the Student Hurricane Network, and more than 50 experienced lawyers from around the nation, generating the approximately 11,000 pro bono hours - the equivalent of six full time attorneys;
• conceived and established intake and delivery programs to provide pro bono representation to Katrina victims on a variety of issues, including evictions, FEMA and SBA benefits, and contractor and insurance disputes;
• served as local counsel in Brou v. FEMA, the class action case which forced FEMA to make accommodations for the temporary housing of special-need and elderlyKatrina victims;
• helped to found and shape the Gulf Coast’s largest progressive alliance, the Steps Coalition;
• persuaded the governor’s policy staff to meet needs of low-income hurricane survivors, including both renters (whose needs were previously almost totally neglected) and homeowners; as a result, Phase II of the Governor’s Recovery and Renewal plan contains several improvements recommended by MCJ, most notably the increase in the assistance cap from $50,000 to $100,000.
Now, our work has begun on Phase III, which is expected to include sizeable programs to increase the availability of rental housing (an estimated 5,000 households) and to enable working but low-wage renters to become home owners (an estimated 3,000 households), as proposed by MCJ and others.
Informing all of the foregoing has been MCJ’s work to identify and collect the data needed justify each position it has advanced. As a result, MCJ is credited with producing more original research faster than any other public interest law firm or organization operating in Mississippi. This includes the only three-county study of rental unit damage based on the Loper Survey, the only eviction court survey, and the only surveys of historic neighborhoods in low-income and minority communities. MCJ has shared this research with its allies, freely distributing the results.
Additionally, MCJ’s research has provided factual support for increasing CDBG funding for rental housing repair, gaining Low Income Tax Credit approvals in the three coastal counties, and creation of a program specifically targeting low-income, minority and elderly renters. The latter is estimated to have provided assistance to at least 5,000 low-income households (13 percent of all Gulf Coast households have at least one adult aged 65;) MCJ believes a combination of CDBG funding and Low Income Tax Credits will have the potential to provide low-income assistance to 5,000 more.
Last, but not least, MCJ’s research is credited with liberalizing appeals rules that will ultimately affect up to 17,000 grant recipients under Phases I and II of the Mississippi Homeowner Assistance Grant Program. Through advocacy, research and reason MCJ has influenced the Mississippi’s governor to focus on low-income housing solutions in Phase II, including a proposal to enable up to 3,000 work-force households to move from rental to home ownership. This movement of work-force households will benefit elderly renters by increasing the availability of low income housing.
The Center’s mission is put into action through four operating principles:
• Partnerships with leaders throughout the state: We convene stakeholders and connect communities with legal resources.
• Generating the legal community’s commitment: We work with local leaders to develop legal strategies supportive of their campaign objectives and organize legal talent to support community goals.
• Making every event a “call to action” event: We convene people in a way that generates commitments and causes “breakthroughs” in enrollment of leaders and legal talent.
• Seeking, celebrating, and adapting models that work: We publicize and celebrate community and legal leadership examples that serve as inspirations, role models, and blueprints for action.
Twelve Social Justice Breakdowns That Local Mississippi Leaders Are Seeing In Their Communities:
• Young children diverted from the school house to the jail house. Zero tolerance school discipline policies and inadequate juvenile defense diverts elementary school children from public schools and channels them into the juvenile justice system with little or no recourse. They and their parents are left to navigate the juvenile justice system while their educational opportunities evaporate. State education policy on school discipline suggests this problem is pervasive.
• Predatory financing disables low-wage workers. In Jackson and other Mississippi communities, low-wage earners’ marginal economic status puts them at the mercy of payday loan companies and check cashing operations, title loan lenders and others in the “sub-prime” finance industry.
• Foster care system drops children through the cracks. Children in foster care are physically abused and neglected. The system is under-funded and under-staffed. Children age out of the system with no jobs, no skills, no transition support. They are left without effective futures.
• Lost in the court system. The courts do not work for poor people in many Mississippi jurisdictions. Any day in Mississippi you can go into courts of record and watch unrepresented people get lost. They cannot navigate the process without legal representation. They lose when they shouldn’t. The court system is not effective in administrating the flow of pro se cases or providing attorney representation when it is needed.
• Lost in the administrative system. Support services administered by the Mississippi Department of Human Services are not getting to the low-wage workers who are eligible for them. Regional administrators are not following DHS policies in providing child care, transportation, job training and other support services.
• Voting rights of African Americans imperiled by new electoral barriers. The struggle to secure basic democratic rights of people of color is ongoing. Implementation of Mississippi legislation newly enacted to apply the federal Help America Vote Act must be vigilantly monitored, county by county, to guard against setbacks.
• Substandard and unequal access to housing. Lack of access to adequate shelter remains one of Mississippi’s most pressing social justice breakdowns. Community leaders in Jackson are pioneering promising new approaches to improving and expanding housing availability, and their successes need to be replicated in other communities.
• Lack of access to health care creates health status disparities and avoidable costs. Most Mississippi communities exhibit severe health status disparities based on race and economic status, to the detriment of everyone in those communities. Communities around the country have made dramatic progress in eliminating such disparities, using approaches readily adaptable but as yet untried in Mississippi.
• Exploitation of immigrant workers. Mirroring historic patterns of abuse of migrant farmworkers, labor contractors are transporting immigrants from the borders of Texas and Florida to work in the poultry processing plants of east Mississippi and the catfish processing plants of the Mississippi Delta. These workers are housed in appallingly overcrowded and substandard housing and are subjected to abusive working conditions.
• Low-income communities and communities of color lack access to risk-adjusted financing for small business startup. In most Mississippi counties, communities are missing out on job development opportunities because of the unavailability of risk-adjusted financing. Such financing could increase the availability of child care and transportation services essential for low-wage workers to maintain their fragile hold on employment.
• Child care crisis confronts low-income families. The Mississippi Department of Human Services’ administration of funding to child care providers poses discriminatory impediments to provider participation, to the detriment of low-income parents and their children.
• State personnel procedures fail to protect low-wage state employees. Workers who attempt to redress discriminatory practices by state agencies are blocked by unfair procedural impediments. Opportunities for advancement even in public sector employment are effectively closed.
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