The Southern Poverty Law Center today filed a federal lawsuit against Mississippi authorities who took a newborn baby from a Mexican immigrant mother and placed the child with a white couple. The SPLC also has appealed an earlier gag order that prohibited the mother and her lawyers from speaking publicly about her family’s ordeal despite the mother’s request to waive confidentiality rules of the youth court.
The Mississippi Supreme Court has ruled that a juvenile court judge cannot punish the Southern Poverty Law Center for its advocacy on behalf of a child facing incarceration at the state’s juvenile prison.
Mississippi's mental health system is failing children from low-income households. The state fails to invest in community-based services and instead pumps the bulk of its resources into ineffective, expensive institutions. Parents are often forced to choose between hospitalizing their children or foregoing mental health services altogether.
The SPLC Mississippi Youth Justice Project and other civil rights and mental health advocates sued the state of Mississippi today in an effort to improve the state's mental health system for children, which fails to invest in community-based services and instead pumps the bulk of its resources into ineffective, expensive institutions.
Hinds County School District officials violated the constitutional rights of a 10th–grader who was expelled for throwing a penny that landed on his school bus driver. The expulsion and subsequent assignment to an alternative school threatens to derail the academic and athletic career of the 16-year-old boy, a good student who dreamed of a collegiate basketball scholarship.
Children and teens held at the Lauderdale County Juvenile Detention Center in Mississippi were subjected to shockingly inhumane treatment. The youths endured physical and mental abuse as they were crammed into small, filthy cells and tormented with pepper spray for minor infractions. The Southern Poverty Law Center sued Lauderdale County and reached a settlement agreement to end the abuses.
The Southern Poverty Law Center today sued Lauderdale County, Miss., to comply with federal law and open the county's juvenile detention center to inspection following reports of children being locked down in unsanitary, overcrowded and abusive conditions.
Children and teens at a Mississippi juvenile detention center will no longer be locked in cells all day without reason or forced to sleep on the floor in a squalid, overcrowded facility following an agreement the Southern Poverty Law Center has reached in a federal lawsuit.
Children held at the Harrison County Juvenile Detention Center in Mississippi endured squalid conditions and horrific physical and mental abuse that violated their civil rights. They were forced to endure shackling, physical assaults by staff, confinement to vermin-infested cells and overcrowded, unsanitary conditions that resulted in widespread contraction of scabies and staph infections. The detention center also failed to provide children with adequate medical and mental health care during their confinement. The Southern Poverty Law Center filed a federal class action lawsuit that resulted in a settlement agreement to protect children and teens detained at the center from abuse and neglect.
The Southern Poverty Law Center today filed a federal class action suit to stop the "shockingly inhumane" treatment of children at a juvenile detention center and to force officials to provide sanitary facilities and mental health treatment to young people confined there.
