Video: Trustee Programs

CLAY AND CHICKASAW COUNTIES, Miss. (WCBI) – Daniel Easley was working as a trustee on a work detail.

Several counties use these prisoners to perform a variety of services.  The system can be beneficial to both the county and the inmates.

Every Sheriff’s Department has trustees, but not every inmate gets to be one.

Trustees spend their nights in a jail cell, and their days at work.

“The county, the trustees there, most of them are sentenced from justice court, which is going to be from either old fines, or some of them actually serving jail sentences, so we’ll try to go in these and evaluate them and if they qualify, we’ll put them out to working. Our state inmates, basically the same thing, but they are under MDOC rules and policies, so we make sure that’s enforced,” says Clay County Sheriff Eddie Scott.

The Clay County Sheriff’s Department can have up to sixty-five trustees, but right now have around thirty.

“They’re the ones you see out in the community that’s either working for the city, doing mowing, weed eating, or they’re on garbage trucks, so they provide a good benefit to the city and the county. The thing that we do, whether they’re county or state, we try to run our own rehabilitation program. We try to give them work ethics,” says Scott.

Chickasaw County Sheriff James Meyers says trustees are a win-win situation, because they’re willing to work and pay their debt to society, and that saves money for taxpayers.

“We have a lot of folks that come through our system that are very educated and some kind of talented, whether it be carpenters, plumbers, and to me, it’s just foolish not to give them that opportunity to work for the public, and in our situation, like here, I mean they save us thousands of dollars a year because they’re very skilled,” says Meyers.

Although trustees spend less time in their cells than regular inmates, they’re still under constant supervision.

“Here, it’s not like you get three or four chances, and three or four strikes on a jail, trustee status, or a jail support, I mean it’s a one strike rule. If you violate the rules and get caught, then we ship you back to the penitentiary,” says Meyers.