AMILE WILSON
Barbour’s budget, which he character“With the Republican takeover in the ized as a “return to discipline,” is more or House, some of these types of conservative less a harbinger for partisan battles to come bills that have been passed previously in the over many of the isSenate and have sues Holland outlined: either been altered redistricting, immigradramatically or tion, education, health just killed entirely care and implementin the House will ing a voter-identificaget a second look tion law that voters apwith this newly proved in November. configured leaderDuring past sesship,” Fillingane sions, the Republicantold the JFP. led state Senate passed House Demobills to allow privately crats shot down run charter schools to both the immigraopen in Mississippi as tion bill and have well as an immigration Derrick Johnson, president of the state repeatedly balked bill modeled after con- branch of the National Association for the at the idea of estroversial laws in Ari- Advancement of Colored People, fears tablishing charter zona and Alabama that the Republican-led Legislature might seek schools, arguto roll back civil rights advances of blacks would have required and other minority groups. ing that doing so local law enforcement would suck reto investigate people sources away from they suspect are in the country illegally. traditional public schools. State Sen. Joey Fillingane, R-Sumrall, who authored the immigration bill, said The Battle Lines Republican lawmakers will likely revive For both parties, living within the alboth issues this year. lowance the state budget provides will be
tricky. Gov. Barbour and the Joint Legislative Budget Committee in November adopted a tentative plan for the 2013 fiscal year, which begins July 2012 and is based on only a 0.7 percent increase in revenue. Every year, ideological battle lines are drawn over health care, especially mental-health services and Medicaid, and education. This year will be no different. “If we have a fight over funding, it’ll be over education and health care,” said state Rep. Cecil Brown, D-Jackson. From the looks of Barbour’s proposal, that funding fight seems more of a matter of when not if. In total, the Barbour budget reduced higher-education funding by 2.8 percent to $861 million from $886 million in fiscal year 2012. This included approximately $5.9 million to community colleges (Barbour added that like public broadcasting, community-college athletic programs should some day fund themselves). Meanwhile, Barbour whacked public health by 4.3 percent to $51.4 million from $53.7 million the previous year. Even though he said health care got a “screwing” in Barbour’s budget, Holland said he doesn’t intend to be much of a thorn in the side of the new Republican
leadership in the House—as long as they don’t “take the meat ax” to hammer down spending on social safety-net programs like Medicaid. Holland, who planned to vote for Speaker-designee Gunn, said he hopes that the new speaker will use his expertise from chairing the health-care appropriations subcommittee for 22 years. “I’m going to with every ounce of conciliatory leadership I can muster, get along with these Republicans—they won. I wouldn’t say fair and square, but they won, and I hope they succeed. But when it comes to the least and most vulnerable among us, they’ve got me to contend with before they put the dagger in their heart,” Holland said. Late in the year, Barbour made signaled a need to inject the flow of revenue to the state. In November, he wrote a letter to U.S. Sens. Mike Enzi and Lamar Alexander, Republicans from Wyoming and Tennessee, respectively, expressing support for a bill they authored that would allow states to collect sales tax on online purchases. “Fifteen years ago, when e-commerce was still a nascent industry, it made sense More STAMPEDE, see page 16
A Wish List for DV Legislation that he intends to work hard on whatever package of bills Hood intends to propose. Sandy Middleton, executive director of the Center for Violence Prevention in Pearl and a regular victim’s advocate at the capitol, wasn’t quite as reticent to speak, although she, too, indicated that nothing was written in stone, yet. Until advocates know who will be chairing committees, Middleton said, it’s unproductive to finalize strategy and a specific action list. That doesn’t mean she’s without a wish list for legislation. Middleton mentioned three areas where additional legislation would help protect victims: strengthening confidentiality laws for shelter records; going statewide with a batterer’s intervention program; and giving victims of domestic violence an easier path to divorce. Regarding strengthening confidentiality for shelter records, Middleton said that much of the information victims provide to shelters or victims’ advocates, such as where they’re living, could put victims in danger if it were to fall into the wrong hands. Additionally, she’s not thrilled to provide abusers potential ammunition against their victims to be used in child custody or divorce proceedings. Mississippi courts, she indicated, frequently side with attorneys representing batterers in such cases instead of with their victims. “It’s important to develop trust,” Middleton said of the relationship between shelters and their clients. Victims need to know that the details of their lives are safe with the people and organizations they have turned to for help. In 2009, the center spearheaded an effort to bring a batterer’s intervention program to the Jackson area, and its ANDY CHILDERS
W
ith all the new faces in the Mississippi Legislature this year, advocates for new and strengthened laws to protect victims of domestic violence are being non-committal about the specific legislation they plan to introduce during this year’s session. Women’s advocates all seem to agree on one thing, though: Former Rep. Brandon Jones, D-Pascagoula, will be missed. During his tenure in the state House of Representatives, Jones sponsored several bills to help protect domestic-violence victims, including one to strengthen the state’s stalking laws and another to add strangulation to the list of aggravating actions that increase a domestic assault charge from a misdemeanor to a felony. Jones’ passion for the issue came from his constituents’ outrage when, in 2008, Gov. Haley Barbour suspended Michael Graham’s life sentence for murdering his ex-wife, Adrienne Klasky. (Graham was one of four domestic murderers the governor pardoned during his tenure.) Graham spent years abusing and stalking Klasky. Then, on April 7, 1989, he pulled up alongside her and shot her in the head as she was waiting for a light to change in downtown Pascagoula. Jones went as far as introducing a bill to add accountability to the governor’s pardoning powers, such as getting advice from the parole board and providing notification to the victim’s family. That bill, unlike many others he introduced, went nowhere. “He was a tremendous leader on this issue,” said Sen. David Blount, D-Jackson, about Jones. “I’m hoping to find someone who can pick up the mantle.” On the Senate side of the state capitol, Blount has also sponsored numerous domestic-violence bills; however, he would not reveal a game plan for the 2012 session. The senator indicated that Attorney General Jim Hood generally led the charge on those issues, and although they have spoken, Blount was keeping mum. Hood did not respond to our request for an interview. “We haven’t finalized everything,” Blount said, adding
program is still the only one of its kind in Mississippi. The program has succeeded everywhere the CVP has instituted a program, and Middleton said that she would like to see Mississippi adopt the intervention model statewide, providing additional resources and covering a wider area than the CVP can hope to do. “It’s a proven program,” she said, citing a recidivism rate of less than 1 percent for the hundreds of men and women who have completed the program offered through the CVP. Judges sentence batterers to attend the 12-week program in lieu of putting them in jail or simply setting them free. Unlike anger management, the BIP focuses on examining and changing batterers’ core beliefs toward their victims. The program gets to the root of the belief systems—power and control issues, for example, or male privilege— that keep the cycle of violence in place, thus allowing for fundamental changes in thinking and behavior. Regarding the state’s stringent divorce laws, Middleton doesn’t see a lot of hope in pushing for laws friendlier to victims; however, that doesn’t keep her from advocating for change. Divorce is often the final bit of power a batterer can keep over his or her victim, she said, and Mississippi’s laws don’t make divorce easy or affordable. “The offenders are just having fun,” she said of batterers who often drag out divorce proceedings for years, forcing their victims to spend thousands of dollars and hours reliving traumatic events. “It’s victimizing them all over again.”
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by Ronni Mott
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