James Tatsch was not charged with any crime. But when he was found unresponsive in an isolation cell at the Alcorn County Jail on Jan. 17, he had been locked up for 12 days. He died at the local hospital.
Tatsch was waiting for mental health treatment through Mississippi’s involuntary commitment process. Every year, hundreds of people going through the process are detained in county jails for days or weeks at a time while they wait for evaluations, hearings and treatment. They are generally treated like criminal defendants and receive little or no mental health care while jailed.
Mississippi Today and ProPublica previously reported that since 2006, at least 14 people have died after being jailed during this process. Tatsch, who was 48 years old, is at least the 15th. No one in the state keeps track of how often people die while jailed for this reason. The news organizations identified the deaths through lawsuits, news clips and Mississippi Bureau of Investigation reports. MBI investigates in-custody deaths only at the request of the local sheriff or district attorney.
I hear you! I offer my position that neoliberals are conservatives. They have more tact and are more open to slight progress to attract votes, but they are still just conservatives who serve only corporations and billionaires to enrich themselves.
I also offer my position that the right spends a great deal of time re-defining words to use as weapons against the left. They will insist that authoritarianism and fascism are both leftist ideologies. Don’t give them even an inch. For example, they have spent decades calling all communism a left-wing construct. It is not.
There are some left-wing flavors of communism, but current Chinese communism and the old Soviet (Marxist-Leninist) communists are both extremely right-wing and conservative, even by their own definitions. Don’t let tankies (conservatives pretending to be leftists with conservative viewpoints) redefine words. Push back and make them look stupid. Wikipedia will absolutely back you up on these points if angry leftists like me aren’t around to jump in.