Amid a decade-long court battle, control of Hinds County’s Raymond Detention Center — severely understaffed and rife with violence, dysfunction and inhumane conditions — is now under the control of a court-appointed administrator.
Wendell M. France Sr., the receiver appointed by a federal judge, took the helm of the long-embattled facility Wednesday morning. France is in charge of the jail’s budget, personnel and day-to-day operations. He is a public safety consultant and a former assistant jail warden of the Baltimore Central Booking and Intake Center.
France and his team are prohibited by the judge from making public statements.
The change was ordered nearly three years ago, but was delayed by the county’s appeal of the scope of France’s duties. France will oversee a jail that has gotten worse during that time, according to court-appointed monitors. There have been at least six deaths this year, including a homicide, a drug overdose and another suspected drug overdose.
The facility has physically deteriorated as well. In one unit, almost all of the windows are broken out. Nearly half of the facility’s cameras are inoperable. And incarcerated people are sleeping on the floors, according to people formerly detained there and the latest monitoring report.
“The complete shock, as far as the conditions, was mind-blowing,” said Tedrick Francois, who spent two weeks this summer detained in the jail after being charged with attempting to deposit checks more than once. “I’ve been to a few county jails, and by far, Raymond… is the worst.”
Francois rattled off a list of issues, many of which have been documented over the years in reports written by a court-appointed monitoring team: severe understaffing, violence, drugs and detainees who control the facility.
The biggest, and one of the most persistent, concerns raised by monitors in August at a federal court hearing was the jail’s understaffing, which monitor Elizabeth Simpson said led to a lack of safety.
“There just aren’t sufficient staff to supervise the building,” she said at the hearing. “It’s reflected in the assaults, but also in the condition of the facility and in the escapes as well.”
The facility was operating with just 29% of the required staff, according to the report. Sheriff Tyree Jones disputed that number in an interview earlier this year. However, he acknowledged that full staffing remains a persistent issue.
“All of this kind of depends on fixing this glaring problem,” said Hernandez D. Stroud, a senior fellow in the Justice Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, who has written extensively about receivership. “What good are policies if you don’t have staff to adhere to them and implement them?”
Stroud said in the past, other receivers have addressed low staffing by hiring more people and putting caps on the number of people behind bars.
The county entered this receivership after the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit in 2016 following its investigation into the county’s detention facilities. The department found numerous violations of detainees’ rights to due process and protection from cruel and unusual punishment. The department cited understaffing, violence, a steady flow of contraband and poor record-keeping that led to people being detained past their release dates. The other facilities have been closed or brought into compliance, except for the Raymond Detention Center.
Although both parties agreed to fix the constitutional violations in a court-approved consent decree, the county failed to comply with many parts of the agreement. U.S. District Court Judge Carlton Reeves held the county in contempt of court twice in 2022, before ordering the receivership now held by France.
Imposing a receivership is one of the most extreme measures that can be taken to correct constitutional violations, aside from shutting down a facility. It’s only happened about a dozen times in U.S. prisons and jails. There are two active receiverships over California prisons’ medical and mental health care systems, and another has been imposed in New York, pending the appointment of a receiver.
The court-enforced monitoring provides a rare look into the operations of the detention center in a state where there is no inspection or regulation of county jails.
“In the absence of any kinds of checks and balances on the jail, or some kind of external oversight, then the only thing you’ve got is the courts,” said Michele Deitch, a distinguished senior lecturer at The University of Texas at Austin who runs the National Resource Center for Correctional Oversight. “That’s why it’s come to this.”
Between December 2022 and May 2025, the court-enforced oversight of the facility was paused. Lawsuits filed during this period claim the constitutional violations continued.
Pending lawsuits filed during that time claimed horrifying conditions inside. In one lawsuit, former detainee Paul Battle stated that in October 2023, he was repeatedly shocked with a stun gun. He also said he was denied access to medical care and a shower while being held in solitary confinement for 20 days in a cell covered in feces and blood. In another case, Quintarius Carter said he was placed in an “inhumane and unlivable holding cell contaminated and filled with feces and dark mold,” in November 2024. Carter also claimed he was held for six months in a holding cell typically used for short periods by new detainees as they enter the jail. The monitoring team and the judge have repeatedly scolded the county for housing people in such cells, which have no windows or beds.
Jones and the officers named in Battle’s lawsuit denied the allegations. The county has not yet responded to Carter’s claims.
The county has made changes. It closed one housing unit deemed dangerous and reduced the population of the 594-bed facility to about 400. The Hinds County Board of Supervisors approved the sheriff’s request for pay raises to attract and retain detention officers. And some of the physical issues, such as faulty locks, will be in the past once detainees are moved into a $125 million facility that the county is building. It’s scheduled to be completed in 2028, but some detainees may be moved in as early as next year.
“The jail has not been able to address the challenges over a period of time because of the way that it was built,” Jones has told The Marshall Project - Jackson.
But a new facility will not be a fix-all solution, said Kathryn Bryan, a former jail administrator at the facility and corrections consultant. Bryan said she’s seen new facilities deteriorate rapidly when they are understaffed or poorly managed.
“Basic constitutional rights of inmates, basic human needs of inmates, those things are put by the wayside, even in a brand new facility, at the expense of taxpayer money and taxpayer expectations,” she said.
However, in the court order outlining France’s duties, Reeves, the federal judge, wrote that the court anticipates the county will achieve “substantial compliance” by the time the new jail opens.
