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East Mississippi Correctional Facility is a men's prison located in unincorporated Lauderdale County, Mississippi, near Meridian. It is about 90 miles east of the capital, Jackson. Opened in 1999, the special needs prison is intended to provide a high level of care for up to 1500 prisoners with seri
ous mental illness, at all custody levels. Since the prison opened, it has been one of six prisons in the state operated under contract to the Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC) by three successive for-profit companies. EMCF was first operated by Cornell Companies, which was acquired by the GEO Group in 2010. In 2012, MDOC forced GEO out of its Mississippi contracts for three facilities, after failure to improve substandard medical treatment and squalor in its facilities, and as a part of its settlement that year of a federal lawsuit for its operation of the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility. MDOC awarded the contract at EMCF and Walnut Grove to Management and Training Corporation (MTC) of Utah, but the complaints continued. In May 2013, the ACLU and Southern Poverty Law Center filed a class action suit against the state of Mississippi and operators of EMCF on behalf of its...
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