Feel however you like about Jay Z’s dealings with the Colin Kaepernick and the NFL, but his latest social justice initiative can’t be disputed.
According to reports, Yo Gotti and Team Roc helped 29 Mississippi inmates file a lawsuit claiming people are dying because the state “has failed to fund its prisons,” as five inmates have died recently.
These inmates have some of the best legal, celebrity and financial support going. Jay Z is always in philanthropist mode and the upcoming artists in the game are increasingly willing to drop a band and join him in a social cause.
“These deaths are a direct result of Mississippi’s utter disregard for the people it has incarcerated and their constitutional rights,” according to the lawsuit, which was filed by Jay-Z’s lawyer Alex Spiro.
“We cannot treat people this way and it’s time to do something about it,” Spiro of the Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP law firm, said in a statement to NBC News.
DOC Commissioner Pelicia Hall and Mississippi State Penitentiary Superintendent Marshall Turner have been named as defendants, as the lawsuit names three prison inmates who were killed this year at the state penitentiary in Parchman, Mississippi.
“Walter Gates, an inmate of Unit 29E at Parchman was stabbed multiple times the night of New Year’s Eve, and pronounced dead just after midnight,” the suit reads. “Roosevelt Holliman was stabbed to death in a fight the next day. And Denorris Howell, an inmate of Unit 291 at Parchman was stabbed multiple times and pronounced dead the day after that.”
The letter goes on to say, “people are forced to live in squalor, with rats that crawl over them as they sleep on the floor, having been denied even a mattress for a cot.”
Pictures have been deleted and uploaded on social media showing just how bad the conditions are.
“This unthinkable spate of deaths is the culmination of years of severe understaffing and neglect at Mississippi’s prisons,” Spiro added in his letter. “As Mississippi has incarcerated increasing numbers of people, it has dramatically reduced its funding of prisons. As a result, prison conditions fail to meet even the most basic human rights.”
Back in August of 2018, the Mississippi Department of Corrections Commissioner Pelicia E. Hall asked the FBI to help investigate the deaths of 15 inmates that occurred within a month.
