It looks like about once a year, officials in Pike County and McComb will need to be reminded gently to take a deep breath and settle their differences.
It happened in December 2024, 11 months ago, when county supervisors suggested that McComb hire off-duty sheriff’s deputies for patrols in the city until several police vacancies were filled.
The city, though it was struggling with a gunfire problem, didn’t like the idea, and the next day Sheriff Wally Jones sent deputies and other officers into McComb for a few raids.
Fortunately, any resentments simmered down fairly quickly. Everyone wisely stood down from red alert. The city hired several police officers.
Here we are now with a sequel. The city and the sheriff bickered last week over what the county should be paid for holding McComb prisoners in the jail.
When the city said that, because of a new opinion from the attorney general’s office, it wasn’t going to pay the full bill from the jail, Jones stopped accepting McComb prisoners. He also told the city it needed to relocate any prisoners from the Pike County jail within 45 days.
Jones portrayed the dispute as one in which the city wanted to reduce the amount it paid each day to hold a McComb prisoner in the county jail. It’s more accurate to describe the problem as a question of when the responsibility for a prisoner's cost shifts from the city to the county.
Opinions from the attorney general’s office have given different guidances on this, so one quick fix would be for the lawyers in that office to coordinate a response to the question.
Ultimately, the Legislature may have to get involved. Or maybe it will take a judge’s ruling to decide.
But until any of that occurs, McComb and Pike County must work out a fair payment schedule between themselves.
At times, this will not be a simple task. For example, who pays to hold a prisoner facing charges in McComb if there is a delay of several months in getting his case in front of a grand jury for indictment?
At least there’s one big difference between this year and last year. In 2024, the disagreement was about policing. Now it’s about who pays to hold people in jail. In an odd way, it’s progress when the fight is about money.
A bit more seriously, the city and county do need to figure this out. And, to everyone's credit, the city board held a meeting Monday at which county attorney Brandon Frazier was among those speaking.
Some people will remember the early 1990s, when there was a big debate over whether to build a new county jail and a new one for McComb at the same time.
Voices of reason, including Charles Dunagin, my predecessor as editor, said Pike County needed only one jail. And that’s what happened. McComb instead built a new “law enforcement complex,” a good, solid police and city court headquarters, next to the Boys and Girls Club. It was money well spent.
I know the cost of law enforcement has gone way up, but there is still no reason for this county to have two jails. There also is no reason that McComb should have to send its prisoners to jails outside Pike County, which it has been doing for the past few days.
At a minimum, the fuel and labor costs of driving prisoners to and from a distant jail makes that unworkable for the long term.
The common-sense solution, which benefits everybody, including taxpayers, is for Pike County to resume accepting McComb’s prisoners.
That may not happen right away. Feelings are bruised. I’m sure the city is mad at the sheriff for basically kicking its prisoners out of the jail. And it was clear last Friday that the police chief’s description of Jones as immature, among other things, was not helpful.
Everybody will have to bend a little bit — can I say it? Take a deep breath! — to resolve this. That means for a time the city may pay more than it wants to for its prisoners to be held in Pike County, and the county may be paid less than it would like.
But working this out is the only way forward. Neither Sheriff Jones nor Chief Perry are unreasonable officers, and the elected officials they work with surely understand there’s only one reasonable solution.
That about wraps up the 2025 “take a deep breath” column. If this pattern holds, I’ll check in 11 months from now, in October 2026, when the bickering resumes.
