Dr. Tom Recor, medical director for the Mississippi Department of Mental Health, told the Senate Public Health and Welfare panel that the department has expanded forensic evaluation capacity, is moving forward with a renovated maximum-security building at Mississippi State Hospital and has launched a public tracking website that cost about $13,000.

Why it matters: Recor said the changes aim to shorten long waits for competency evaluations, address a legal bottleneck that left some defendants incarcerated for years, and free limited inpatient beds for people who need civil psychiatric commitment rather than long jail stays.

Recor told senators that competency evaluations are governed by a 1960 United States Supreme Court decision and that the state must recruit licensed clinicians to determine whether defendants are able to assist in their defense. He said Mississippi once saw evaluation waits measured in hundreds or even a thousand days but that in 2019–20 the Whitfield forensic service reduced wait times so no one waited more than 30 days for an initial evaluation.

To expand capacity, Recor said the department advertised full-time evaluator positions at state hospitals and initially received no applicants; later, after creating a certification process under the Forensic Mental Health Act of 2019 and increasing transparency, about 16 clinicians from places such as Tulane, Colorado and New York became licensed evaluators in Mississippi. "If we made our process attractive enough ... maybe folks would come and get licensed in Mississippi," Recor said.

He described the department’s new tracking tool for forensic evaluations, saying a forensic ID number is issued for each order and that judges, clerks, defense attorneys, prosecutors and sheriffs can check the status in real time without patient information. "It cost $13,000 to put together, and it's tens of thousands of views now, and the courts are actually using it," Recor said.

On inpatient capacity, Recor outlined bed counts the department is using to plan services: historically 25 maximum-security beds used for pretrial competence restoration (now planned as an 81-bed secure unit after renovation), roughly 300 medium-acute beds, 75 medium long-term beds and 56 supervised transitional beds. He said about 25% of the Department of Mental Health’s dedicated inpatient beds serve the not-restorable or continued-treatment forensic population. Recor noted that, among a subset of 102 forensic-level patients, about 49% had been charged with murder or killing at least one person.

Recor and senators discussed three pieces of state law that affect the system. He said the Forensic Mental Health Act of 2019 required evaluator certification. He described House Bill 1640 as making it more difficult for counties to hold mentally ill, noncriminal individuals in jail, which the department and some speakers said increased access to beds for not-restorable forensic patients. He credited House Bill 1088 with eliminating a legal bottleneck by allowing circuit judges to retain jurisdiction and enter civil commitments for some defendants, which Recor said has moved people who had been jailed for years into treatment "in a matter of a couple weeks." The transcript identifies the 1960 Supreme Court decision only as such; no case name or citation was provided in the hearing.

Recor stressed the overlap between forensic services and civil commitments, saying the same inpatient beds are used for both purposes. He cautioned against legislation that would allow pretrial defendants to be treated in general inpatient psychiatric units without special provisions, warning that defense attorneys could use that to move clients from jail into scarce hospital resources and displace people in the community who need treatment.

Committee members pressed Recor on inconsistent data reporting from community mental health centers and chanceries. Recor and senators described that data submission has been uneven — one senator said only about 43% of chanceries submitted requested information in a recent period — and that community centers sometimes use different definitions. Senators discussed a failed ARPA-funded procurement for broader IT upgrades and said procurement and information-technology support from the state (ITS) can be slow and fragmented. Recor said the department can pursue standardized reporting but noted limits on DMH’s authority to compel county or chancery reporting without additional accountability mechanisms.

Other initiatives mentioned included a MacArthur Justice Center-funded forensic navigator program (described in the hearing as a grant of about three-quarters of $1,000,000) to steer low-level offenders toward treatment and reduce recidivism, and a residency program at the state hospital to train psychiatric residents.

The session closed with senators and Recor agreeing to pursue more standardized data reporting and continued coordination between courts, law enforcement and DMH. No formal votes or committee actions were recorded in the transcript.