Former Fellow Scott Colom (’09), the district attorney for the 16th Circuit Court of Mississippi, wrote a column for The Dispatch highlighting the violence and uninhabitable conditions at the Mississippi State Penitentiary (“Two Proposals for Addressing the State's Prison Crisis,” Jan. 23). “Our newly elected state leaders have a choice before them: address the moral and legal crisis in our prisons or ignore it until the federal government steps in,” Scott said.