The Marion County Sheriff’s Office inmate litter program was recently named tops in the state.
The joint award from Keep Mississippi Beautiful and the Mississippi Department of Transportation honored the county for picking up the most roadside litter in the state as part of the inmate labor program.
Marion County also won first place in District 7, which includes 13 counties in south Mississippi, for the fourth year in a row.
Sheriff Berkley Hall said the state spends $3 million a year statewide using inmates to help clean along state highways and last year Marion County picked up 13,397 bags of trash.
Toni Griffin has headed the program for five years, using a female inmate work crew, and said litter along the highways of Marion County is a problem.
“Sometimes we would be picking up an area and people would throw things in the area we had just cleaned,” she said.
Hall said he is saddened that litter is such a major problem.
“If we hadn’t picked it up, can you imagine what the state highways would have looked like?” he said. “This program is just for the highways; the supervisors have to pay people to go along the roads and clean up after people’s trash. It’s a real shame. People just don’t care.”
Hall said the Sheriff’s Office would do what it can to prosecute littering.
“We have trouble catching them,” he said. “It’s very hard to prosecute someone for littering unless you’re an eyewitness. Many people want to report it, but they won’t come forward and go to court for it. We’re going to keep trying.”
Pictured Above: Marion County Sheriff Berkley Hall and Toni Griffin, who heads the county’s roadside litter program, hold recent state awards. | Photo by Mark Rogers
