Last month, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit in federal court on behalf of the inmates — many seriously mentally ill — at the East Mississippi Correctional Facility. The conditions shock the conscience and, as the complaint charges, have “cost many prisoners their health, and their limbs, their eyesight, and even their lives.”

The “solitary confinement zones house dozens of seriously mentally ill prisoners who are locked down in filthy cells for days, weeks, or even years at a time,” the suit alleges. “Rapes, stabbings, beatings, and other acts of violence are rampant,” and inmates have set fires as “the only way to get medical attention in emergencies.”

This suit is the latest chapter in a series of challenges to horrendous conditions in Mississippi prisons. In March 2012, Federal District Judge Carlton Reeves in Jackson approved an agreement between the state and the Justice Department to reform a prison then called the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility. The agreement was in response to a lawsuit, which was also brought by the A.C.L.U. and the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The abuses there included staff members coercing prisoners to have sex in exchange for food or even phone privileges, officers responding to minor aggression of prisoners by slamming them headfirst into the ground and widespread rape among the young prisoners. A withering Justice Department report called the sexual misconduct by the prison staff and rape there “among the worst that we have seen in any facility anywhere in the nation.”