The police in the small city of Lexington, Miss., routinely made unjustified arrests, used excessive force and trampled on civil rights, investigators said.

The U.S. Justice Department said on Thursday it found a series of civil rights violations by a small-town Mississippi police department, accusing officers of routinely using excessive force and arresting people who owed fines for minor traffic offenses.

The City of Lexington, Miss. and its police department deprive people of their constitutional rights, discriminate against Black people, engage in excessive force and unlawfully jail people, the Justice Department said.

The U.S. Department of Justice will scale back its oversight into the operations of Julia Tutwiler Women’s Correctional Facility stemming from a consent decree.. The Alabama Department of Corrections announced in a news release sent Thursday that the state,

A decade after finding that Alabama failed to protect women incarcerated at Julia Tutwiler Prison from sexual abuse and harassment, the U.S. Department of Justice is preparing to scale back its oversight of the prison.