Scott Colom wants to bring a fresh perspective.
The 32-year-old Columbus lawyer and city prosecutor says his youth is one of his strengths in his campaign to be elected District 16 District Attorney. He has new ideas. He thinks the current system sends too many to prison for too little, and that doing so makes our communities less safe.
His campaign has framed his youth and his new ideas as positives.
His opponent — Forrest Allgood, the current district attorney — says he is too inexperienced.
Colom said witnessing what he called injustices from Allgood’s office during the last 26 years is what motivated him to pursue the position, which serves Lowndes, Oktibbeha, Clay and Noxubee counties. This is Colom’s first campaign, but he knew a viable run against a longterm incumbent would require energy.
“I knew I needed to be aggressive with my messaging and my fundraising because I wanted the voters to truly have a choice,” Colom said.
Background
Colom was raised in Columbus. He graduated from Columbus High School in 2001. A successful prep basketball career led Colom to Millsaps College in Jackson, where he continued to play basketball. He attended law school at the University of Wisconsin. While there, he spent summers working for the United Nations Tribunal on Rwanda in Tanzania and the Civil Rights Commission. Colom also received the Skadden Fellowship, which pays for young lawyers to focus on public service for two years. He used his fellowship fighting predatory payday lending with the Mississippi Center for Justice.
Upon completion of his fellowship, Colom returned to Columbus to join the family law practice, a move he did not anticipate.
“Growing up, you never want to go back to your hometown,” he said. “I never thought I’d end up back in Columbus. Never. But once I started practicing law I decided there would be no better honor to my parents than to come back to the place that helped raise me and give back to those people. Because there’s a lot of needs here.”
Colom became a Lowndes County Justice Court Judge in 2011. He moved on to be municipal judge in Aberdeen in 2012, and was named Columbus city prosecutor in July of 2012.
“As I’ve become more educated about (the criminal justice system), I’ve realized that we don’t have the best priorities and the policies that we’ve been doing the past 40 years haven’t been working,” Colom said. “They haven’t made us safer, and they’ve had disastrous effects on people and their families. So, I decided to become city prosecutor to try to implement some of these smarter polices, and I’ve been doing it. But as I thought more about the district attorney position, I couldn’t help but think that the reality is a lot of injustices are being served from that office. If you do research on our district attorney, some of the competency issues that he has have had disastrous effects on people.”
Visions for office
Colom is running on a simple slogan: “Tough. Smart. Fair.”
“My first responsibility is do everything in my power to make the community safe,” Colom said. “I understand that we’ve got to be tough on violent crime. We have to make sure that the public knows that we’ve got a district attorney who is doing everything in his power to make it clear to criminals that if you commit violence in these four counties, I’m going to punish you as swiftly as possible. At the same time, that cannot be at the expense of convicting innocent people. And I will not do whatever it takes to get a conviction.”
He sees himself as active prosecutor if elected district attorney. However, he said he would like to set up a unit where he and senior attorneys on his staff would focus solely on violent crime. He believes this approach would lead to quicker trials for violent crime cases and better results.
“What I want to do is have our best attorneys focus only on the violent crimes so we can get to them quicker,” he said. “And I also want to have the investigators more involved in the investigation prior to the indictment.”
Colom diverges from Allgood in that he believes the district attorney serves the criminal justice system, while Allgood sees his role as an advocate for the victim.
“The reality is that the district attorney does not represent the victim, he represents justice,” Colom said. “His job is to make sure that justice is served and that is important to me. I’m going to do whatever is in my power to get a conviction, but it’s going to be based on reliable evidence, it’s going to be based on a procedure that’s open.”
He said the view of Allgood as an advocate for the victim is unethical.
Stance on drug crimes
Allgood has said his office has been hands-off when it comes to putting people into the drug court system.
Colom said he would be “very active” is using drug court as an option for first time offenders, but also noted the program is expensive and generally only wealthier people can take advantage of it to stay out of jail. He said his administration would pursue federal grant money to put more people into drug court and keep them out of prison.
Colom believes that battle needs to be fought early, by targeting young people likely to enter the drug selling trade to make money and offering them alternatives.
When it comes to drug users, Colom sees little benefit of throwing them behind bars.
“We’ve fought the war on drugs for the last 30 years,” Colom said. “Drug use is just as high as it’s ever been. People are using prescription drugs now. Heroin is making a comeback. We’ve lost the war on drugs, we just haven’t realized it yet. Actually, we’re starting to realize it. Democrats and Republicans are coming together and realizing that the current approach is not working. It’s my opponent’s outdated model. He’s just in the past. And people are realizing the effects of sending all these young people to prison are not worth the cost to them and the cost to us.”
“If you commit a violent crime, obviously you’re going to be punished,” he said. “But if you make a mistake with drugs or something like that, everybody knows that doesn’t mean you’re a bad person and we can just throw you away and forget about you.”
The district attorney position pays $95,796 a year.
Election day is Tuesday.
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