Two reporters, Michelle Liu, left, and Anna Wolfe, center, met with inmates and their employers across Mississippi, beginning at fast food restaurants around Jackson, traveling to the Mississippi Delta and the Gulf Coast. Credit: Eric Shelton, Mississippi Today/Report for America

The tip we got at Mississippi Today seemed a little unlikely: a woman in state prison was also working at McDonald’s — and not voluntarily. But sure enough, we found Dixie D’Angelo, a woman with court-ordered debts of $5,000 because she damaged a friend’s car. She had been sentenced to something called a restitution center, where she worked four different restaurant jobs to try to pay off her debts and get out of jail.

Two reporters, Anna Wolfe and Michelle Liu, ultimately found that hundreds of people were in similar situations because of the state’s little-known restitution center program. Basically, we discovered, Mississippi was running a modern-day debtors prison.

We met with inmates and their employers across Mississippi, beginning at fast food restaurants around Jackson, traveling to the Mississippi Delta and the Gulf Coast. We found people using court documents and a list of work-camp inmates that the corrections department later removed from its website.

We interviewed more than 50 current and former restitution center inmates and a dozen national experts. We filed 30 public records requests. Using more than 200 sentencing orders, we built a database detailing how judges ordered people to the centers and how much money they had to pay.

With the help of Andrew R. Calderón at The Marshall Project, we analyzed that material as well as other data we got from the state. We requested population reports from the Mississippi Department of Corrections, which tell us the inmate population in each restitution center at the beginning of each month. The reports also include information like the average number of inmates employed in a given month and how many absconded, and more.

While the corrections department and most judges we contacted denied repeated interview requests for this story, we relied on hundreds of pages of court documents, hearing transcripts and policy manuals to corroborate the inmates’ stories.

This investigation was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for The Marshall Project’s newsletter, or follow them on Facebook or Twitter.

Creative Commons License

Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.

Michelle Liu was a 2018 corps member for Report for America, a national service program that places talented journalists in local newsrooms. She covered criminal justice issues across the state from June 2018 until May 2020. Prior to joining the Mississippi Today team, her work appeared in the New Haven Independent.

Anna Wolfe is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who covers inequity and corruption in government safety net programs, nonprofit service providers and institutions affecting the marginalized.

She began reporting for Mississippi Today in 2018, after she approached the editor with the idea of starting a poverty beat, the first of its kind in the state.

Wolfe has received national recognition for her years-long coverage of Mississippi’s welfare program, in which she exposed new details about how officials funneled tens of millions of federal public assistance funds away from needy families and instead to their friends, families and the pet projects of famous athletes.

Since joining Mississippi Today, she has received several national honors including the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting, the Livingston Award, two Goldsmith Prizes for Investigative Reporting, the Collier Prize for State Government Accountability, the Sacred Cat Award, the Nellie Bly Award, the John Jay/Harry Frank Guggenheim Excellence in Criminal Justice Reporting Award, the Al Neuharth Innovation in Investigative Journalism Award, the Sidney Award, the National Press Foundation’s Poverty and Inequality Award and others.

Previously, Wolfe worked for three years at Clarion Ledger, Mississippi’s statewide newspaper, where she covered city hall, health care, and wrote stories about hunger and medical billing, earning the Bill Minor Prize for Investigative Journalism two years in a row.

Born and raised on the Puget Sound in Washington State, Wolfe moved to Mississippi in 2012 to attend Mississippi State University, where she currently serves on the Digital Journalism Advisory Board. She has lived in Jackson, Mississippi since graduating in 2014.