A year after deadly riots, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division continues to investigate Mississippi prisons.
“Taking a hard look at the Mississippi prison system is something we owe all those who have been murdered, maimed and mistreated while under the care of this state,” said Cliff Johnson, director of the University of Mississippi School of Law’s MacArthur Justice Center, which represents many inmates.
COVID-19 has hampered the investigation into conditions at Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, the South Mississippi Correctional Institution in Leakesville, Central Mississippi Correctional Facility in Pearl – all state-run prisons — and Wilkinson County Correctional Facility, operated by Management & Training Corp.
“We can’t let the recent pandemic cause us to forget or minimize the shocking events of late 2019 and early 2020,” Johnson said. “The Department of Justice needs to turn our prison system inside out and figure out exactly why and how we lost control of Parchman and other Mississippi Department of Corrections facilities.”
If the state of Alabama provides any hint for what might happen in Mississippi, the future looks daunting. Last month, the Justice Department filed another lawsuit over prison conditions there.
“The Department of Justice conducted a thorough investigation of Alabama’s prisons for men and determined that Alabama violated and is continuing to violate the constitution because its prisons are riddled with prisoner-on-prisoner and guard-on-prisoner violence,” Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement. “The violations have led to homicides, rapes and serious injuries.”
The lawsuit alleges conditions in Alabama prisons have worsened since 2016, that violence has increased and that prisons are more crowded.
The state of Alabama expects to pay $900 million to replace its three men’s prisons. Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, a Republican, has called those prisons “deplorable,” “horrendous” and “inadequate.”
And a federal judge has ordered the state to add as many as 2,000 new correctional officers.
In another case, the Justice Department concluded last month that officials at a Florida prison violated the constitutional rights of female inmates by failing to protect them from sexual abuse by staff.
“Prison officials have a constitutional duty to protect prisoners from harm, including sexual abuse by staff,” Dreiband said. “This illegal and indecent treatment of women must end, and the Department of Justice will not tolerate it.”
A 2015 Miami Herald investigation detailed complaints filed by prisoners between 2011 and 2015 saying women were repeatedly subjected to abuses. Many victims told the Herald they would often comply because they felt they had no other choice.
“As we saw in Alabama and now Florida, people in prison are being killed, raped, and beaten – and no one is held responsible,” said Kevin Ring, president of FAMM, a national criminal justice reform organization. “Prison conditions violate the Constitution and yet the states refuse to act. Mississippi is no different.”
He said the Justice Department investigation should be the beginning of reform, not the end. He recommended an independent body have oversight of Mississippi’s prisons to ensure that perpetual problems don’t return.
David Fathi, director of the ACLU National Prison Project, said that “the U.S. Department of Justice is the last line of defense for people held in dangerous, degrading, and often deadly prisons and jails.”
Justice Department officials have said their focus is “whether the Mississippi Department of Corrections adequately protects prisoners from physical harm at the hands of other prisoners at the four prisons, as well as whether there is adequate suicide prevention, including adequate mental health care and appropriate use of isolation, at Parchman.”
Between April 2019 and January 2020, Parchman prison saw 16 violent deaths, joining the ranks of some of the world’s deadliest prisons per capita. Those deaths include eight suicides and eight homicides. (In the eight prior years, there were only four homicides.)
Overall, the state’s prisons saw a record 102 deaths in 2020, 13% of them violent deaths. There were 74 deaths in 2019.
An investigation by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting and ProPublica revealed that violence came after years of neglect by state officials, who allowed conditions at Parchman to deteriorate after federal courts ended oversight of the facility in 2011.
The inspections document prison cells that lack lights or power; toilets that don’t work; holes in cell walls and prison doors; collapsing ceilings; broken commodes, sinks, drains and tiles; exposed wiring; and roaches and rats throughout the prison.
The 2020 inspection reflected great improvement. The number of cells without power has been cut by more than half from 130 to 55. In 2019, there were 117 inmates without mattresses or pillows; now that number is zero.
But many woes remain: holes in the walls, holes in windows, bird nests in windows, raw sewage backing up in toilets, leaking ceilings that “flood when it rains,” torn screens with flies coming in, flies on a food serving line and bleach in a Twister Cherry Blast bottle on a serving line.
The prison’s drinking water has violated the Safe Drinking Water Act nearly 100 times since 2012, with findings showing multiple toxic contaminants in the drinking water. Safety scores for water treatment plummeted from 3.5 out of 5 in 2015 to 0.5 out of 5 in 2019. According to the latest filing, Parchman has failed to address deficiencies since December 2019.
Inmates have complained to MCIR about stomach ailments, posting online images of brown or opaque water streaming from taps in their cells.
Before the riots, corrections officials sought $22.5 million to renovate Unit 29, saying Parchman’s most notorious unit was “unsafe for staff and inmates.”
Lawmakers turned down the request, and the riots began months later. (For fiscal 2022, the Legislative Budget Committee is recommending yet another cut to MDOC — more than $9 million.)
Inside Parchman, inmates have described themselves as being prey to prison gangs who control the supply of contraband drugs and weapons, bedding, food and cellphones. Videos have shown the most dangerous inmates, identified by their red-and-white striped uniforms, freely roaming the hallways, beating and threatening others.
“We know that the terrible problems with Mississippi’s prison system started decades before last year’s eruption at Parchman — but they have been exacerbated by worsening conditions, a pandemic, a swelling prison population and ongoing inaction in the face of commonsense solutions to bring vulnerable people home safely,” said Alesha Judkins, the Mississippi state director of FWD.us, an organization dedicated to criminal justice and prison reform.
If Mississippi were a country, it would boast the second highest per capita prison population in the world, trailing only Louisiana. (In recent years, Oklahoma adopted reforms that reduced its prison population, dropping it from first place to third.)
One byproduct of the pandemic has been a reduction in the prison population across the U.S., including Mississippi, where the number of inmates has fallen below 18,000, the lowest number in two decades.
Judkins said the state’s “full-blown incarceration crisis, driven by long sentences with few opportunities for release, wastes millions of taxpayer dollars, hurts families, and doesn’t make our communities any safer. During the COVID-19 pandemic, conditions for incarcerated Mississippians are past the breaking point, with more than 1,400 cases of COVID-19 reported throughout Mississippi’s prison system.”
She urged the state Legislature to “pass critical reforms to safely reduce the state’s dangerously high prison population.”
Last year, the Legislature passed a reform bill that would have helped reduce the prison population by making 2,000 more prisoners eligible for parole. Some predicted the change would save taxpayers up to $45 million.
Gov. Tate Reeves vetoed the bill, saying it went too far. He said he doesn’t believe someone serving a life sentence should be eligible for parole if that person were convicted of a capital crime. Nor does he believe a “drug trafficker, habitual offender or violent criminal” should be eligible for parole at age 60.
Sen. Juan Barnett, D-Heidelberg, chairman of the Senate Corrections Committee, is introducing a revised version he predicts will pass and be signed into law.
“If you’re going to call it the Mississippi Department of Corrections, it means we’re trying to correct the problem,” he said. “You don’t correct the problem by leaving them in prison the rest of their lives.
“We’re spending $20,000 a year for each inmate in prison and a little over $5,000 for each student in public schools. To me, that’s a problem. Why not encourage individuals who make a mistake to be able to be rehabilitated?”
MCIR and ProPublica exposed how gangs exerted so much control at South Mississippi Correctional Institution that they even determined where inmates slept and whether they had mattresses or not. Inmates shared how gangs snapped their pictures with cell phones so that even if they were transferred to a different part of the prison, their photos would arrive ahead of him. Gangs also charged fees for the beds, wall phones, food, showers and much more.
MCIR and ProPublica’s reporting was cited in a 23-page letter Jan. 7 from Mississippi’s U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson and 13 civil rights and social justice organizations to the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division requesting an investigation into Mississippi prisons, noting state lawmakers have refused to implement reforms and adequately fund the prison system.
The letter attributed “the level of violence that pervades Mississippi’s prison system” to the acute understaffing of its prisons. MCIR and ProPublica reported that MDOC had 1,591 correctional officers in 2014, according to the state Personnel Board. By the end of 2019, it had fallen to 732 and is now only 668.
Fathi called the numbers “stunning. Truly a disaster waiting to happen.”
The letter noted “accounts of gang control at SMCI are particularly egregious and shocking: people report that gangs assign residents to cells and beds, overriding the formal MDOC assignments; control access to phones; photograph prisoners, using contraband cell phones, to create and maintain unofficial databases; determine when and where individuals may eat and shower; and enforce fines against those who break gang-written rules.”
Despite the passage of a year, the state medical examiner has yet to rule on a possible homicide in Parchman a year ago. No charges have been filed.
Sam Howell, director of the state Crime Lab, said autopsy reports remain backed up two or more years. “It’s a lack of people,” he said. “It all goes back to funding.”
Authorities initially thought inmate Denorris Howell had been stabbed to death by his roommate on Jan. 3, 2020, but they later determined he sustained a fatal neck injury and that the bloodstains on his clothing belonged to his roommate, who was also injured in the attack.
Howell’s mother, Janice Wilkins of Memphis, said her son called her on his cellphone during the prison lockdown, where all inmates are confined to their cells.
She said he told her the lights had been turned out. Before hanging up the phone, he said that a guard was letting inmates out of their cells.
MCIR obtained an apparent video of Howell’s death in which an inmate can be heard boasting: “I’ve got him in a chokehold.”
Another inmate cheers him on: “Oh, yeah, oh, yeah. Dead. Oh, yeah. Dead. Deaaaaad.”
Despite the loud shouting throughout the incident, no officer can be seen responding.
Wilkins said she can’t believe authorities have yet to rule whether her son’s death was a homicide, calling on the Justice Department to investigate. “I would like to see justice in my son’s death.”
Justice Department officials say those with relevant information can contact the department at 1-833-591-0288 or by email at [email protected].
Jerry Mitchell is an investigative reporter for the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization that is exposing wrongdoing, educating and empowering Mississippians, and raising up the next generation of investigative reporters.
Email him at [email protected] and follow him on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
