Five years after a gang war and unrest at Mississippi’s prisons left a dozen dead from homicide and suicide, officials say these prisons are different places.

They pointed to the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, which has long been regarded as one of the nation’s worst prisons. The facility has been remodeled, and all the units except for Unit 29 have air-conditioning.

Air-conditioning has also come to a third of the South Mississippi Correctional Institution, which the American Correctional Association recently gave a 99.3 score, while the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility made 99.3, said Corrections Commissioner Burl Cain. “That’s hard work. That helps us with the Justice Department.”

The Mississippi Department of Corrections is hoping to stave off litigation from the Justice Department, which concluded in a 60-page report last year that these two state prisons, along with the private prison, Wilkinson County Correctional Facility, fail to “adequately supervise incarcerated people, control contraband, and investigate incidents of harm and misconduct. These basic safety failures and the poor living conditions inside the facilities promote violence, including sexual assault. Gangs operate in the void left by staff and use violence to control people and traffic contraband.”

In 2022, the Justice Department found that Parchman inmates were being subjected to “an unreasonable risk of violence due to inadequate staffing, cursory investigative practices, and deficient contraband controls. These systemic failures result in an environment rife with weapons, drugs, gang activity, extortion, and violence.”

Within three years, a dozen of Parchman’s prisoners had committed suicide. Department officials cited the problem in concluding that the prison “fails to meet the serious mental health needs of persons incarcerated at Parchman.”

Five years ago, a gang war that spread from prison to prison began in December 2019 and ended in January 2020. 

After becoming governor, Tate Reeves vowed to clean up Mississippi’s prisons and provide for inmates’ safety. By Jan. 27, 2020, he ordered prison officials to shut down Unit 29. Parchman’s inmates were sent to a private prison.

Afterward, he visited the vacant Unit 29, where much of the violence took place, and he hired Cain, the former head of the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola.

Reeves said that under Cain’s leadership, Angola went from “beatings to Bible studies.”

It was a bold and controversial pick. On one hand, Cain had a reputation for cleaning up the notorious Louisiana prison; on the other, he had come under fire for allegations of impropriety and nepotism during his reign there — allegations he called “unfounded.”

Reeves said he had “absolute full confidence in Burl Cain’s ability to change the culture at the Department of Corrections. I have absolute confidence he will do so in a manner to make Mississippians proud. I have zero reservations about appointing him.”

Cain inherited Mississippi prisons suffering from subhuman living conditions, gross understaffing and grisly violence, and he vowed to change all of that.

He told reporters that after Parchman’s renovation was complete, he would give them a tour of the prison. Jay-Z’s camera crew got to tour Parchman, but reporters have yet to be invited.

Four years later, despite the remodeling, Health Department inspections reflect that conditions at Mississippi prisons have improved, but plenty of problems still exist.

Inspection reports show that water continues to leak from the ceiling at Parchman prison when it rains. Some showers harbor mold, some toilets don’t work, and some sink spigots are broken.

Despite the investment in improving Parchman, state Sen. Juan Barnett, chairman of the Senate Corrections Committee, said he would still like to shut down Parchman and turn Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility into a state-operated prison.

In the 2024 legislative session, he filed a bill to do this, but the measure died in his own committee.

“We can’t just keep pumping good state tax dollars into something built long ago,” said Barnett, D-Heidelberg. Parchman opened its doors in 1901, but most of its current facilities were built in the 1970s after a federal judge ruled that the state’s treatment of prisoners was unconstitutional.

“We don’t want to be in a situation like Alabama,” Barnett said.

Alabama is now constructing a new 4,000-bed prison at a cost of $1.25 billion to taxpayers, and a second 4,000-bed prison has also been approved. These prisons are being built in response to the Justice Department’s lawsuit over unsafe conditions in Alabama’s prisons.

Cliff Johnson, director of the MacArthur Justice Center, said his great-grandfather worked at Parchman, and “he’s been dead for 76 years. The time has come to close the book on that decrepit facility and its tortured history. The last thing the Delta needs is to lose more jobs, but the notion of replacing Parchman with yet another Mississippi prison feels like taking three steps backward.”

While Parchman has outlived its life “as a facility to humanely house human beings,” he said, “things like the addition of air-conditioning, giving people greater access to common areas instead of being kept in cells indefinitely and providing programs does relieve some of the tensions that lead to violence.”

• $23,853 — What it costs to house a single Mississippi inmate for a single year
• $18,125 — What it costs for tuition for a University of Mississippi Medical Center student

Barnett praised what Cain has done since he took over in 2020. “There are some good things he’s done,” he said, “but there is still stuff that needs to be done.”

That includes improving the quality of those hired, not just to hire people “to fill a hole,” he said, “but to make sure we’re doing everything to protect employees, protect those in there and make sure people who are in there are good people.”

Finding and hiring qualified people to work as correctional officers has long been a problem in Mississippi prisons. While staffing levels have improved, they remain short of what they were a decade ago.

Between 2014 and 2021, the number of correctional officers in state prisons in Mississippi plummeted from 1,591 to 667, according to the state Personnel Board.

That number has since rebounded to 1,207, which Cain attributed to salary increases approved by state lawmakers. Since he was hired in 2020, starting pay has increased to $40,392 a year — a hike of about $14,000. “The glory goes to the Legislature,” he said, “not me.”

Mississippi’s numbers stand in contrast to national trends, where state prisons have lost 11% of their workforce since 2020, according to a Prison Policy Initiative analysis.

Parchman has been hurt by officers who fail to show up for work, the Justice Department found in its investigation. “The few officers who do make their shifts are confined in the tower or control room of each housing area and do not conduct patrols or offender headcounts for fear of personal safety,” according to the 2022 report. “Consequently, housing areas in Parchman routinely go unsupervised, resulting in a dangerous environment.”

Fears by staff were “well-founded,” the report said. “We tallied more than 30 assaults on staff from January 2018 through May 2020.”

The report cited a lack of cameras, which Cain said has been solved by placing cameras everywhere.

Johnson said staffing remains a challenge. “Until we take seriously the need to dramatically alter the staff-inmate ratio at the proper levels by substantially reducing the number of people in our prisons,” he said, “the risks of violence remain quite high.”

Mississippi needs to take a hard look at reducing the prison population because “we’re not going to be able to hire our way out of the problem,” he said. “People will take less money not to work at a prison. They’re not attractive jobs.”

The fact there hasn’t been an explosion of violence over the last five years can make people complacent when in reality such violence could return when a substantial number of people are crammed into a small space with “limited supervision, limited exercise and limited participation in programs that improve the quality of life,” he said.

Barnett praised a pilot program that is allowing inmates with two years or less left of their sentences to work outside prison to improve their job skills. Half the money they earn goes into savings; 10% they get to keep; the rest goes to pay fines and restitution.

“It’s getting them ready for society,” he said. “Over time, I think we’ll see a reduction in recidivism.”

He said other employers are calling him, wanting to take advantage of this new program.

“If we are going to spend $30,000 a year on each person behind bars, we should see a return on that investment,” he said. “This way, those who get out of prison can become taxpaying citizens.”

He also wants to see officials make sure on day one that inmates are able to get copies of their birth certificates and Social Security cards that are necessary to get identification cards and jobs, he said. “Sometimes we get in the way of helping people.”

Cain believes the best way to change prisons is to turn prisoners into productive citizens, he said. “We have to teach the inmates skills and trades.”

More than 2,000 inmates have been certified in various areas, including small-engine repair, welding and operating forklifts, he said. “We want everybody to have a job.”

A good job and a good moral compass can help change the direction of those behind bars, he said. “It’s this simple in corrections: morality and a job equal success.”

Morality is needed so that people will stop committing crimes, he said, and there must be a job or “they’ll have to rob or steal to pay their bills.”

Worship centers have been built or are under construction in all the prisons, using private funds, he said. “We don’t care what religion.”

There might be a Baptist group or a Pentecostal group or a Muslim group using the centers for two hours at a time, he said. “That group becomes a club or a gang or a gang for God, if you want to call it that. It’s leading people away from violence to peace and harmony.”

True change requires a change in heart, he said. “If you look at a criminal, he’s very selfish. He has no problem stealing a lawnmower.”

Rather than bringing in ministers from the outside, they are being raised up from the inside, he said. Inmates are graduating from the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and becoming “field ministers” inside the prisons, he said. “They’re changing the culture.”

In a video interview obtained by Mississippi Today, Parchman Superintendent Marc McClure said these field ministers play a critical role in improving the way prisons serve inmates. “They go to every unit and see everybody,” he said. “The field ministers are here to serve.”

These ministers do everything from presiding over funerals to delivering care packages or family death notifications to counseling fellow inmates. The ministers include Protestants, Catholics, Muslims, Jews and those with no religious affiliation. 

This approach represents “a paradigm shift for people to think that the answer for prisons is actually in the prison,” said Byron Johnson, distinguished professor of social sciences at Baylor University. “It doesn’t have to come from the outside.”

He and others surveyed 2,200 inmates at Angola and conducted 100 life-history interviews. Their conclusion? Religious faith can help prisoners transform their lives and increase their concern for others.

The Baylor professor is now interviewing those inside Mississippi prisons and hopes to release a documentary and a book in 2026. “I think solutions for our prisons can be found in places like this,” he said.

In 2020, there were 6,000 gang members, Cain said. Within a year or so, he said that had been reduced to 1,500. To help end gang rule, he said he traded dozens of gang leaders with other states.

In 2021, he vowed that in three years, there would be reduced violence and no illegal gangs: “It will be a model for people to come see.”

Since Cain took over as commissioner, homicides and suicides have fallen. In 2020, there were eight homicides and 10 suicides in Mississippi prisons, according to the Mississippi State Medical Examiner’s Office. By 2023, the most recent year available, the numbers had dropped to two homicides and four suicides.

“Violence is way down,” he said. “The gangs, we have them under control.”

Nicole Montagano, CEO of Hope Dealers Prison Reform, said she doesn’t think gangs will ever disappear from Parchman.

She believes state officials have yet to fulfill their promises on improving Unit 29, she said. “They painted and redid the showers, but there are a lot of broken windows that have yet to be repaired.”

Unit 29 still has no air-conditioning, and roaches remain a problem, she said. “Inmates are still living in inhumane conditions.”

Inmates, rather than staff, deliver the food, which are sometimes missing items or, worse, are moldy, she said. “Some of these guys are losing weight.”

Five years after the meltdown at Unit 29, she worries that history might repeat itself, she said. “I’m scared it’s going to happen again.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Jan. 5, 1939 

Pauli Murray applied to the University of North Carolina law school, sparking white outrage across the state. 

“The days immediately following the first press stories were anxious ones for me,” she recalled. “I had touched the raw nerve of white supremacy in the South.” 

A year later, she was jailed twice in Virginia for refusing to give her seat on a Greyhound bus. She graduated first in her class at Howard University School of Law, but Harvard University wouldn’t accept her because of her gender. (Harvard didn’t admit women until 1950.) Instead, she became the first Black student to receive Yale Law School’s most advanced degree. 

In 1942, she helped George Houser, James Farmer and Bayard Rustin form the Congress of Racial Equality, known as CORE. Four years later, she became a deputy attorney general in California. Thurgood Marshall described her 1951 book, “States’ Laws on Race and Color,” as the “bible” for civil rights lawyers. 

A year later, she lost her post at Cornell University because of McCarthyism. She left her law career to work on her writing at MacDowell Colony, a haven for artists and writers in New Hampshire, where she worked on her first memoir alongside James Baldwin. 

“Writing is my catharsis,” she said in an interview. “It saved my sanity. But you cannot sustain anger for years and years. It will kill you.” 

She researched her ancestry. “If you call me Black, it’s ridiculous physiologically, isn’t it? I’m probably 5/8 white, 2/8 Negro — repeat American Negro — and 1/8 American Indian,” she said. “I began years before Alex Haley did. I’m always ahead of my time.” 

She also penned a book of poems, “Dark Testament,” writing the words, “Hope is a song in a weary throat.” 

During her time as a professor in Ghana in the early 1960s, she began to accept that ancestry, she said. 

“The difficulty is coming to terms with a mixed ancestry in a racist culture,” she said.

She said she didn’t consider her experience unique. 

“I don’t believe that, ‘You came over in chains so how can you feel American?’ That’s poppycock. Thousands are just like me. In fact I probably feel more American than many whites. I just want this country to live up to its billing.” 

After returning from Africa, President Kennedy appointed her to his Committee on Civil and Political Rights. She worked with Martin Luther King Jr. and other top civil rights leaders and took part in the 1963 March on Washington. But she remained critical of “the blatant disparity between the major role which (Black) women have played and are playing in the crucial grass-roots levels of our struggle and the minor role of leadership they have been assigned in the national policy-making decisions.” 

She helped found the National Organization of Women. In 1977, she became the first Black woman to serve as an Episcopal priest. 

“Being a priest is the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she said. “The first 48 hours were the most difficult of my life. I found myself on the receiving end of tremendous human problems I didn’t know how to handle.” 

She rejected the idea that she should slow down. “We shouldn’t stop growing ‘til our last breath,” she said. She died eight years later, and in 2012, the Episcopal church named her as a saint. 

In 2021, a documentary on Murray was released, using her own voice and words as narration. The documentary also includes an interview with law professor Anita Hill. 

Even though Murray knew that the odds were often against her success, she kept fighting for what she believed was right,” Hill said. “It takes a lot of courage to be hopeful.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

For many there is no more cherished right enshrined in the U.S. Constitution than the freedom of speech and, of course, its accompanying freedom of the press.

During the November election cycle, various people like billionaire Elon Musk and podcaster Joe Rogan spoke of the importance of free speech. Both cited part of their reasoning for supporting Donald Trump was his commitment to free speech.

Those and many other self-professed free speech proponents are noticeably quiet as Trump works to curtail freedom of speech to a degree that perhaps has never been seen in this country.

Trump, as part of a broad legal attack on the American press, is suing the Des Moines Register because the newspaper published a poll showing he was trailing Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris a few days before the November election. The president-elect also is suing longtime pollster Ann Selzer, whose poll the newspaper published. Granted, the Selzer poll of Iowa voters was way off, but because a poll is wrong has never been viewed as a reason to sue a news outlet that chooses to run it.

And ABC, one of the nation’s legacy broadcast networks, has already settled with Trump another lawsuit that many believe the network eventually would have won.

Historians and journalism advocates view Trump’s Des Moines Register lawsuit, ABC lawsuit and others as an effort to curtail press freedom. The lawsuits, they argue, create a fear of reporting on powerful people with deep pockets, and they force news outlets to expend large sums of money to defend lawsuits that have in many cases been viewed as frivolous.

A deeper expressed fear is that the Trump lawsuits are designed to convince a U.S. Supreme Court loaded with Trump sympathizers to curtail the press freedoms that this country has long enjoyed.

It is important to remember that at one time in the nation’s history, newspapers were largely extensions of the political parties and particular politicians — something that is no longer the case for most mainstream or legacy media outlets.

The late James Baughman, the late mass communications historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in a 2011 Center for Journalism Ethics speech, “Papers in opposition to Andrew Jackson in 1828 attacked him for marrying a woman before her divorce had been finalized. He was the violator of marital virtue, a seducer. Jackson, one paper declared, ‘tore from a husband the wife of his bosom.’ Pro-Jackson newspapers insisted on the general’s innocence and accused his critics of violating his privacy. There was no objective, middle ground.”

Baughman pointed out that in 1884, the Los Angeles Times did not like that Democrat Grover Cleveland had won the presidency, so the paper “simply failed to report this unhappy result for several days.”

The history of American media, however, may mean little to Trump. He is suing the Pulitzer Prize committee for reaffirming the coveted award to The New York Times and Washington Post for their reporting of Trump’s campaign ties with Russia during the 2016 campaign. He is also suing CBS and its news show 60 Minutes for how an interview with Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris was edited.

There are, of course, countless examples of Fox News and other Trump-friendly television networks editing clips of interviews or news segments in ways that could be seen as favorable to Trump. Fox has said simply the edits were made for the sake of brevity. Advocates of press freedom would argue the practice is Fox’s guaranteed legal right, though they may disagree with the conservative outlets’ decisions in terms of journalism ethics.

Fox did pay a record $787 million to Dominion, a voting machine manufacturer, because of allegations aired on the network that their machines changed votes to favor Joe Biden in the 2020 election. The lawsuit was based on financial harm incurred by Dominion as a result of the false reports.

Many of those allegations were made not by Fox employees, but by Trump supporters who were network guests. Emails obtained during the lawsuit reveal that the Fox staff did not believe the unfounded allegations but repeatedly allowed the Trump allies to make them.

The so-called legacy media, including Fox in this instance, have long been legally responsible for what other people say on their news outlets. A newspaper, for instance, can be held liable for making false claims about a person in a letter to the editor it publishes.

Free speech, of course, does not mean people or news outlets cannot face consequences for what they say. A company could choose to fire an employee for offensive speech, and outlets are certainly not obligated to publish what they view as offensive or false claims.

But this latest barrage of lawsuits from Trump, that so-called advocate of free speech, have many experts questioning how far the long-held American free speech principles could be stretched.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.