Mississippi Today
Mississippi prisons may soon exceed capacity
Mississippi prisons may soon exceed capacity
Mississippi — the world’s leader in imprisoning people — will soon skyrocket past its capacity to hold them all.
In just 10 months, the state’s prison population has exploded, rising almost twice as fast as inflation. If this rate persists, the Mississippi Department of Corrections would exceed its listed capacity of 20,443 over the next several months.
Eldon Vail, an inspector of Mississippi prisons in recent years, called the alarming rate “pouring gasoline on a top of a fire that is already raging.”
Between 1993 and 2013, the state’s prison population more than quadrupled, thanks largely to mandatory minimum sentences, with the population peaking in the past decade at more than 23,000. That prompted a push for reforms that included House Bill 585, which then Republican Gov. Phil Bryant signed into law in 2014.
In the years since, reforms and an aggressive Parole Board reduced the number of inmates. By 2016, Mississippi had fallen into third place in per capita imprisonment, trailing Louisiana and Oklahoma.
Five years later, additional reform took place with the passage of the Mississippi Earned Parole Eligibility Act, which gave thousands more inmates the opportunity to go before the Parole Board. By Feb. 7, the prison population had fallen to 16,499, the lowest level in two decades.
That fall mirrored the nation, which saw the prison population decline more than 16% in all states but one between 2019 and 2021, according to the Vera Institute of Justice. (The lone holdout? Alaska, which rose 3.6%.)
But under the leadership of new Parole Board Chairman Jeffrey Belk, that trend has reversed itself.
Ten months later, Mississippi’s prison population now exceeds 19,000 in what the Corrections and Criminal Justice Oversight Task Force calls “unprecedented growth.” If this growth continues at the same rate through 2023, that population would surpass 22,500 for the first time since 2010.

If Mississippi hits that number, taxpayers would be forced to pay $111 million more a year than they were paying in 2020 before the population hike, based on the per-day cost figured by the state’s legislative watchdog, Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review. That’s more than enough to fund the state Department of Health, the governor’s office and a dozen other state agencies.
“While other states are reducing their prison populations, Mississippi is backsliding, thanks in large part to the actions of the Parole Board,” said Cliff Johnson, director of the MacArthur Justice Center at the University of Mississippi School of Law. “It’s demoralizing. It’s infuriating. And it’s terrible corrections policy.”
The population increase has come, despite the decline in Mississippians sentenced to prison, going from 4,270 in 2018 to 3,189 over the past year, according to the task force’s report.
In an interview, Belk told MCIR that the Parole Board is “not a numbers-driven board.”
Some people want the board to “just blindly parole people and not care if they come back,” he said. “We’re not going to do that.”
For his part, Corrections Commissioner Burl Cain said he isn’t worried about MDOC surpassing capacity, because his agency is creating 660 new spaces inside Mississippi prisons. That includes a move of all female inmates from Central Mississippi Correctional Facility in Pearl to the Delta Correctional Facility in Greenwood.
To curb the rise in prison population, he’s banking on better drug rehabilitation and job training programs to reduce recidivism.
About three-fourths of those behind bars in Mississippi battle drug or alcohol problems or both. Cain said a robust rehabilitation program is now available to 2,700 different inmates.

While serving as superintendent of the Louisiana Penitentiary at Angola, he established a job training program that resulted in a three-year recidivism rate of 9.4% for those who finished the program compared with 34% for the average inmate, according to the Louisiana Commission on Law Enforcement.
He hopes to replicate that success in Mississippi, where the three-year recidivism rate is about 33% and the five-year rate is 77%, according to the 2022 World Population Review.
So far, “we have about 170 inmates in the program,” with more to come, he said.
Most of the instructors, who are inmates, earn 25 to 30 cents an hour, or about $52 a month, he said. “It gives them a little bit of independence, and it’s really good for morale.”
MDOC’s work release program plays a companion role in this. “We have 23 out of 25 inmates in jobs making $15 an hour,” he said. “They’re not going to come back.”
Senior U.S. District Judge Keith Starrett of Hattiesburg, who chairs Mississippi’s Reentry Council, praised Cain for providing job training, moral training and job certification. “Reducing recidivism saves lives, money, families and communities,” he said.
House Bill 585 sought to reduce prison overcrowding, which the Pew Foundation estimated would save Mississippi $266 million over a decade.
But the lawmakers’ promise to use those savings for corrections programming never took place, Starrett said. “The Legislature looks out for a lot of folks, but prisons and programs that reduce recidivism are way down on their list of priorities.”
The weak link is the follow-up in programming for those leaving prison, he said. “Let’s say somebody is successful in getting drug treatment, getting a GED and getting a job, but the first week on the job, they cuss at their boss and get fired.”
Now the work goes away, “and they get discouraged and start stealing or selling drugs,” he said. “You’ve got to have support, supervision and encouragement.”
The ultimate goal of both law enforcement and corrections is community safety, and the way to make the community safer is to reduce recidivism, he said. “Of those in prison, 98% are coming back into the community. What’s important is what kind of people they are when they come back. You don’t want them coming home and breaking in your mama’s house.”
Hinds County District Attorney Jody Owens II — who worked with the then-governor and lawmakers of both parties to help pass House Bill 585 — questioned the rise in inmates. “Are we safer because we are incarcerating more people?” he asked.
Former Chairman Steve Pickett said his Parole Board had a parole rate of about 60%. That is, six out of 10 inmates eligible for parole were able to go free. Belk puts his board’s rate at about 40%.
In contrast to the past board, the current one regularly sets off parole hearings for inmates for years, sometimes as much as seven years before they’re eligible again.
Belk cited the case of 80-year-old woman Evelun Smith, who has been in prison 31 years. He said she had come up for a parole hearing every six months. This time, the Parole Board set her off five years.
“She was not ‘parole-able,’” Belk said. “She didn’t know the heinousness of her crime.”
In 1991, Smith and her boyfriend, Phillip Beard, were given life sentences for their roles in stabbing to death a 28-year-old woman, Dedra McGill of Brookhaven, who had “snitched” on Beard, according to the McComb Enterprise-Journal. Smith testified that Beard had been plotting to kill McGill before she spoke to a grand jury investigating Beard’s drug dealings.
Smith is also serving a 20-year sentence for armed robbery for the couple using McGill’s car to drive them to Louisiana to dump McGill’s mutilated and burned body.
In addition to the current board granting fewer paroles, Mississippi judges are giving longer sentences, according to the task force report. The average sentence in 2018 was 7.7 years; now it’s 8.9 years. The number of those imprisoned for drug offenses has risen from 38.8% in 2018 to 47.3% over the past six months.
State Public Defender André de Gruy said he doesn’t think anyone, including the Parole Board, “knows what they are doing regarding case plans or presumptive parole. They have never followed 585 on presumptive parole.”
The state’s presumptive parole law allows MDOC to release inmates without a parole hearing if they satisfy their case plans.
“Under this program, we tell people exactly what is expected of them when they enter prison, and we reward them when they meet those expectations,” Johnson said. “Our Republican-led Legislature wisely passed the law almost a decade ago, and it has never worked like it is supposed to.”
In a 2021 report, PEER, the state lawmakers’ watchdog, concluded that the Parole Board conducted 274 unnecessary hearings for offenders who qualified for this presumptive parole.
Belk said that was PEER’s “nice way of saying they [the Parole Board and MDOC] weren’t doing it.”
He and Cain are now working to make presumptive parole a reality. That will start with creating a case plan, which will capture education levels, job skills and needs, such as alcohol or drug addictions, when an inmate enters prison, Belk said.
That plan will detail programs for the inmate to take part in, such as getting a GED, developing job skills or taking part in a recovery program, he said. If inmates complete those plans, “there’s no reason why the majority of those can’t be paroled,” he said.
If an inmate rejects chances to improve, it’s better for that inmate to wait, Belk said. “Call it tough love. Sometimes the best thing to do is not parole.”
In fact, he said, some inmates have asked the board to revoke their parole so that they could get six months of intensive drug and alcohol treatment at Walnut Grove Correctional Facility.
Ashley Lukens, president of Mississippi Dreams Prisoner Advocacy, said one major problem is inmates often can’t take classes and programs because of shortages in both correctional officers and case managers.
Since Belk took over as chairman, the Parole Board has increased the number of parole revocations from 1,949 in 2018 to an estimated 2,496 for 2022; the percentage of time served by inmates has risen from 53.5% in 2021 to 60.1% in the last quarter.
To stem this tide, de Gruy suggested the board and judges better utilize Technical Violation Centers. “A lot of people are going to prison for failure to pay fines, fees and assessments. It’s unconstitutional to send someone to prison who can’t pay.”
There needs to be reinvestment, including housing, transportation to jobs for those paroled and improvements in mental health, he said. “We need to relieve the financial burdens because 80% of people entering at arrest can’t afford a lawyer. We then add more and more financial burdens at every step of the process.”
Beyond these issues, there is the question of how many more inmates the Mississippi Department of Corrections can handle.
At the State Penitentiary at Parchman, the department has had to add bunks in order to have enough beds for inmates to sleep. Inmates in Unit 30 told MCIR they now have 104 people, but only three showers, six urinals, five toilets and five sinks.
All this is happening at the same time the department is struggling to hire and retain correctional officers, despite pay raises in recent years. MDOC officials say one of the biggest problems has been retention.
In 2014, the department had 1,591 correctional officers, according to the state Personnel Board. Today, that number is less than 1,000, even though the state is now operating two additional prisons: Walnut Grove Correctional Facility and Marshall County Correctional Facility.
Pickett, who chaired the Parole Board between 2013 and 2021, called the current correctional officer-to-inmate ratio “dangerously low.” So are the case manager numbers, he said.
“We have to accept our failure to invest in good criminal justice public policy,” he said. “We can’t keep pushing the failures back onto local police and county jails and expecting a different outcome.”
Cain said he hopes to solve this shortage through a pay raise for starting correctional officers, beginning Jan. 1. It’s a raise the Personnel Board has already approved.
Will the new pay raise succeed where the old ones failed? For years, starting officers earned $24,900 before the pay rose to $27,149. After Cain arrived in 2020, he convinced lawmakers to boost the starting salary, which is now $36,720. Despite that, MDOC continues to struggle with retaining workers. Cain hopes the newest raise to $40,248 does the trick.
Vail said in recent years, he has witnessed staffing levels so low inside Parchman and East Mississippi Correctional Facility that there wasn’t even a single officer to watch units holding prisoners of 100 or more.
“When that is the case, the vacuum of power and control is ceded to the prisoner population in the form of gangs,” said Vail, who served as corrections secretary for the state of Washington.
In an April report, Justice Department officials criticized “gross understaffing” at Parchman and “uncontrolled gang activity,” which leads to “an environment rife with weapons, drugs, gang violence and extortion. … MDOC officials have long known about these unsafe prison conditions, but have continually failed to correct the conditions.”
In recent months, Parchman has seen a new wave of violence.
On Sept. 26, inmate Richard Weems, who was serving 25 years for armed robbery and 25 years for kidnapping out of Madison County, was killed by blunt force trauma to his head.
Two weeks later, inmate Markeith Williams, who was serving a 25-year sentence for armed robbery out of Grenada County, was stabbed to death in Parchman’s Unit 29, which has a long history of violence, including the killings of three inmates in a 2019-2020 riot.
Despite having the highest incarceration rate in the nation, Mississippi spends less per inmate than any other state.
“Lack of adequate funding is the primary reason for the extraordinary levels of violence and death in the Mississippi Department of Corrections,” Vail said.
Whatever momentum there might have been to parole more people from prison may have been undone by the case of Frederick Bell, whom the Parole Board voted to release under supervision after he served 31 years behind bars for the 1991 killing of a 21-year-old clerk during a store robbery. He also pleaded guilty to killing a 20-year-old man in Memphis.
Bell committed the crimes when he was 19, and now he serves as a mentor, teacher and pastor behind bars.
In August, the Parole Board concluded that he had been rehabilitated and voted to free him, but when criticism followed, the board reversed its decision — just hours before he was slated to walk out the doors of Parchman prison.
Brandon Jones, director of political campaigns for the Southern Poverty Law Center, criticized Mississippi’s “terrible thicket of sentencing laws,” which include “one of the most unforgiving habitual offender arrangements in the world.”
This means thousands of Mississippians held behind bars have “no path to parole at all,” he said. “There needs to be more reasonable paths to parole and a Parole Board that sees the value in second chances.”
Email Jerry.Mitchell@MississippiCIR.org. You can follow him on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.
This story was produced by 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. Sign up for our newsletter.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Derrick Simmons: Monday’s Confederate Memorial Day recognition is awful for Mississippians
Editor’s note: This essay is part of Mississippi Today Ideas, a platform for thoughtful Mississippians to share fact-based ideas about our state’s past, present and future. You can read more about the section here.
Each year, in a handful of states, public offices close, flags are lowered and official ceremonies commemorate “Confederate Memorial Day.”
Mississippi is among those handful of states that on Monday will celebrate the holiday intended to honor the soldiers who fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War.
But let me be clear: celebrating Confederate Memorial Day is not only racist but is bad policy, bad governance and a deep stain on the values we claim to uphold today.
First, there is no separating the Confederacy from the defense of slavery and white supremacy. The Confederacy was not about “states’ rights” in the abstract; it was about the right to own human beings. Confederate leaders themselves made that clear.
Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens declared in his infamous “Cornerstone Speech” that the Confederacy was founded upon “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.” No amount of revisionist history can erase the fact that the Confederacy’s cause was fundamentally rooted in preserving racial subjugation.
To honor that cause with a state holiday is to glorify a rebellion against the United States fought to defend the indefensible. It is an insult to every citizen who believes in equality and freedom, and it is a cruel slap in the face to Black Americans, whose ancestors endured the horrors of slavery and generations of systemic discrimination that followed.
Beyond its moral bankruptcy, Confederate Memorial Day is simply bad public policy. Holidays are public statements of our values. They are moments when a state, through official sanction, tells its citizens: “This is what we believe is worthy of honor.” Keeping Confederate Memorial Day on the calendar sends a message that a government once committed to denying basic human rights should be celebrated.
That message is not just outdated — it is dangerous. It nurtures the roots of racism, fuels division and legitimizes extremist ideologies that threaten our democracy today.
Moreover, there are real economic and administrative costs to shutting down government offices for this purpose. In a time when states face budget constraints, workforce shortages and urgent civic challenges, it is absurd to prioritize paid time off to commemorate a failed and racist insurrection. Our taxpayer dollars should be used to advance justice, education, infrastructure and economic development — not to prop up a lost cause of hate.
If we truly believe in moving forward together as one people, we must stop clinging to symbols that represent treason, brutality and white supremacy. There is a legislative record that supports this move in a veto-proof majority changing the state Confederate flag in 2020. Taking Confederate Memorial Day off our official state holiday calendar is another necessary step toward a more inclusive and just society.
Mississippi had the largest population of enslaved individuals in 1865 and today has the highest percentage of Black residents in the United States. We should not honor the Confederacy or Confederate Memorial Day. We should replace it.
Replacing a racist holiday with one that celebrates emancipation underscores the state’s rich African American history and promotes a more inclusive understanding of its past. It would also align the state’s observances with national efforts to commemorate the end of slavery and the ongoing pursuit of equality.
I will continue my legislative efforts to replace Confederate Memorial Day as a state holiday with Juneteenth, which commemorates the freedom for America’s enslaved people.
It’s time to end Confederate Memorial Day once and for all.
Derrick T. Simmons, D-Greensville, serves as the minority leader in the state Senate. He represents Bolivar, Coahoma and Washington counties in the Mississippi Senate.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
The post Derrick Simmons: Monday's Confederate Memorial Day recognition is awful for Mississippians appeared first on mississippitoday.org
Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.
Political Bias Rating: Left-Leaning
This article argues against the celebration of Confederate Memorial Day, stating it glorifies a racist and failed rebellion that is harmful to societal values. It critiques the holiday as a symbol of white supremacy and advocates for replacing it with Juneteenth to honor emancipation. The language used, such as referring to the Confederate cause as “moral bankruptcy,” and the call to replace the holiday reflects a progressive stance on social justice and racial equality, common in left-leaning perspectives. Additionally, the writer urges action for inclusivity and justice, positioning the argument within modern liberal values.
Mississippi Today
On this day in 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois urged active resistance to racist policies
April 27, 1903

W.E.B. Du Bois, in his book, “The Souls of Black Folk,” called for active resistance to racist policies: “We have no right to sit silently by while the inevitable seeds are sown for a harvest of disaster to our children, black and white.”
He described the tension between being Black and being an American: “One ever feels his twoness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
He criticized Washington’s “Atlanta Compromise” speech. Six years later, Du Bois helped found the NAACP and became the editor of its monthly magazine, The Crisis. He waged protests against the racist silent film “The Birth of a Nation” and against lynchings of Black Americans, detailing the 2,732 lynchings between 1884 and 1914.
In 1921, he decried Harvard University’s decisions to ban Black students from the dormitories as an attempt to renew “the Anglo-Saxon cult, the worship of the Nordic totem, the disenfranchisement of Negro, Jew, Irishman, Italian, Hungarian, Asiatic and South Sea Islander — the world rule of Nordic white through brute force.”
In 1929, he debated Lothrop Stoddard, a proponent of scientific racism, who also happened to belong to the Ku Klux Klan. The Chicago Defender’s front page headline read, “5,000 Cheer W.E.B. DuBois, Laugh at Lothrup Stoddard.”
In 1949, the FBI began to investigate Du Bois as a “suspected Communist,” and he was indicted on trumped-up charges that he had acted as an agent of a foreign state and had failed to register. The government dropped the case after Albert Einstein volunteered to testify as a character witness.
Despite the lack of conviction, the government confiscated his passport for eight years. In 1960, he recovered his passport and traveled to the newly created Republic of Ghana. Three years later, the U.S. government refused to renew his passport, so Du Bois became a citizen of Ghana. He died on Aug. 27, 1963, the eve of the March on Washington.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Mississippi Today
Jim Hood’s opinion provides a roadmap if lawmakers do the unthinkable and can’t pass a budget
On June 30, 2009, Sam Cameron, the then-executive director of the Mississippi Hospital Association, held a news conference in the Capitol rotunda to publicly take his whipping and accept his defeat.
Cameron urged House Democrats, who had sided with the Hospital Association, to accept the demands of Republican Gov. Haley Barbour to place an additional $90 million tax on the state’s hospitals to help fund Medicaid and prevent the very real possibility of the program and indeed much of state government being shut down when the new budget year began in a few hours. The impasse over Medicaid and the hospital tax had stopped all budget negotiations.
Barbour watched from a floor above as Cameron publicly admitted defeat. Cameron’s decision to swallow his pride was based on a simple equation. He told news reporters, scores of lobbyists and health care advocates who had set up camp in the Capitol as midnight on July 1 approached that, while he believed the tax would hurt Mississippi hospitals, not having a Medicaid budget would be much more harmful.
Just as in 2009, the Legislature ended the 2025 regular session earlier this month without a budget agreement and will have to come back in special session to adopt a budget before the new fiscal year begins on July 1. It is unlikely that the current budget rift between the House and Senate will be as dramatic as the 2009 standoff when it appeared only hours before the July 1 deadline that there would be no budget. But who knows what will result from the current standoff? After all, the current standoff in many ways seems to be more about political egos than policy differences on the budget.
The fight centers around multiple factors, including:
- Whether legislation will be passed to allow sports betting outside of casinos.
- Whether the Senate will agree to a massive projects bill to fund local projects throughout the state.
- Whether leaders will overcome hard feelings between the two chambers caused by the House’s hasty final passage of a Senate tax cut bill filled with typos that altered the intent of the bill without giving the Senate an opportunity to fix the mistakes.
- Whether members would work on a weekend at the end of the session. The Senate wanted to, the House did not.
It is difficult to think any of those issues will rise to the ultimate level of preventing the final passage of a budget when push comes to shove.
But who knows? What we do know is that the impasse in 2009 created a guideline of what could happen if a budget is not passed.
It is likely that parts, though not all, of state government will shut down if the Legislature does the unthinkable and does not pass a budget for the new fiscal year beginning July 1.
An official opinion of the office of Attorney General Jim Hood issued in 2009 said if there is no budget passed by the Legislature, those services mandated in the Mississippi Constitution, such as a public education system, will continue.
According to the Hood opinion, other entities, such as the state’s debt, and court and federal mandates, also would be funded. But it is likely that there will not be funds for Medicaid and many other programs, such as transportation and aspects of public safety that are not specifically listed in the Mississippi Constitution.
The Hood opinion reasoned that the Mississippi Constitution is the ultimate law of the state and must be adhered to even in the absence of legislative action. Other states have reached similar conclusions when their legislatures have failed to act, the AG’s opinion said.
As is often pointed out, the opinion of the attorney general does not carry the weight of law. It serves only as a guideline, though Gov. Tate Reeves has relied on the 2009 opinion even though it was written by the staff of Hood, who was Reeves’ opponent in the contentious 2019 gubernatorial campaign.
But if the unthinkable ever occurs and the Legislature goes too far into a new fiscal year without adopting a budget, it most likely will be the courts — moreso than an AG’s opinion — that ultimately determine if and how state government operates.
In 2009 Sam Cameron did not want to see what would happen if a budget was not adopted. It also is likely that current political leaders do not want to see the results of not having a budget passed before July 1 of this year.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
-
News from the South - Missouri News Feed2 days ago
Missouri lawmakers on the cusp of legalizing housing discrimination
-
News from the South - Alabama News Feed6 days ago
Prayer Vigil Held for Ronald Dumas Jr., Family Continues to Pray for His Return | April 21, 2025 | N
-
SuperTalk FM5 days ago
New Amazon dock operations facility to bring 1,000 jobs to Marshall County
-
Mississippi Today7 days ago
‘Trainwreck on the horizon’: The costly pains of Mississippi’s small water and sewer systems
-
News from the South - Florida News Feed6 days ago
Trump touts manufacturing while undercutting state efforts to help factories
-
News from the South - Texas News Feed7 days ago
Meteorologist Chita Craft is tracking a Severe Thunderstorm Warning that's in effect now
-
News from the South - Virginia News Feed6 days ago
Taking video of military bases using drones could be outlawed | Virginia
-
News from the South - Florida News Feed6 days ago
Federal report due on Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina’s path to recognition as a tribal nation