Gang violence rocks Miss. prisons
Rival groups have ties going back to streets of Chicago
JACKSON, Miss. — Betty Turner dreaded what her son would face in the state penitentiary in Parchman, the Mississippi Delta prison that has, over the course of more than a century, earned a dark and near-mythic reputation for cruelty and institutional racism. Her fears were realized when he described meals of just a slice of bologna with a packet of mustard, sightings of rats and mold, and nights spent on a mat on a cold, damp floor.
But over the last week, such worries have come to feel almost trifling, as Mississippi’s state prisons have exploded with gang warfare, riots, disorder and killing. Five inmates have died, three of them slain at Parchman. Two inmates escaped. Videos and photos of fires and blood-smeared walls, shot by inmates on smuggled cellphones, have spread across social media.
Now Turner’s son, 27 and serving a 15-year sentence related to an armed robbery, is wondering whether he will survive.
“When my child tells me he’s afraid — and he’s not the type to be afraid,” said Turner, her voice trailing off. “... That’s a problem.”
Department of Corrections officials responded to last week’s crisis with a systemwide lockdown affecting all of Mississippi’s roughly 19,000 inmates. The lockdown was lifted for some regional facilities Tuesday, and the two escaped inmates have been apprehended.
But there remains a sense that Mississippi must now reckon with a disaster that has been a long time coming.
“You’ve heard the saying: ‘Pressure busts pipes,’ ” said
Benny Ivey, who spent more than a decade as an inmate in Mississippi prisons and now advocates on behalf of prisoners.
“This was gang violence — it’s the fact of the matter,” he added. “But also the fact of the matter, if you ain’t treated like animals, you won’t act like an animal. They’re people, man. They’re our loved ones. They are our brothers, our uncles, our daddies, our grandfathers.”
Last week, Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, D-Miss., and a roster of state civil rights groups asked the Justice Department to open a civil rights investigation into the state’s prison system. In a 23-page letter, they described “extreme” staff vacancies despite the thirdhighest incarceration rate in the country.
The letter also described a long record of violence, escapes, uprisings, inadequate health care and institutions where criminal gangs are tolerated. At one prison, the letter noted, gang members who dominate the kitchen withhold food to punish disfavored prisoners and control who gets a mattress or blanket.
“The Mississippi prison system is in a state of acute and undeniable crisis,” the letter states.
Gangs are a fact of life in Mississippi prisons, with many members belonging to one of two rival groups with roots in the streets of Chicago, the Vice Lords and the Gangster Disciples, said Jimmy Anthony, a retired criminal investigator and instructor at the state police academy who serves as a spokesman for the Mississippi Association of Gang Investigators.
Anthony said that sources inside the system have told him that some of the current trouble was sparked by tensions between these two groups, which maintain ties to Chicago leaders and Mississippi street gangs and are heavily involved in the distribution of illegal drugs in the state.
The recent burst of violence almost ensures that the long-standing problems in the state’s prison system will take center stage as the Republican-dominated legislature begins a new session this month and as the state’s governor-elect, Tate Reeves, prepares for his Tuesday inauguration.
Among the first tasks facing Reeves, who is white, will be finding a new commissioner of the corrections department; the current department head, Pelicia Hall, announced last month that she would be leaving her job for a role in the private sector.
Civil rights advocates say Mississippi’s current penal system has been stressed by tough-on-crime measures, including “three strikes” laws that sentenced repeat offenders to life without parole and were popular during the “war on drugs” era of the 1980s and 1990s.
More recently, Republican lawmakers in Mississippi, as in other conservative states, have come to see these policies as straining families and burdening state budgets. According to the Pew Charitable Trusts, the prison population in Mississippi grew by 300% between 1983 and 2013, to more than 22,000 inmates.
In 2014, the legislature passed ambitious, bipartisan and widely lauded changes to sentencing and corrections laws. Just over a year ago, President Donald Trump, who is seeking to reduce the federal prison population, cited Mississippi as a model and praised the “fantastic job” state officials had done.
The 2014 changes and others that followed have helped bring Mississippi’s inmate population down to its current level of about 19,000 inmates, said Cliff Johnson, director of the MacArthur Justice Center at the University of Mississippi School of Law. But Johnson, a former federal prosecutor and a signer of this week’s letter to the Justice Department, said that much more needed to be done.
Sen. Brice Wiggins, a Republican, agreed that there would likely be broad support within the Legislature to expand the push to find alternatives to incarceration, as well as boost pay and training for corrections officers.
But he also said lawmakers should tackle gang violence as a threat inside and outside of prisons. “It is an area that is not Republican or Democrat,” Wiggins said of the recent unrest. “Everyone, from what I can tell, believes that we need to look at this issue and address it so that it doesn’t continue to happen.”
Last week, the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, a conservative think tank in Jackson, published an analysis suggesting that the state could fund cheaper alternatives to incarceration like intervention courts, community diversions and drug treatment.
“We need to continue to reform our criminal justice system, and reprioritize and refocus its purpose,” Brett Kittredge, an executive with the policy center, wrote in its analysis. “Simply giving a raise of a few thousand dollars to prison guards won’t do that.”
According to the letter to the Justice Department, the entry-level salary for a Mississippi corrections officer is $24,900, the lowest of any state. Critics say that job seekers in a good economy are, predictably, gravitating toward safer and less-taxing jobs.
In urging lawmakers to boost funding for her agency, Hall, the outgoing corrections commissioner, told them last year that there were more than 670 vacancies for staff security positions.
“We are operating in a pressure cooker-type situation right now,” she said.