by Michael Goldberg, Mississippi Today
June 19, 2025

As the punishing Mississippi sun baked the grounds of one of America’s most notorious prisons, a wheelchair-bound man was so jaundiced he appeared to glow in the dark. 

The 6-foot-2 man had dropped to 115 pounds and sat drenched in sweat between bouts of vomiting at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman. He sat before Rep. Becky Currie, chairwoman of the state House Corrections Committee, at the facility in the Delta known for its long history of deaths and violent disturbances.

Currie, a registered nurse, could tell the man had liver disease. She asked that the man’s name be concealed to protect him from retribution from prison officials. Currie said the inmate told her he contracted liver disease from untreated Hepatitis C. The contagious virus can be treated with antiviral medication that, if administered properly, is highly effective, curing more than 95% of patients. 

The man said he had been asking for medication for years, to no avail. Another man Currie met in prison with Hepatitis C had blood ammonia levels so high that he was hallucinating and had been told he had three months left to live. 

“He didn’t have but a five-year sentence,” Currie said. “Now he’s got a death sentence.”

Currie voiced her dismay to Burl Cain, commissioner of the Mississippi Department of Corrections. 

Currie’s committee has legislative oversight of Mississippi’s corrections system, and Cain became aware of her increasing skepticism of the department’s ability to police the provision of health care in its facilities. 

So he told Currie in April that MDOC had withheld $2 million in state funding from the private company providing prison health care for having inadequate staff. 

But when lawmakers returned to Jackson in late May for a special session to set a state budget, MDOC requested an additional $4 million in a “deficit appropriation” – money to cover a shortfall – for the medical program provided by that same company. 

Currie said the money appears to be a bailout for VitalCore Health Strategies, canceling out any financial consequence the company was supposed to face. She also said there is no explanation for why MDOC is running a deficit for its medical program as sick prisoners languish without proper medical care, turning some short prison stints into death sentences. 

“A month ago, Commissioner Burl Cain told me that he had fined VitalCore $2 million for a lack of health care workers to be able to provide health care to inmates,” Currie said. “Then, in their budget, VitalCore and MDOC asked for $4 million to shore up a health care deficit. What this means is VitalCore and MDOC are working together to manipulate their budget.”

In a statement, an MDOC spokesperson confirmed the agency withheld $2 million from VitalCore under its contract with the company for staffing issues, but it said the financial punishment wasn’t a “fine.” It also said the $4 million budget request was to cover increased costs of providing health care. 

“MDOC has not ‘fined’ VitalCore,” wrote Kate Head, a corrections department spokesperson. “Rather, MDOC has withheld approximately $2M in proceeds under the contract due to VitalCore’s failure to meet certain contractual staffing requirements.”  

In a separate statement, Timothy Keck, a company spokesperson, said VitalCore has not received additional funds beyond what is outlined in its contract and has made progress hiring more medical staff. The company disputed claims that it denied treatment and said it complies with all state policies.

MDOC did not respond to a follow-up question asking why the cost of providing care had increased, the same question Currie kept asking as she embarked on several tours inside Mississippi’s prisons. Once inside the grounds of these facilities, the lawmaker says she witnessed widespread suffering. The suffering is preventable, and raises questions about how hundreds of millions in taxpayer money have been spent, she said.

“I disagree with them that they are living up to standards of care,” Currie said. “I am also aware that what money they don’t spend on inmates, they keep.”

‘Trapped here with no help’

Currie said the first man she met at Parchman later received medication for Hepatitis C, but only after she inquired directly with Cain about the holdup. 

She said the episode further affirmed to her that untreated illness among prisoners was not happenstance but the result of deliberate decisions made by those tasked with caring for inmates. 

Allegations that Mississippi denies inmates treatment for Hepatitis C stretch back years. The denial of medication, either willful or the result of mismanagement, has caused Hepatitis C to go untreated inside Mississippi’s prisons, Currie said she found while touring jails. 

But that isn’t all she found. 

Currie met a 23-year-old woman with a lump growing out of her breast from untreated cancer. Other women were denied pap smears and mammograms. She met men with untreated HIV. Many more inmates were charged for care they never received.

Then Currie began receiving letters — pleas for help scribbled on notebook paper. Mississippi Today reviewed some of the letters and is protecting the identity of its authors, who shared sensitive details about their medical conditions.

Last fall, Currie met a 69-year-old woman incarcerated at the Mississippi Correctional Institute for Women in Rankin County. The woman said she was having trouble breathing, but couldn’t get prison officials to let her see a doctor. In a letter to Currie months later, the woman said she still hadn’t seen a doctor despite her lips turning purple and blue. She also suffers from gastrointestinal issues that have gone untreated.

“It has affected my eyes, mouth, throat and now my urethra,” she wrote. “I have yet to see a urologist either. I am submitting another sick call to the clinic this week. I don’t know what else to do.”

A 60-year-old woman at the Delta Correctional Facility in Greenwood said she had urinary incontinence, but was denied pads and wipes because facility medical staff, directed by VitalCore, demanded she have a pelvic exam first. She had the exam and was still denied supplies.

“It looks to me like they are setting the criteria too high because at the end of the day, I still have urinary incontinence and am left to fend for myself without means to fend,” the woman wrote. “This is cruel and I am not the only one affected. We are trapped here with no help.” 

The steady stream of letters, each new arrival sounding more desperate than the last, suggested to Currie that the conditions inside Mississippi’s prisons, already condemned by federal officials, were worse than she imagined. 

“When people are writing me letters begging me for treatment for health care needs it’s hard for me to just ignore it,” Currie said. “When they need a liver transplant from untreated Hep C or begging me for help with untreated HIV. When they beg me for supplies because they make them reuse colostomy bags over and over that don’t fit, when they are bowel and bladder incontinent and they don’t provide diapers to them it is hard for me to hear that (MDOC) feels that they provide adequate care.”

VitalCore told Mississippi Today it does not deny treatment and provides “comprehensive and competent health care services in accordance with prevailing standards of care.”

Kate Head, the corrections department spokesperson, said the care provided to inmates exceeds “constitutional standards,” and the department “denies any allegation” that inmates receive care below such standards. 

More money, more sickness

Currie was awarded chairmanship of the House Corrections Committee after the 2023 statewide election. She is a conservative Republican with no appetite for the decarceral aspirations of many prison-reform activists.  

With these conservative bona fides in mind, House leadership dispatched Currie to answer a question of government efficiency: Why were Mississippi’s inmates getting sicker even after the state continued increasing its spending on medical care for prisoners? Currie wanted to know why she had been receiving letters from inmates detailing an environment where sick prisoners got sicker even as the state spent more money to treat them.     

In the next fiscal year, Mississippi is set to spend over $121 million on prison medical services, a number that has been climbing for years. But there is little evidence that the money is being spent on providing quality care, Currie said. 

“In my investigations, very little health care is given. We have Hep C and HIV patients dying from no care. We have diabetics who have no possible way of treating their diabetes. High blood pressure inmates who end up on dialysis. Cancer patients are dying from lack of care. So it is obvious to me that this is a game they have played for some time.”

Untreated illness in facilities around the state prompted Currie to author a bill during the 2025 legislative session that would have directed the state Department of Health to conduct a sweeping review of the medical care for inmates at Mississippi prisons.

The legislation passed the House with a large bipartisan majority, but it didn’t survive negotiations with the Senate. Republican Gov. Tate Reeves wanted to hire an out-of-state firm to conduct the review instead of the Department of Health, Currie said.

Months later in the special legislative session for the state budget, the Legislature approved a $690,000 appropriation for MDOC to review its medical services, money that Currie said will go to a private firm. The report will be presented to legislative leaders by Dec. 15.

But Currie said a private out-of-state firm will not be able to infiltrate prisons and identify systemic issues the way a state entity such as the Department of Health could. Plus, it wouldn’t cost the state extra money.

“I am glad the governor is going to look into health care, but it will be a waste of taxpayers’ money not to find out the truth about health care, and the only way to do that is to talk to inmates,” Currie said. “Their problems will not be found in their medical chart.”

A spokesperson for Reeves did not respond to a request for comment. But in a late May press conference announcing the special session, Reeves said he inherited a corrections department that oversaw numerous deaths, and that the department made progress under his watch. He also joked that he would support moving the management of the troubled MDOC to the Lieutenant Governor’s or the House speaker’s office. 

“I made this offer publicly before. I make it privately regularly. I tell my friends in the Lieutenant Governor’s Office and the Speaker’s Office that if they have a problem with something going on at the Department of Corrections, that if they would like to sponsor a bill to move the management of corrections, I’d probably support it.”

Reeves appointed Cain to lead Mississippi’s corrections in 2020. A former warden of the notorious Angola State Prison in Louisiana, Cain’s controversial career has regularly garnered national headlines. He resigned his post in Louisiana in 2015 after allegations that he misused public funds, but he has denied wrongdoing and was later cleared in an investigation conducted by the state’s legislative auditor. 

Pulling the wool over lawmakers’ eyes

The apparent mismatch between increased government spending and stagnant or diminishing health outcomes among prisoners is hidden from public view, some experts say. 

Marcella Alsan and Crystal Yang, professors at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and Harvard Law School, have studied health care delivery in jails. They said the scale of death and sickness inside Mississippi’s prisons may fly under the statistical radar.

“Our research documents significant underreporting of deaths in custody within official statistics,” Alsan and Yang told Mississippi Today. “The issues uncovered within Mississippi prisons reveal poor management and an absence of clear standards of care, much like the jails in our study.” 

Stronger accreditation standards for correctional facilities can help tackle the “inefficiency dilemma” within correctional institutions, the professors said. 

For Currie, the problem lies with a legislative process that has allowed MDOC and VitalCore to use more taxpayer dollars without accounting for how the money is spent. 

“In the rushed special session where we had a self-imposed time limit to vote on a budget, the Department of Corrections and VitalCore pulled the wool over legislators’ eyes,” Currie said. “They act like we are spending more on inmates’ health care and these stupid legislators won’t ask questions. We swap money between health care and MDOC to make sure they get to spend or waste taxpayers’ money, and the Legislature doesn’t ask for any information supporting why they need more money.”

Without improved care and transparency around spending, she warned, prisoners will continue to languish with untreated illnesses with life-altering or fatal consequences. 

Susan Balfour, 63, echoed that sentiment. Balfour was incarcerated for 33 years at Central Mississippi Correctional Facility until her release in December 2021. Balfour said she was among a group of prisoners asked to clean the facility without protective equipment.

She was later diagnosed with terminal breast cancer, a condition that would have been identified earlier had she been provided medical screenings and treatment, according to a lawsuit Balfour filed in federal court.

“They ignored my pleas for help and let my cancer grow untreated for 10 years until it was terminal and too late,” Balfour said. “I never knew when I’d be seen after filing a medical request, and was always at their mercy. It’s like Mississippi is co-signing on their inhumane practices that prioritize corporate profits over people’s lives. Who do these public officials work for? And why are profits protected more than people?”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The post Lawmaker probing Mississippi’s prisons finds inmates suffering from treatable diseases as corrections asks for more money 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: Center-Left

This article presents a critical examination of prison healthcare in Mississippi, particularly under the leadership of MDOC and private contractor VitalCore. The tone reflects skepticism toward government efficiency and corporate accountability, emphasizing inmate suffering and systemic neglect. While Rep. Becky Currie, a conservative Republican, is portrayed as a reform-minded figure, the article primarily amplifies concerns over mismanagement and moral failure in public-private partnerships. It frames the issue with emotionally charged language and includes voices of incarcerated individuals, which lends a humanitarian focus often associated with Center-Left reporting, though it does not overtly advocate for progressive reform.

by Jerry Mitchell, Mississippi Today
June 9, 2025

America lost a gentle giant in journalism when Stanley Nelson, who investigated some of the nation’s most notorious racially motivated slayings in Mississippi and Louisiana, died unexpectedly last week. He was 69.

CBC reporter David Ridgen, an award-winning documentary filmmaker and podcast host, worked with the reporter for years. “Stanley Nelson is the best of us,” he said. “A doer. Not a reminiscer. A teller. Not someone to leave anyone behind. A brotherly guy who you’d trust anything to.”

In 2008, Ridgen and I joined forces with Nelson and fellow journalists John Fleming, Ben Greenberg, Pete Nicks, Robert Rosenthal, Hank Klibanoff, Ronnie Agnew, Melvin Claxton, Peter Klein and others to form the Civil Rights Cold Cases Project. Our dream was to create a documentary that would capture our continuing work on these cases.

The big picture documentary never happened, but many other projects emerged for radio, print and film. Nelson never missed a beat, writing hundreds of stories for the 5,000-circulation Concordia Sentinel, where he served as editor.

In 2012, he became a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his stories on the 1964 killing of Frank Morris in Ferriday, Louisiana, by Klansmen who belonged to the violent wing, the “Silver Dollar Group.”

Best-selling author Greg Iles depicted the journalist as the character Henry Sexton in his novel, “Natchez Burning.” Nelson chuckled to me about the portrayal, saying his alter ego lived a much more adventurous life: “He is a musician, has a girlfriend and is tech savvy — that’s something I don’t know a damn thing about.”

Iles said the most important writing he’s ever done “would not exist were it not for the inspiration and selfless collaboration of Stanley Nelson. I never knew another man who always did the right thing regardless of fear or favor, not motivated by hope for profit or fame. Stanley eventually gained a wide reputation for excellence, but not because he sought it. Because he earned it. And God knows the world is a better place because he lived and worked in it.”

First case: Frank Morris

On the last day of February in 2007, Nelson heard the name of Frank Morris for the first time. He learned that the Justice Department would be taking a second look at the 1964 killing of Morris.

That surprised Nelson because he thought he knew almost everything about this small town and had never heard the name.

He reached out to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which shared about 150 pages of redacted FBI reports on the Morris case, and he wrote his first article.

He didn’t see how he could advance the story anymore until he received a call from Morris’ granddaughter, Rosa Williams, and began to learn more about the man and the killing.

On a cold December morning in 1964, the 51-year-old Morris was asleep in the back of his shoe repair store when he heard glass breaking. He bolted to the front of the store and saw one man pouring gasoline and another holding a shotgun, who yelled, “Get back in there, n—–!”

By the time Morris escaped, his feet were bleeding, and nearly all his clothing had been burned from his body. He survived long enough to tell FBI agents that he didn’t know his attackers, but friends wondered if he had been afraid to say.

‘His curiosity never waned’

In 2011, Nelson reported that family members of Arthur Leonard Spencer said he had confessed to them years earlier, but Spencer denied that claim to Nelson. A federal grand jury met on the matter, but no one was ever arrested.

Klibanoff, who works with Emory University students on civil rights cold cases and hosts the Peabody-winning podcast “Buried Truths,” helped Nelson edit those stories. “We were going over them till 9, 10 or 11 at night, because we both had full-time jobs,” he recalled. “Stanley was busy covering police juries, the city council and other things during the day.”

Nelson remained rock solid in his reporting, Klibanoff said. “I admired him immensely, and his curiosity never waned.”

The journalist moved beyond the Morris killing to document other violence by the Silver Dollar Group, depicted as the “Double Eagles” in “Natchez Burning.” The group, which included some law enforcement officers, was suspected of planting bombs in the vehicles of two NAACP leaders in Natchez, George Metcalfe and Wharlest Jackson. Metcalfe was injured in the blast, and Jackson was killed.

Nelson also reported on possible involvement of the Silver Dollar Group in the 1964 disappearance of a 21-year-old Black man, Joseph Edwards. His white and green Buick was found abandoned near a local bowling alley in Vidalia, Louisiana.

Ridgen said Nelson has been telling him for years that he believed he had found where Edwards’ body was buried.

When Ridgen worked with Nelson, he would stay with him on his Cash Bayou farm near the Tensas River. At night, they would drink together, Nelson sipping a glass of Old Charter.

“I shared and pored over thousands of pages of FBI files with him over the years. Confronted Klansmen, and visited the families so awfully affected by them,” he said. “Stanley’s passion was writing and local reporting but also investigation and uncovering the history that surrounded him and that he grew up with.”

He collected old investigative documents, FBI interviews and local police reports. “Saw them as treasures that contained just the beginnings of the actual story,” Ridgen said. “He reported all the ends of the story, all the shades of gray. Always with an eye for the restorative power of the work.”

Ridgen believes that Nelson’s work, which includes two books on the Klan, should be required reading for Americans and the rest of the world. He “will be missed dearly by the state and country,” Ridgen said. “I wish we could travel those roads together forever.”

In 2009, the Louisiana State University Cold Case Project began helping Nelson with his research, and a decade later, Nelson began sharing tips and techniques with students on how he worked on these civil rights cases.

Christopher Drew leads LSU’s Manship School’s experiential journalism curriculum, which includes the project. Under Nelson’s tutelage, “our students proved that Robert Fuller, a businessman who later became a top Klan leader, killed four of his Black workers in 1960, not in self-defense, as the local authorities had allowed him to claim, but in an ambush following a dispute over back pay,” Drew said.

In 2022, a series by LSU students on the 1972 killings of two students at Southern University in Baton Rouge won a national award from Investigative Reporters and Editors as the best investigative series by students at a large university.

“Stanley was always low-key, humble and determined to hear people out –– the model of what a reporter should be,” Drew said. “But the students were always leaning forward in their seats when he talked about how he got old Klan leaders to talk. ‘Most of them (Klansmen) lived on dirt roads at dead ends,’ he’d say, ‘with barbed wire fences and signs on the gate saying, ‘No Trespassing’ and ‘Trespassers Will Be Shot.’ Sometimes he’d send them letters saying he’d be coming at a certain date and time to mitigate those odds.

“But his heroism did not just come at those moments. It was his courage, the students could see, to dig up the dark facts in these communities for the sake of justice–and to take personal risks to hear what the suspects and perpetrators had to say–that make him such an exceptional journalist.”

LSU students plan to continue Nelson’s work on the Edwards’ case with a forensics team, Drew said. “We know where Stanley thinks the body might be, and we will continue to pursue that story.”Many of the stories written by Nelson and LSU students can be found at lsucoldcaseproject.com.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The post Civil rights investigative journalist Stanley Nelson, ‘the best of us,’ died last week 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: Center-Left

This article honors the life and work of journalist Stanley Nelson, focusing on his dedication to uncovering civil rights-era racial violence and his impact on investigative journalism. The tone is reverent and empathetic, emphasizing social justice, historical accountability, and the systemic failings of past law enforcement practices—hallmarks of center-left reporting. While it does not promote partisan ideology, it frames its narrative around advocacy for truth, civil rights, and journalistic courage in confronting racism, aligning it with center-left values. The article maintains factual reporting but with an unmistakable moral perspective favoring justice and equality.

by Michael Goldberg, Mississippi Today
June 18, 2025

The state of Mississippi and technology giant Nvidia have reached a deal for the company to expand artificial intelligence training and research at the state’s education institutions, an initiative to prepare students for a global economy increasingly driven by AI, Gov. Tate Reeves announced Wednesday.

The memorandum of understanding, a nonbinding agreement, between Mississippi and the California-based company will introduce AI programs across the state’s community colleges, universities and technical institutions. The initiative will aim to train at least 10,000 Mississippians using a curriculum designed around AI skills, machine learning and data science.

Mississippi now joins Utah, California and Oregon, which have signed on to similar programs with Nvidia.

“This collaboration with Nvidia is monumental for Mississippi. By expanding AI education, investing in workforce development and encouraging innovation, we, along with Nvidia, are creating a pathway to dynamic careers in AI and cybersecurity for Mississippians,” Reeves said. “These are the in-demand jobs of the future — jobs that will change the landscape of our economy for generations to come. AI is here now, and it is here to stay.”

The agreement does not award any tax incentives to Nvidia, but Reeves said the state would provide funding for the initiative. Still, he did not foresee having to call a special legislative session in order to pay for it. Reeves said officials and Nvidia were still determining the exact dollar figure the project would require, but the state would spend as much as it took to reach its goal of training at least 10,000 Mississippians.

Some of the funding may come from $9.1 million in grants to state institutions of higher learning through the Mississippi AI Talent Accelerator Program, which Reeves announced last week.

Nvidia designs and supplies graphics processing units (GPUs), and the Mississippi program will focus on teaching people to work with GPUs. The company has seen growing demand for its semiconductors, which are used to power AI applications.

Now the world’s most valuable chipmaker, Nvidia announced in April that it will produce its AI supercomputers in the United States for the first time.

Louis Stewart, head of strategic initiatives for Nvidia’s global developer ecosystem, said the Mississippi program is part of a larger effort to bolster the United States’ position as the global leader in artificial intelligence.

“Together, we will enhance economic growth through an AI-skilled workforce, advanced research, and industry engagement, positioning Mississippi as a hub for AI-driven transformation to the benefit of its communities.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The post State partners with Nvidia for AI education 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: Centrist

This article presents a largely factual and balanced account of Mississippi’s partnership with Nvidia to expand AI education. It reports on the initiative, quotes key stakeholders such as Governor Tate Reeves and Nvidia executive Louis Stewart, and avoids emotionally charged language or partisan framing. While the governor’s remarks are supportive and optimistic, they are typical of official announcements and are presented without editorial commentary. The piece highlights economic and educational goals without implying ideological advocacy, thus maintaining neutrality in tone and content.