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.