A special House committee on Thursday began work on three issues that have stumped Mississippi lawmakers for years: restoring voters’ right to sidestep the Legislature and put issues on a ballot, restoring voting rights to convicted felons and allowing people to easily vote before election day.

Members of the House Select Committee on Voters Rights heard from Samantha Buckley, director of policy for the Secure Democracy Foundation. Her presentation made clear that Mississippi is far behind the curve on dealing with these three voting rights issues.

House Speaker Jason White has tasked the bipartisan panel — one of four select committees he formed to tackle complex issues before the next legislative session — to hold public hearings on the issues and craft legislation.

“Once again, the House’s legislative priorities will be clear and informed from the start as we maintain our focus and energy on preparing for the 2026 legislative session,” he wrote recently of the select committees.

In MS, 52,000 can’t vote because of nonviolent records

Buckley told lawmakers that 46 other states allow some sort of automatic restoration of voting rights for people convicted of crimes who have completed their sentences. Mississippi is one of only four states with a difficult application process for restoration, and given that only 207 people here had their rights restored from 1997 to 2004, it’s process may be the most restrictive. It requires lawmakers to pass by a two-thirds margin in each chamber an individual bill for each person’s rights to be restored, or a governor’s pardon.

The Mississippi Constitution drafted in 1890 in the Jim Crow era of racial discrimination listed 10 disenfranchising crimes — offenses that state leaders at the time believed Black people were more likely to commit. Since then, attorneys general interpretations added many more nonviolent, disenfranchising crimes.

Buckley said about 52,000 Mississippians, or about 2% of the voting age population, currently cannot vote because they have nonviolent felony records.

Buckley said many states provide for automatic restoration of rights after someone serves their sentence, fulfills their probation or parole, and-or makes financial restitution. She said making it automatic saves states money and reduces bureaucracy. But she said making such changes in Mississippi would most likely require a change in the state constitution, a heavier lift requiring a statewide vote rather than just lawmakers passing a law.

Rep. Noah Sanford, a Republican from Collins co-chairing the select committee, said he believes reform of felony suffrage restitution can pass the House. Rep. Price Wallace, a Republican from Mendenhall and co-chair, said Speaker White’s focus on the issue with the select committee will help suffrage reform legislation’s chances.

“I think there is broad consensus among House members that restoration of voting rights for nonviolent offenders is the right thing to do,” Sanford said. “But we are not kings, and there are two other levels it has to go through (the Senate and governor).”

MS has had on-again, off-again ballot initiative rights

Mississippians’ right to place issues directly on a statewide ballot is, technically, enshrined in the state constitution.

Mississippians had the right to ballot initiative starting in 1914, but the state Supreme Court threw it out in 1922. Voters restored the right by passing a constitutional amendment in 1992, but the Supreme Court again nullified it on a technical issue in a lawsuit over voters passing a medical marijuana initiative in 2020.

The right to initiative in the state constitution includes requirements for gathering voter signatures from Mississippi’s five congressional districts. But in 2001, the state lost a district from population loss, and the court ruled the initiative inoperative. Since then, despite calls from voters and advocates to restore it, lawmakers have dickered over details and signature thresholds and failed to restore the right.

Buckley told lawmakers Thursday that the simplest way to restore the right would be to change constitutional language on signature gathering from five districts to four, or have language adapting to whatever number of districts the state has at the time of an initiative effort.

Buckley said 23 other states, plus the District of Columbia and U.S. Virgin Islands, have some sort of functioning ballot initiative process.

Lawmakers have debated how stringent the requirements for placing an issue directly before voters should be. Some fear sidestepping the state’s representative form of government could allow special interests with deep pockets to game the system. Others say the state’s previous requirements were too strict.

Buckley noted that, from 1992 until the high court ruling in 2021, Mississippi voters passed only three initiatives — one restricting eminent domain, one requiring voters to provide IDs and one (the court struck down) approving medical marijuana.

Mississippi’s ballot initiative in the past gave voters the right to change the state constitution. But lawmakers have also considered allowing it only for addressing state law.

Buckley said allowing it for state law might prove problematic because “when the public makes a decision, the Legislature could then change it back — what does that mean about the process?” She noted that states’ ballot initiative processes vary.

“No state really has a template,” she said. “Every state does it differently.”

Early voting faces uphill battle

Mississippi is one of three states — along with Alabama and New Hampshire — that does not allow in person early voting. In her presentation, she gave an example of the difficult process “Frank,” who would be out of town on Election Day, would have to go through to vote absentee beforehand in Mississippi.

Buckley said that in most states, in-person early voting “mimics most of Election Day practices.” She said it would reduce paperwork and clerical mistakes from Mississippi’s absentee voting process and mean shorter lines and less people walking away without voting on Election Day.

But early voting in Mississippi and other states has brought much debate, oftentimes partisan, with many Republican officials opposing it. Gov. Tate Reeves has been very vocal with his opposition to it.

Sanford said that of the three issues the committee is tackling, allowing early voting might face the most uphill battle.

“The governor remains opposed to early voting, and he’s made that extremely clear that it’s not subject to change,” Sanford said. “I’m not saying we are not going to work on early voting — compromise is the name of the game — but that may not be the focus as much as suffrage restoration and ballot initiative.”

A half hour into Jackson’s final budget meeting Wednesday, Councilmember Vernon Hartley wanted to know if — out of the hundreds of millions of dollars the city council was poised to pass in the annual budget — the city could allocate $2.5 million to blight control equipment. 

Pieter Teeuwissen, the chief administrative officer, leaned down from the dais to speak with one of his employees before offering a counter: That would work if Hartley dropped the number by a million. 

“No sir,” Hartley said.

Then Teeuwissen explained his hesitation: Like many officials in the council chambers, he lacked confidence in the accuracy of the city’s proposed budget book. 

“All this is numbers that none of us are willing to build our own financial houses on,” he said. “So I don’t want you allocating money beyond what my finance people say they are comfortable with.”

The uncertainty stems from the city’s failure to keep up with its audited financial statements — something many cities and towns across Mississippi struggle to execute. This concern led Mayor John Horhn’s administration to recommend the Jackson City Council adopt a generally flat budget this year. 

On Wednesday, the council passed the roughly $337 million budget, up from $325 million last year, Teeuwissen said, a difference that is due to the infusion of one-time funds, not substantial growth in the city’s general fund. 

Hartley ended up dropping his proposal by a million as Teeuwissen asked. Other changes the council made to Horhn’s proposed budget included amendments from Councilman Kenneth Stokes to give a discretionary raise for the lowest-paid city employees and add an additional $1 million to the police and fire departments after the city completes the back-due audits. One proposal that failed would have forced the administration to pay the zoo’s water bills.

“We need to show some money in this budget that’s just not fluff, not just some money in the sky that ain’t there,” Stokes said. 

Council President Brian Grizzell said after the meeting that due to the late audits, the council does not know how much money the city has in its fund balance. He described his level of confidence in the budget he had just passed as “moderate” and added he hoped to have more time to look at the numbers next year. 

“We haven’t passed an audit since I’ve been in office,” Grizzell said. “It’s always just been a really good guess.” 

To remedy that, Teeuwissen told Mississippi Today the mayor also hopes to consolidate some of the city’s 11 departments starting Oct. 1, when the new budget takes effect. 

The administration said the mergers, which will include reducing the number of city employees, will help in the event that the budget changes once the city’s audited financial statements are complete. 

“The main thing Jacksonians need to know is that — I’m trying to choose my words carefully — the city, the administration has proposed to the council a flat budget in light of the lack of audited financial data,” Teeuwissen told Mississippi Today. “It is also likely that the city budget will have to decrease during the fiscal year as audited numbers are received now.” 

To complicate matters, the audited financial statements will not answer every question facing the city’s budget, Teeuwissen said.

Take, for instance, longrunning concerns about the impact Jackson’s dwindling population will have on its tax base. Officials do not know the extent to which Jackson is missing out on revenue due to potentially low property tax collection rates, even as the city property tax revenues grew by $2 million to $68 million this year, according to Fidelis Malembeka, the chief financial officer. 

“You might lose population, but somebody’s property values still increase,” Malembeka said after the meeting. 

Overall, the city’s revenues fell by about $8 million from last year to $316 million, Malembeka said, mainly due to a decline in one-time funding. Revenue generally includes permits and fees, sales tax, grants and non-recurring funding such as the Siemens settlement.

If the administration truly lacked confidence in the city’s budget figures, they would have taken more drastic action than proposing a level budget, said Tina Clay, a council member who represents northwest Jackson.

“If that was the case you need to freeze everything until you get the audit,” she told Mississippi Today. 

Teeuwissen said the administration will be focusing on sensibly organizing city government, such as reinstituting monthly meetings with department-level fiscal officers, reviewing the finance department’s recordkeeping methods and moving services so they fall within the same department. 

“Right now, we do grass-cutting by contract, grass-cutting by community improvement and grass-cutting by Parks and Rec, and we’re supposed to have right-of-way maintenance by Public Works,” he said. “Three different departments and contractors all supposedly doing some version of the same thing but we really don’t have the left hand knowing what the right hand is doing.” 

The council on Tuesday passed a resolution supporting the mayor’s goal of consolidating and merging departments. Another way the city is attempting to coordinate efforts around infrastructure projects is an agreement approved Tuesday to share resources between the city and county, Clarion Ledger reported.

Councilman Kevin Parkinson told Mississippi Today he was relieved to know that the budget is not the end-all, be-all of the city’s spending power, as it can receive more revenue throughout the year in one-time payments, such as a $1 million grant the council accepted Tuesday from Jackson State University for beautification. 

“I think there’s many people, myself being one of them, that says as much as we want to re-examine everything from the ground up, I don’t know if we can start with a blank sheet of paper in a couple of months and meet the deadline that we have legally,” Parkinson said. 

The city’s budget needed to be finalized before Sept. 15. Over the past week, council members heard budget requests from individual city departments. Some of the needs included helping the community improvement division tackle blight, such as streetlights that are out across the city, improving police technology and purchasing new patrol vehicles, and reopening the Sykes Community Center. 

But moves like that depend on coordination across the system — which, an exchange toward the end of the council meeting illustrated, is lacking in Jackson. 

In an effort to help the legal department, which was considering moving buildings due to HVAC issues, Foote proposed the city put an additional $1 million into the fund for the care and maintenance of public buildings. 

Then Foote learned from Sharon Thames, the deputy chief financial officer, that Jackson already has $710,000 for HVAC repairs set aside in a different fund, one that’s for the “repair and replacement” of city infrastructure. 

Thames explained the monies weren’t listed in the budget book where Foote had looked.

“I mean, this is crazy, people are packing up and getting ready to move when we have money in our budget,” Foote responded. “We’re not communicating well across the system if the money is there, and then we’re being told by the legal department they have to move out because the money to fix their HVAC isn’t there?”

“I mean, to kind of answer your question on the legal (department), that building belongs to JRA (Jackson Redevelopment Authority), not to the city of Jackson,” Thames said. 

“JRA belongs to the city of Jackson,” Foote shot back. Clay shook her head and other council members laughed. 

“Well, yeah, but they don’t like to share their money,” Thames quipped.

(JRA Director Christopher Pike told Mississippi Today Thursday that his agency, a partner to the city, deploys its funding on programming and building maintenance — it’s not as much a matter of not sharing as it is having limited resources — and that it stands ready to assist with these concerns).

Teeuwissen chimed in. 

“As a practical matter I’m with you,” he said to Foote. “If that money was available, that should have been clear so y’all could decide how to address the problem or how to proceed.”

“Somebody in the chain of command needs to know there’s $750,000,” Foote said. 

“Councilman Foote, there’s been no chain of command,” Teeuwissen responded.

At least 42 people have been killed inside Mississippi prisons in the past decade, leaving scores of grieving families questioning a system that fails to protect people in its custody or hold anyone accountable.

There are sisters wracked with guilt, mothers with depression, and children struggling to fill the voids in their lives. Former prison employees talk about lying sleepless in bed, replaying the killings they’ve witnessed but could not stop.

In Mississippi, prison homicides are the culmination of long-documented festering problems: chronic understaffing, lax oversight, gangs that rule by violence and delays in treating life-threatening injuries, an investigation by a statewide reporting team found.

Murders signal “catastrophic failures” of prison administrators, whose number one job is to keep incarcerated people safe, said David Fathi, director of the ACLU National Prison Project.

The perpetrators haven’t faced justice in most cases. Just six of the 42 homicides have led to convictions. 

And the killings show no sign of ending. In the first half of this year, there were five homicides in three Mississippi prisons.

Sydney Miller said her family was given almost no details by prison officials after her elder brother, Gregory Emary, was stabbed to death at the Chickasaw County Regional Facility in Houston in 2020. 

Over the past five years, they have received no contact from prison investigators or prosecutors about what happened or if someone would be held responsible. Miller did not know Emary’s death had been deemed a homicide by a medical examiner until a reporter told her. She wonders if her family would have been treated the same way if her brother had been killed on the outside. 

“So why is this any different?” Miller asked. “Just because it was committed inside prison walls?”

‘No one deserves to die like this’

Uncovering the toll of Mississippi’s prison homicides took a team of reporters from five news organizations: The Marshall Project – Jackson, Mississippi Today, the Clarion Ledger, Hattiesburg American and The Mississippi Link. The team scoured thousands of pages of court records, corrections documents, federal and state government death records, and interviewed families, formerly incarcerated people, former guards, attorneys and corrections experts. 

The investigation found that the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman, which holds about 2,500 people, has had the most killings in the past decade. At least 19 people died in homicides at Parchman from 2015 through 2024.

For most of this time period, the homicide rate among people inside Parchman was five times higher than the state as a whole, which already had the highest rate in the country in 2023.

Lack of consistent and accurate reporting nationwide makes a state-by-state comparison of prison homicides difficult. The reporting team identified three Mississippi homicides that were not listed in federal and state reports.

Most of the 42 killings throughout the state prison system involved beatings or stabbings, sometimes involving multiple assailants. Three in five victims were Black. The age of the victims ranged from 23 to 62. 

Mississippi Department of Corrections officials declined multiple requests for an interview about killings across the prison system, but released an emailed statement. “MDOC remains committed to ensuring the safety of inmates in its custody,” the agency wrote.

Many of the people who were killed in Mississippi’s prisons were sent there after being convicted of offenses that included parole and probation violations, as well as more serious crimes, including robbery and murder. At least a quarter were serving life sentences. Although prison officials have a legal duty to protect all incarcerated people from harm, they could not protect them from death at the hands of cellmates, rival gang members or other incarcerated people.

In one case, a corrections officer pleaded guilty to accessory after the fact in a 2021 murder.

Detrick Munford, who served as deputy warden of Parchman until 2022, said the number of unprosecuted homicides doesn’t surprise him.

Mississippi officials didn’t install many of the cameras at Parchman until after 2020, so in many cases, there was no way to prove who was responsible for a death, he said. Anyone who witnessed a killing “is not going to talk,” he said, alluding to the prison culture of violent retribution, “because he knows what might happen to him.”

MDOC often shares sparse details about prison homicides, if any at all, even with the families of the victims. Nearly all internal investigations into the killings are hidden from the public because the state’s open records law exempts all law enforcement investigative files.

Although many of the recent homicides were filmed by security cameras and some of those responsible are known to corrections officials based on internal reports, local prosecutors filed charges against suspects in 36% of the homicides in the past decade.

MDOC officials responded in their email that prison officials take “every death of an inmate in its custody seriously. Each suspected homicide is investigated…The remaining investigations that are closed did not support a referral (for prosecution).”

In one criminal case, a charge was filed, but the Marshall County District Attorney’s office essentially forgot to prosecute the suspect nearly four years after the prison killing. The indictment had gotten lost in the bureaucracy, District Attorney Ben Creekmore later acknowledged in an interview. It was reactivated only after a reporter from the news team called him about the case.

The prospect of criminal prosecution, however, is likely of little concern to someone already serving a multi-decade sentence. The continued killings show how the prison system has not significantly addressed its failures to prevent homicides. The reporting team identified one person who pleaded guilty to manslaughter for a killing in one prison, then allegedly went on to kill again in another prison. He is awaiting trial on the second homicide charge and is currently serving a 40-year sentence.

DeAndre Davis was serving a life sentence when he was stabbed to death in 2017 in the Wilkinson County Correctional Facility in Woodville, months after he was stabbed in another attack at the same prison. At the sentencing hearing for the man convicted of the killing, Davis’ mother, Victorra Williams, said she didn’t understand why her son died, because he was supposed to be in isolation after he received a death threat. 

“No one deserves to die like this,” she told the judge.

“I understand that they are in prison, and I understand that they are (caged), but I don’t understand you are in prison and you are steady killing each other for no reason,” Williams said. “That’s just — that’s crazy.” 

Punishment after killing: loss of privileges

Growing up, Marcie Harper protected her baby brother, Joshua Odom. He was smaller than the other kids, so she fought his fights. She called him her Cabbage Patch Kid because of his big blue eyes and bald head. Her brother grew into a wiry man who loved to fish, gaining him the nickname Catfish.

“I was always there for him,” Harper said.

But Odom developed a drug problem that landed him in and out of prison, locked away from his big sister, who couldn’t always afford to visit or talk to him on the phone. 

She could not be there to protect her brother on Jan. 12, 2025. 

He died, a casualty of prison violence, lax security and questionable medical care that gave superficial treatment to a head wound that would prove fatal. 

Odom was incarcerated at South Mississippi Correctional Institution in Leakesville. His friend Shelby Peevyhouse, who has a pacemaker, had just gotten into a fight and been kicked in the chest. As Odom came over to check on his friend, Peevyhouse said later, another incarcerated person punched Odom, knocking him to the ground, where he hit his head and fell unconscious.

When Odom came to, guards were restraining him, Peevyhouse said from prison.

“Don’t kill him. He needs your help,” Peevyhouse pleaded with the guards as they wrestled Odom. Both men were taken to the medical wing.

“Catfish was laying there screaming for help in a medical gurney to the left of me, calling for his mama,” Peevyhouse said. 

Guards declined to call an ambulance and went home, as their shifts were ending, Peevyhouse said. Instead, he said, a medical staffer glued Odom’s head wound shut and sent both injured men back to their housing unit. 

Odom, though, was dazed. He couldn’t even say his name. Peevyhouse tried to keep his friend awake. 

“I did not know what to do,” Peevyhouse said. “I was so scared.”

As Odom began vomiting a “pink foam,” Peevyhouse banged on a window. He says he told a guard coming around for a count to call medical or else he would start a fire. 

A medical worker took Odom away in a wheelchair. “Hey, smile a little,” Odom said before being wheeled off. Peevyhouse lit a cigarette for his friend, told him he loved him, and that he would be there when Odom got back. This time, an ambulance was called. It was too late. 

The next morning, Peevyhouse found out Odom was dead. 

“He was my best friend. This is really hard for me,” Peevyhouse said repeatedly.

The state medical examiner ruled Odom’s death a homicide by blunt force trauma. Because his alleged attacker was never criminally charged, the reporting team is not naming him. Imprisoned on a domestic violence conviction, he is scheduled for release by 2028.

The suspect was issued a disciplinary citation for assaulting another person. Prisons use a rules violation book that outlines dozens of actions that are prohibited inside prison walls, from hoarding food to attacking others. According to a rule violation report obtained by the reporting team, guards used security camera footage to confirm the assault.

The suspect’s punishment was the loss of 180 days of earned time — time that would have reduced his sentence for good conduct — as well as lost phone and visitation privileges for 60 days, and he was held responsible for Odom’s medical costs, which were not listed. He did not receive a higher violation for causing Odom’s death. The next day, he was transferred to another facility, which is MDOC’s standard procedure.

State Rep. Becky Currie, a registered nurse, has publicly criticized VitalCore, the company contracted to provide medical care in the state’s prisons, after meeting and receiving letters from incarcerated people who claim they were not getting care for treatable illnesses and injuries. 

“It is hard for me to hear that (MDOC) feels that they provide adequate care,” Currie told Mississippi Today. 

A spokesperson for VitalCore told Mississippi Today that the company provides “comprehensive and competent health care services in accordance with prevailing standards of care.”

After Odom’s death, his sister said the family could not get a clear story from prison officials.

The official who called their mother said Odom had been found hurt and died at the hospital. It wasn’t until someone connected to Peevyhouse sent her a Facebook message that she found out that her brother died waiting for an ambulance.

The 40-year-old Odom, incarcerated since 2018 after being convicted of burglary and credit card fraud, was supposed to be released in a few weeks, his family said.

“I just wish I had something of his,” Harper said. Instead, all she has left are memories and his ashes, which the family plans to scatter in the Gulf, where he loved to fish, on his birthday. 

Soon, she’ll also have a tattoo of a catfish on a hook with a phrase he always told her: “Keep your head up.”

Constitutional violations, few answers

Odom’s death came less than a year after the federal Department of Justice found that three Mississippi prisons — including the South Mississippi prison where he had been held — violated the constitutional rights of the more than 7,400 people housed in them by failing to protect them from widespread violence. The investigation listed numerous failures: gross understaffing, assaults that are likely undercounted because of this lack of staff supervision, gang brawls involving dozens of people, violent incidents that go uninvestigated, and bungled investigations that lead nowhere.

The Justice Department had found similar violations in a 2022 investigation of the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman. 

What Odom’s family experienced is common. The reporting team found that the families of other incarcerated people killed in prison were often left without answers. Many of those interviewed learned details about their loved ones’ deaths through a whisper network of incarcerated people, insiders, advocates, and, in some cases, from journalists. 

Some families contacted lawyers, attempting to file civil suits, only to find out that no one would take their cases.

“I literally just gave up on it,” said Dale Graham, whose brother was killed in the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility in 2021. “Nothing happened.”

Currie, a Brookhaven Republican, who chairs the state’s House Corrections Committee, has raised questions about how the prisons are run, including the health and safety of the incarcerated.

She said prison killings show that violence is rampant inside the state’s prisons, and that it’s amplified by issues such as contraband and gangs. 

“Whatever the cause of death is, I think the families are owed an answer,” she said. “Was my loved one killed? Was it that their diabetes wasn’t tended to? What was the cause of death?” Currie asked. “And I do not know of one family that’s ever received that answer.”

She has wondered how seemingly healthy men die in Mississippi’s prisons. Currie said she plans to introduce legislation to create a group of lawmakers and prison officials to look into all prison deaths, which can serve as a guide on how to prevent future deaths. 

In a written response to reporters’ questions, MDOC said the department has taken several corrective measures since the Justice Department began investigating the prison system in 2020, including improved training, facility upgrades and increased staffing.

MDOC said the Justice Department’s investigation is ongoing, and both sides are engaged in confidential settlement negotiations. 

A deadly prison economy

Violent deaths in Mississippi prisons tend to lead back to the same factors: understaffing, poor training, and gang control, according to lawyers, experts, former corrections staffers interviewed, and the Justice Department reports. 

Prison guards, many of whom are young and female, are poorly trained and sometimes left alone to oversee units holding as many as 180 men, according to Catina Washington, a former MDOC case manager who said she was assaulted in December 2020 by an incarcerated person at the South Mississippi prison. Her attacker was charged with simple assault, but the charge was later dropped due to conflicting witness testimony.

Guards make decisions on whether a sick or injured person can see a prison nurse or even go to a hospital. 

“We don’t realize how much trust of another person’s life we put into the hands of correctional officers,” said Greta Kemp Martin, formerly the litigation director of Disability Rights Mississippi. “They literally hold your life in their hands.”

Poor oversight allows gang members to take advantage of the security gaps, buying and selling illegal drugs and cellphones, sometimes with the help of prison guards whom they recruit to smuggle contraband in. The reporting team identified several criminal cases in which corrections officers were charged with bringing in drugs or cellphones. Martin said some incarcerated clients have told her about correctional officers who share gang affiliations with them. 

The gangs run a brutal underground economy. A debt to the wrong person can cost a life, as it did for 31-year-old Jeremy Irons, who was killed over $40 in Parchman, federal and state reports showed. 

The Justice Department’s investigations found that the facilities operated at dangerously low staffing levels. In 2022, the Central Mississippi prison was operating with 44% of the employees needed to run the facility. At the South Mississippi prison, where Odom was later killed, the facility ran with 36% of the necessary employees. And in Wilkinson County’s prison, a human resources manager told investigators that the officer vacancy rate hovered around 50%.

Chronic understaffing is a key factor in prison homicides across the nation, said Fathi, of the ACLU National Prison Project. And what staff there is may be poorly trained to handle violence.

Former MDOC staffers reported that their training was rushed, leaving them unprepared for the dangers of the job. 

“Parchman is all about ‘We’re gonna hurry up and get you out of class, throw your ass out there, because we need people to watch the inmates,” a former correctional officer, who did not want his name used for fear of retaliation, told a reporter. “Many times I’ve seen people get killed right in front of me, and it really wasn’t nothing you could really do, because you ain’t but one person.”

Chuck Mullins, a lawyer who has represented Mississippi families in wrongful prison death cases for decades, said in many of the death cases he has litigated, he found that staff were either not present or poorly trained.

Chronic understaffing and poor training endanger both the incarcerated people and corrections staff, leaving many who remain fearful to do their jobs. The Justice Department’s reports cited multiple instances of staff failing or refusing to do security counts and falsifying count sheets. 

Disciplinary reports reviewed by the reporting team show corrections officers being overpowered, beaten, choked, stabbed, spit on and sprayed with human waste. 

Fatal beating overlooked for five hours

Army veteran Ronnie Graham survived combat in Iraq. He survived cancer.

He did not survive nine days inside the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility in Pearl. 

In the early hours before dawn in December 2021, prison security camera footage captured a man attacking Graham near his bunk, choking and kicking him in the head, according to federal and state records reviewed by the reporting team. 

Throughout the night, Graham passed in and out of consciousness. Later, another person punched him in the face. More than five hours later, an officer found Graham and called for help. By then, his body was rigid, and he was foaming at the mouth. Graham died soon after help arrived. 

For at least five hours, Graham suffered. And for most of that time, guards were nowhere to be found. An investigative report noted that an officer turned the lights off in the unit about 45 minutes after Graham was attacked, but no officer walked through to check on the welfare of the men held there. 

“If someone would have done their job that night, he would still be alive today,” his brother, Dale Graham, said. “But because someone didn’t do their job, my brother is now dead.”

No one was charged in Graham’s death.

Lawsuits and internal prison reports show that, on multiple occasions, guards did not find a dead person for hours.

Earlier this year, Jonathan Havard was strangled in the Wilkinson County Correctional Facility. A parent, who found out about the death through unknown means, notified the prison that someone in Havard’s cell was dead, according to an internal MDOC report. 

Last year, a group of roughly 10 people beat and stabbed 28-year-old Edward Boyd to death at East Mississippi Correctional Facility in Lauderdale County, according to a lawsuit his family filed against the private prison company that operates the lockup, Management & Training Corp. The suit stated that the attackers killed him “in plain view of surveillance camera” and then “dragged (Boyd) into a cell, where they left him to die.” 

He was found covered in blood during a morning count. The lawsuit alleges that a correctional officer wrote in a report that they had last seen Boyd alive and well during a 4 a.m. count. However, there was no evidence of a count being conducted at 4 a.m., according to the lawsuit.

In response to the lawsuit, MTC denied any negligence or wrongdoing. The case is pending in federal court.

Dead-end investigations

When someone is killed in a Mississippi prison, typically, the department conducts an investigation. It interviews staff, witnesses, sometimes confidential informants, people it believes to be complicit in the death, and reviews camera footage.  

MDOC sometimes requests help from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation. 

However, the U.S. Justice Department found many investigations by the department were incomplete, failed to answer key questions or were mishandled. 

Investigations of homicides that stemmed from fights over drug debts routinely ignored the source of the drugs or failed to conduct follow-up interviews.

During the 2022 Parchman investigation, a supervisor in MDOC’s investigative division told Justice Department officials that the caseload was too heavy and staffers were too overworked to conduct comprehensive investigations.

For example, after Jeremy Irons was stabbed to death in 2019, the internal investigation concluded that one incarcerated person stabbed him and flushed the weapon down the toilet. 

The investigation into Irons’ death relied on one written statement from a trainee officer. No other staff was interviewed. However, several other people took part in the fight, which stemmed from Irons’ $40 debt to another person, according to the Justice Department. 

After MDOC concludes its investigations, it may pass its findings along to local county district attorneys, who can then seek an indictment from a grand jury. 

In an August 2019 case, Samuel Wade was strangled to death at Parchman. The Justice Department’s investigation references an incarcerated person strangled with a bedsheet that month. The victim’s cellmate allegedly confessed to the killing, and MDOC referred the case to the Sunflower County district attorney, according to the investigation. After six years, however, no charges have been filed.

Sunflower County District Attorney Dewayne Richardson has not responded to multiple interview requests.

Criminal charges have only been filed in five of the 19 killings in Parchman over the past decade. Four of those cases are pending in the courts. The fifth was dismissed after the defendant died by suicide.

Other district attorneys with prisons in their counties did not respond to requests for comment or declined to comment on open cases. 

Experts said secrecy around prison operations and the lack of oversight, coupled with the general public’s lack of concern toward incarcerated people, allow the long-documented abuses and civil rights violations to continue. 

Reforms to reduce deaths in custody have been hampered by “the secrecy that pervades prisons and jails,” said Andrea Armstrong, a Loyola University New Orleans law professor and leading researcher on deaths behind bars.

Many of the prison incident records the reporting team obtained came with scant narratives or with entire sections blacked out, even though such records are public under the state’s open records law.

In the past decade, at least five families of people killed in Mississippi prisons have filed civil lawsuits against the Department of Corrections or Management & Training Corp. However, documents in these lawsuits, such as evidence and settlement details, are often sealed or protected by confidentiality agreements.

For the incarcerated people who have been killed, their families are left with little, other than despair. 

“This (is) an unimaginable pain you all gave me. This grief will last forever,” one victim’s mother wrote in a court statement for the upcoming trial of the prison murder of her son. 

“People talk about justice. They say it’s blind. But justice shouldn’t be silent. It shouldn’t turn away when someone dies in state custody,” she wrote. “If the state takes responsibility for a person’s life, it should also be held accountable when that life is lost.” 

Caleb Bedillion of The Marshall Project – Jackson, Grant McLaughlin of the Clarion Ledger, Jerry Mitchell of Mississippi Today, and Christopher Young of The Mississippi Link contributed to this report.

This story is part of a reporting collaboration with The Marshall Project, Mississippi Today, the Clarion Ledger, Hattiesburg American and The Mississippi Link.

New Stage Theatre in Jackson opens its 60th anniversary season with a murder mystery farce that might just as well have a Murphy’s Law mandate. Simply put, “The Play That Goes Wrong” does, in so many ways, as a troupe of actors do their disastrous darnedest to get through the  mishap-prone opening night of a 1920s whodunit.

That makes it the perfect introduction for this milestone anniversary season, said New Stage Artistic Director Francine Thomas Reynolds. “I think you have to go with anything that happens, right?”

The show-must-go-on drive has seen the regional professional theater through a storied history that has launched careers, built a reliable stable of talent, supported new works and brought rich Mississippi stories, American classics and powerful contemporary fare to the Jackson stage. 

From the start, the founders’ commitment reached beyond entertainment. They wanted something different, hence the “New Stage” name. Desegregating the stage and the audience in civil rights era Mississippi brought called-in threats, Reynolds said, recalling conversations with founding Artistic Director Ivan Rider. 

“Doing things like ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ as their first show — it was very bold. … They kept going. They did it.” 

Subsequent hurdles included a financial crisis that nearly closed the theater in 2001, but New Stage powered through with an “intermission” season, skeleton staff and volunteers, and rebuilt. The COVID-19 pandemic brought another huge challenge. 

“While theaters were closing or pausing around the country, we pivoted,” said Sharon Miles, former New Stage education director, frequent performer and, later this season, a guest director. Virtual play readings, streamed shows and an online summer camp met the moment.  

“That type of resilience says so much about who we are as artists, as a theater, as a community, and I won’t ever forget that,” she said.

“I think after 60 years, a lot does go wrong, that you make right,” Reynolds said, from problem-solving design challenges to keeping the lights on (or rehearsing in the back alley when Katrina knocks them out). “That’s part of the magic of theater, and how you make it happen and how you persevere.”

A milestone season brings into focus what the theater has gotten right all along. That perseverance and its legacy have a generational impact. Starkville native Miles was a 9th grader when she saw a production of August Wilson’s “Fences” at New Stage Theatre. 

“It was the first time I had ever seen an all-Black cast. It was a turning point in my life, because I did not know you could make a career in theater before that moment.” 

Miles just completed her master of fine arts degree in acting at Northwestern University in Chicago. She returns to New Stage in February to direct the Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Primary Trust” by Eboni Booth, part of the anniversary season’s main stage lineup.

Award-winning Atlanta-based playwright Topher Payne is among many who can claim New Stage as a launchpad. 

“I’m so fortunate that that was where, as a teenager, I learned what I had a right to expect in a professional theater environment, which was so driven by people first, product second,” said Payne, who came onboard as an apprentice almost 30 years ago. 

“From (founder) Jane Reid Petty forward, it was always with the goal of creating a space where community can gather. And, that wasn’t just what we’re offering the audience. It’s what we’re offering as artists, to each other,” Payne said. “For me, as a 17-year-old artsy kid from Kosciusko, that was my safe space. … It was safe for me to be joyful. It was safe for me to be brave and bold and make mistakes, and have the support of the community. That still propels me forward and expects me to do the same for others.” 

He worked that theater know-how into a professional career that has taken him all over the world. It pulls him back to Mississippi in April, when he’ll direct his new play “The Attala County Garden Club,” a contemporary Southern comedy Payne described as “a little bit ‘Witches of Eastwick’ … a little bit ‘Get Out.’” 

“It’s a story for everybody who ever thought they wanted to fit in, and then have to deal with what happens when they do,” he said.

Veteran New Stage actor Jo Ann Robinson’s show count hovers around 58, and she’ll notch another in Payne’s play next spring. The theater’s faithful core group of Mississippi-based performers and crew who return, show after show, bring the skill and dedication artistic directors can rely on, she said. 

“They’re responsible, they show up when they’re supposed to, and they’re easy to work with. … That makes it better for everyone.

“The people behind the scenes, the crews, the designers, the people in administration, the actors that work there consistently — it’s like home to us,” Robinson said. “That does set it apart.”

That care runs deep. This week, New Stage unveils the honorary renaming of the Belhaven block bound by Carlisle, Whitworth, Fortification and Monroe streets to Bill McCarty Square. The move celebrates Bill McCarty III’s roles as passionate New Stage volunteer for more than 50 years, generous donor and, for the past 24 years without compensation, the theater’s general manager.

Jackson actor John Howell, an intern in 1993 and briefly education director, adds to his frequent onstage work in “The Play That Goes Wrong,” as the earnest actor playing the butler. Fondren Theatre Workshop, started by Howell and his wife, Diana, in 2003, partners with New Stage to present John Maxwell’s play “We Need to Talk” at the New Stage’s Warehouse Theatre in November.

Now retired from teaching, Howell highlighted the key role of training at New Stage. 

“There are so many opportunities for young people, starting with kids, starting with the camps and the classes. So many people who are onstage now started out back then, as kids,” he said, noting, too, its extraordinary opportunities for associates (formerly called interns) for professional training. “They basically create their own season in the Unframed Series, in addition to all the touring and the support they give to the main shows.

“New Stage is a really great laboratory for learning about the art of theater, for all ages, for all skill levels, and for all types of interests,” Howell said.

That’s intentional. 

“When we hire people, we spend a lot of time making sure that they have a good foundation for more work,” Reynolds added.

Miles called it “a garden of fertile ground for artists. It’s a place where local talent can grow — whether you’re acting, directing or working in design.” Fruits from her New Stage time include character and community building, and the importance of costume checks. 

One night, playing the star’s best friend in “Mahalia: A Gospel Musical,” her usually meticulous check proved not good enough. 

“I’m supposed to be driving this car and we’re supposed to take off really, really fast. … So, I speed off, I throw my head back and my wig comes off onstage! I’m completely frozen. I don’t know what to do, and Mahalia looks at me and says, ‘Didn’t put that wig on too tight, did you?’”

They laughed and so did the audience, who probably never knew it was a flub. Miles chuckled.

“I check my wigs very securely now.”

Reynolds’ own New Stage roots reach back to 1989 with a “Steel Magnolias” role, followed by day camp leadership and education director, and acting and guest directing till 1995. She came back in 2006 to restart the day camp, was kept on to plan the main stage season and hired as artistic director in 2007. 

A thread throughout the theater’s history is a focus on good scripts. 

“This is one thing I always remember about Jane,” Reynolds said of New Stage Theatre founder Petty’s constant eye on well-written scripts. “She would say that, and I always kept that in my head.”

Mississippi stories, written by Mississippians and/or dealing with the state’s culture, icons and history, are another key thread. Plays by Eudora Welty, Beth Henley and Tennessee Williams, certainly, graced the stage, and so have works by Payne, Maxwell and Randy Redd, adaptations of books by John Grisham and Jill Conner Browne, plays about or including Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Bobby Rush, productions tapping into state history with the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, Fannie Lou Hamer, Freedom Riders,  the murder of Emmett Till and more.

About 70% of the actors onstage are Mississippians. 

“I think it’s real important to be within the community, and build community,” Reynolds said. “Theater has the agency to build community more than a lot of things.”

 She sees it in the summer day camps. 

“I say all the time, ‘If politicians would do day camp, everything would be better.’ People from all walks of life — private and public school, different districts, different counties — come together and have a good time and solve problems and collaborate.” 

In 2017, New Stage initiated the Mississippi Plays Series as part of its Eudora Welty New Play Series, partly because certain plays and stories told about Mississippi did not get it right, Reynolds said. 

“I thought it was real important that we pay attention to the stories that are being told about Mississippi, and try to contribute to that.”

When it comes to the “magic” of theater, the production team has conjured some gasp-worthy moments over the years. The train in “Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express” (2019-20 season, Scenic Designer Dex Edwards), complete with moving cars onstage, was a particular standout that amazed even a seasoned pro. 

Maxwell, also a former artistic director as well as longtime actor, sat behind Technical Director Richard Lawrence in the audience one night, and murmured praise the first time the train’s dining car moved to the sleeper car, Lawrence said.  

“Then it moved again in the same direction … and he leaned over and goes, ‘I know how big this theater is, where the hell is that train going?’” When the train split for the caboose to come downstage, a string of “Omigods” summed up the wonder. 

“The train was the very first time I ever got applause for a set,” Lawrence said.

Another high point was the truck in “The Grapes of Wrath,” (2013-14 season, also designed by Edwards). Packing up the house, the family stacked items on the table which then turned around to reveal the truck it had become — a washboard as radiator, pots for headlights, washtubs for wheels. Built on a small turntable on a slipstage, it was able to turn and drive across the stage. 

“That was, to me, pretty ding-dang cool,” Lawrence said.

Onstage rain in several productions and a moment in “The Sound of Music,” when the whole villa moved downstage (to applause from wowed viewers) were other high points.

“One of the things New Stage does well, and it’s partly because of you,” Reynolds said to Lawrence, “is that we are able to look good on a small budget.”

Lawrence nodded. “That’s the miracle, every time.”

“The Play That Goes Wrong” opens Tuesday and continues its run through Sept. 21 at New Stage Theater, 1100 Carlisle St. in Jackson. For showtimes and tickets, visit www.newstagetheatre.com or call 601-948-3533.

Text messages and a video from a prisoner inside the Mississippi State Penitentiary have raised questions about a homicide there during a 2020 gang war.

During the war, Denorris Howell was strangled to death. No one was charged with his killing.

Howell was one of 42 people who died by homicide in Mississippi prisons over the past decade, a toll uncovered by a reporting team that includes Mississippi Today, The Marshall Project – Jackson, the Clarion Ledger, Hattiesburg American and The Mississippi Link. Total convictions in those cases? Six.

“Oh, my God, there’s something wrong with that picture,” said Howell’s great aunt, Annie Moffitt, who runs Annie’s Home Cooking in Holly Springs, where he once worked.

Parchman’s gang war came after years of neglect by state officials, who slashed millions in funding and allowed conditions at the prison to deteriorate after federal courts ended oversight of the facility in 2011, according to an investigation by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, now a part of Mississippi Today, and ProPublica.

The U.S. Department of Justice later blamed the war and the violence leading up to it on inadequate staffing, cursory investigations, insufficient security measures, unfettered access to contraband and uncontrolled gang activity. 

“These systemic failures result in an environment rife with weapons, drugs, gang activity, extortion, and violence,” the report said.

Mississippi Department of Corrections officials said they referred only one of the three homicides in three days to prosecutors. Overall, the agency referred 15 of the 42 homicides to prosecutors over the past decade, and said in a recent statement that it “remains committed to ensuring the safety of inmates in its custody.”

David Fathi, director of the ACLU National Prison Project, called these numbers inconceivably low. “I can’t imagine any other law enforcement agency failing to refer three-fourths of the homicides under its jurisdiction to prosecutors,” he said. “These victims’ lives are not seen as sufficiently valuable to warrant the effort.”

After the gang war, Gov. Tate Reeves hired the former head of Angola, Louisiana’s most notorious prison, to clean up Parchman and the other prisons. The Mississippi Legislature passed raises for correctional officers.

But the violence that initially declined under Corrections Commissioner Burl Cain’s leadership is now back on the rise. With five killings already, 2025 marks Mississippi’s worst year for prison homicides since 2021.

Fatal response to a dispute over money

Denorris “Nod” Howell grew up in the Waterford community between Oxford and Holly Springs, the eldest of three children.

“He was a good young man who treated all of us with the ultimate respect,” recalled Moffitt, his great aunt. “He loved his grandmother, who was my sister.”

After the teen shot up to 6-foot-1, he played power forward for Holly Springs High School and graduated in 2001.

“Denorris was a good kid,” said his mother, Janice Wilkins. “He was an obedient child. I didn’t have much problems out of him growing up, other than him being a typical teenager.”

Unlike others, he and his brother didn’t hang out in clubs, she said. “When kids grow up, they venture out and do their own thing, but as long as you are in my house, you have rules.”

After graduating, Howell moved out and got married. He and his wife had four children. He worked a series of odd jobs, first at a warehouse in Oxford and then at his great aunt’s restaurant.

In 2010, Howell and a friend were at his home when LaKeith Jones arrived. According to testimony, Howell had recently sold a car to Jones, who still owed him money. Once Jones paid the remaining balance, Howell would give him the keys.

The conversation between them grew heated. Howell shot Jones five times.

Howell called 911 and told the dispatcher that he had shot Jones in self-defense because he thought Jones was about to pull out a pistol. He later told a deputy that he had not wanted to shoot Jones, but that Jones was robbing him and had robbed him four times in the past.

Sheriff’s investigators did not find a pistol on Jones’ body, and none of the witnesses who testified at Howell’s trial said that Jones had a weapon.

In 2012, a jury convicted Howell of manslaughter. He was sentenced to 17 years and began serving that time at Parchman, one of the nation’s most infamous prisons.

The maximum security prison holds up to 2,542 men in seven buildings, surrounded by an 18,000-acre working farm. The prison’s long history of violence and abuse has been documented by journalists, researchers, filmmakers and blues singers.

‘I was praying that he was safe’

After her son began serving his time in Parchman, two hours away, Wilkins began working locally at the Marshall County Correctional Facility, where she taught incarcerated men how to give haircuts.

The whole time there, she thought of her son, she said. “I was praying that he was safe.”

Through her classes, men learned all styles of cuts, and she said prison officials grew to appreciate her. “They call me ‘Boss Lady,’ the one that everybody loves,” she said.

After a year of instruction, the men “know what they’re doing,” she said. “They get a license just like mine,” she said, flashing her own license from the state Board of Cosmetology and Barbering.

Many of those she taught have left prison far behind. “They’re in barber shops, and some of them have ventured out and gotten their own shop,” she said. “They’re just doing really good.”

While she worked, she waited for her son’s release. He had told her that he might come home as early as 2020, because he could be paroled after serving half his sentence. 

She began to plan for a huge family gathering to welcome him home, complete with chicken, fish, frog legs, shrimp, crab legs and vegetables — all the food he loved.

‘Ain’t nothing under control’

In the waning days of 2019, a war between the Vice Lords and the Gangster Disciples spread across Mississippi prisons.

In hopes of preventing the violence from spreading, Parchman officials locked down the men in their cells to prevent their movement.

Despite this, Walter Gates, 25, who was serving a 10-year sentence for burglary from Coahoma County, was stabbed to death on New Year’s Day at Parchman. Roosevelt Holliman, 32, who was serving 12 years for armed robbery and burglary out of Forrest County, met the same fate a day later. Two suspects in the Holliman killing are pending trial.

Reeves declared in a Jan. 3, 2020, tweet, “Grateful to those working to restore order and safety. That is the first priority. Then we need answers and justice on the people who perpetrated this violence.”

The Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting received a series of text messages and videos during that war from people in the prisons and their loved ones.

A message sent on Jan. 2 identified a female correctional officer in Unit 29 “giving inmates keys right now, and my brothers have no one to alert.”

A similar message followed on a private Facebook page, accusing the same officer of cutting off lights.

Photos and videos showed men in red-and-white-striped uniforms, reserved for people convicted of the most violent crimes, walking freely through Unit 29, with no correctional officers in sight.

The message from inside Parchman continued: “If MDOC thinks they have control, they are very mistaken.”

In a video recorded during the unrest on a contraband mobile phone, a cell sits in darkness while other parts of the prison are lit.

Loud shouting can be heard as an incarcerated person inside the cell appears to be punching someone. A prisoner recording the video narrates, “They’re straight up hitting the motherf—ers with knives and sh–, beating them motherf—ers up.”

A man can be heard saying, “I’ve got him in a chokehold.”

Another voice cheers him on: “Oh, yeah, oh, yeah. Dead. Oh, yeah. Dead. Deaaaaad.”

Despite the loud shouting throughout the incident captured on video, no officer can be seen responding.

At 3 a.m. on Jan. 3, an officer called additional staff to the Unit 29 building, where they found Howell’s body in his cell. His cellmate, who had been stabbed repeatedly and whose name was blacked out on the incident report, was taken by ambulance to the hospital. At 4:22 a.m., the coroner pronounced Howell dead.

The coroner ruled that Howell’s cellmate had strangled him to death in self-defense.

By the time the governor decided to shut down Unit 29 on Jan. 28, five prisoners at Parchman had been killed, and dozens had been injured. Three others were found hanging in their cells. MDOC ruled their deaths suicides.

Detrick Munford, who was a captain over Unit 29 then and later served as Parchman’s deputy warden, said he heard on the evening of Jan. 2 about a female officer allegedly sharing her keys with prisoners. He said he confronted her and took her keys.

After that, he opened an investigation into the officer’s actions to determine if she had a relationship with a gang, he said. “When she found out, she quit.”

He sent his findings to the prison’s investigators, he said. “They take it from there.”

No charges were ever brought against the officer, who was never identified in any department report. She said in text messages recently that prisoners lied about her, that she was never investigated by MDOC and that she wasn’t even at work that night. But her timesheet reflects that she did work that night. She worked from 8:40 a.m. on Jan. 2 until 1:39 a.m. on Jan. 3, less than an hour and a half before prison officials discovered Howell’s body.

No one ever got her keys, she wrote. “I was the one lied on.”

She said after Howell’s death, Munford checked that she had her keys.

Munford said he knows of some cases where correctional officers did favors for gangs. He said he also knows of several cases where correctional officers enabled violence against those behind bars, but he doesn’t know of any cases where officers were prosecuted.

Munford said officers can cut off the lights to an individual cell.

Parchman is located in a rural area where there are few jobs, he said. “People tend to think they can’t do no better, so you have to go along with the system.”

If people refuse to “go along with the system, they’ll find a way to get you out of the way,” he said. “There’s so much corruption.”

Within weeks after Howell’s death, two more men were killed at Parchman. Prison officials tried to reassure the public that these were isolated incidents. 

“We have been working around the clock with MDOC and DPS [the Department of Public Safety] to respond immediately and prevent this going forward,” Reeves tweeted on Jan. 21, 2020.

In the wake of the killings, Reeves appointed Cain as corrections commissioner to clean up the prisons and restore safety.

By the end of that year, six people had been killed at Parchman and three more in other parts of the state’s prison system. No one has been convicted in connection with any of the deaths.

‘He told me that he feared for his life’

On Jan. 3, 2020, Wilkins got a call from the chaplain that her son was dead. Since then, she said, she has received no other details about his death and no autopsy report.

“I just felt empty,” she said. 

She paused. “Sometimes it feels like it just happened yesterday.”

She had just talked to her son the night before, and he sounded nervous, she said. “He told me that he feared for his life.”

She said her son told her that the lights had been turned out and that a guard was letting men out of their cells.

Years later, she heard a rumor from the men she worked with at the Marshall County Correctional Facility that her son’s cellmate had been killed in prison, but it offered her little solace. “I don’t wish that on nobody,” she said. She later found out that the rumor was false. 

Today, five years after his death, Wilkins continues to have questions. No one from the prison has ever explained what happened to her son, she said. 

“Justice needs to be served,” she said. “My son had four children who loved him very dearly.”

Reporter Leonardo Bevilacqua contributed to this report.

This article is part of a reporting collaboration by Mississippi Today, The Marshall Project – Jackson, Clarion Ledger, Hattiesburg American and The Mississippi Link. 

Update 9/10/25: This story has been updated to include details of the corrections officer’s timesheet.

The Mississippi Public Service Commission voted Tuesday morning to initiate daily fines of up to $12,500 against the city of Holly Springs as long as it violates state law regarding providing utility services.

The vote, which was unanimous, comes after a hearing the PSC held in New Albany last week over Holly Springs’ long troubled power provider. At the hearing, the commission made two decisions: to declare that the city had “failed to provide reasonably adequate service,” violating state law, and to petition a chancery judge to place the utility into a receivership.

Holly Springs’ utility department serves about 12,000 customers in north Mississippi, most of whom live outside the city limits.

Northern District Public Service Commissioner Chris Brown, whose constituency includes Holly Springs, explained the PSC has discretion over how often and how long to impose the fines, as well as how often the city has to pay what’s owed. For instance, Brown said, if the utility does end up in a third party’s hands or being bought, the PSC can end the fines.

Money from the fines, he added, would go to the state’s general fund. Brown said the PSC could then request the Legislature to appropriate those dollars back to whoever is running the utility.

“This problem has been decades in the making,” he said during Tuesday’s monthly docket meeting.

Brown also noted allegations that Holly Springs has misappropriated funds meant to be reinvested into the utility. Those claims are at the center of a lawsuit the Tennessee Valley Authority, which sells power to the city, filed against Holly Springs earlier this year.

Central District Public Service Commissioner De’Keither Stamps asked his colleagues where the money for fines would come from, before concluding they’d likely have to come from Holly Springs taxpayers. Stamps also said the city took steps Monday to address recommendations made by Silverpoint Consulting in a July report.

“Does that not signal to this body that the entity is making appropriate steps to improve the system?” Stamps asked.

Brown responded that the city has had plenty of chances already, and that the fines are meant to motivate local leaders.

“The people in that district have obviously been suffering under a system that has failed them for decades,” he said. “Although we appreciate their moving to rectify this, that’s exactly why this penalty is being levied, to make sure they understand not providing adequate service is not going to be tolerated by this body.”

Mississippi Today reached out to Holly Springs’ mayor and city attorney and did not hear back before publication.

Fines from the PSC would just add onto recent financial challenges for the small city of just around 7,000 people. In August, Mississippi Today reported that the state auditor’s office diverted $450,000 of Holly Springs’ sales tax revenue — or roughly half of the city’s yearly total — for past-due audits.

The city’s median income is around $47,000 and its poverty rate is about one in four, census data shows. Both figures are worse than the rest of the state’s.

Talking to Mississippi Today after the meeting, Brown said while he understands the city may have trouble paying the fines, the idea is to compel action from local leaders such as selling off parts of or all of its service area to a neighboring electric cooperative.

Members of the Jackson Housing Task Force gathered Monday afternoon to discuss the ongoing relocation efforts at Blossom Apartments and rental inspections during their second meeting since forming.

One member of the task force, Stacey Patrick, has been a resident of the south Jackson complex for nearly 17 years. JXN Water, the city’s privately run water utility, discontinued services to Blossom Apartments in late July after its owner had long failed to pay the bill.

“When they fall short, we are still hurt,” Patrick said during the meeting. “We are the ones that are still hurt. Is there anything they could put in place that it wouldn’t affect us?”

In addition to living without water, Patrick said she and her husband, Robert, have been working daily for the last month on applications for apartments around Jackson. The search has been difficult, she said, because many places require security deposits and proof of salary up to three times the amount of the rent. 

“It’s very hard. It’s not easy,” Patrick said. “It’s not like it used to be where there’s a sign, you call them and you can get into a place. I’ve never seen it like this before.”

Patrick hoped they had finally gotten a break with Arbor Park Apartments, but after paying nearly $1,600 to claim a unit, once it was time to move in, it was uninhabitable, trashed and filthy.

“She (the property manager) had us believing that we were supposedly getting into a place for a whole month,” she told Mississippi Today. “She kept us on hold. We could have been out there trying to find other housing.”

Patrick is now waiting for a refund from the apartments. 

After JXN Water initially shut off services to Blossom Apartments in July, U.S. District Judge Henry Wingate twice ordered the water temporarily restored. But those extensions have run out, and since then, Patrick said the Jackson Fire Department has ceased delivering water to residents. Mississippi Home Corporation deemed the property unfit for housing in early August. In addition to Patrick, roughly a dozen families are still living at the complex without water as they struggle to find a new place. 

“ It’s just a hard thing that we’re going through right now because of this water shut off, and it’s not easy going out here trying to find a place. It’s not easy at all,” Patrick said. 

Since mid-August, Stewpot Community Services has been working to relocate Blossom residents. The nonprofit has placed a few residents in hotels, while others are waiting it out with family members. Jill Buckley, director of Stewpot, said that of the 27 households it has identified through management records and door-knocking, they’ve been able to rehouse eight families.

“One thing that has really slowed the process down is the HUD inspections for people who have housing vouchers, so waiting for the inspections to happen has been a little frustrating,” Buckley said.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development requires rental property inspections to ensure their habitability and safety. Buckley said another issue residents are facing is the availability of apartments across Jackson. 

Eight of the 11-member Housing Task Force were in attendance at Monday’s meeting. Attorney Robert Ireland, who is representing another complex in its lawsuit with JXN Water over nonpayment, resigned from the task force to avoid a conflict of interest, said Nic Lott, Jackson’s communications director.

Task force vice-chair Jennifer Welch, who owns and manages properties in Jackson, Hattiesburg and Meridian, described one issue impacting JXN Water as “churn.” Limited liability companies rack up large water bills, terminate the account and then establish a new LLC to open a new account with JXN Water. 

“The property doesn’t even change ownership,” Welch said. “It’s just new LLCs being established really for this purpose of fraud, in my opinion.”

Welch said initiating a multifamily account with JXN Water should be as rigorous as applying for a loan. Landlords should be required to have a deed, be in good standing with the Secretary of State’s office and provide personal information and a working contact number or email for the manager of the LLC, she said.

“ There’s a lot of times when I sign up for a random account and they’re verifying that my phone number is legit,” Welch said. “Can we not do that if someone’s gonna be able to have a $150,000 water bill?”

Carla Dazet, a billing executive for JXN Water, also attended the meeting, though not as the company’s official designee to the task force. She said JXN Water has now implemented a process for shut-offs – whether it’s a residential, commercial or multi-family account, once the account is past-due 60 days, the property will lose water.  

“It won’t be a compounded annual delinquency. It’ll just be two months,” Dazet said. “That’s going forward. That’s already in place, so we don’t have to worry about the big bills building up.”

Welch also noted that as a property manager, she has found it increasingly difficult to purchase insurance for her properties due to the perception of high crime in the city.

“If we can prove that those areas are changing, I think that it can make it easier for people like myself to get insurance,” Welch said. 

Task force members also discussed city ordinances and code enforcement. Earnest Ward, president of the Association of South Jackson Neighborhoods, said he performs routine inspections on his properties, something that other landlords are lax to do. 

Units get damaged, cars rust away in yards, and some tenants have multiple pets that are destructive to the property which further decreases the value, he said. A solution he proposed is including city ordinances around rental inspections in the lease agreement. 

“I think it needs to be done regularly. They know what they expect,” Ward said. “Certain things they probably won’t do, but I think the landlord needs to take more of their responsibility on inspecting their own property.”

In 2022, the city made changes to its rental registration ordinance in an effort to track compliance and tackle blight. According to figures shared during the meeting, the goal was to inspect nearly 11,000 units, but the city fell short by inspecting only 3,200.

The city also relaunched the rental registry and inspection program, which requires  landlords to register properties and provides an avenue for tenants to record complaints. Victoria Love, the rental registry manager, said there are currently about 50 open cases, and most cases are closed within 30 days, though some have been open for up to 90 days. 

“Where you do have a slight issue is on some of your smaller landlords,” Love said. “A lot of times, they just don’t have additional capital to repair things completely.”

Welch said the information in the registry could be outdated and that the task force should consider recommending that the city conduct annual updates.

“Operators are changing, property managers are changing, things happen,” Welch said. “I think that the city needs to be putting effort into updating the information that’s registered.”

The next meeting of the Jackson Housing Task Force is scheduled for Monday, September 22 at 3:00 p.m. in the Warren A. Hood Building at 200 S. President St. 

The Current, a nonprofit news organization serving Lafayette and South Louisiana, is joining Deep South Today, a nonprofit network of local newsrooms that serves communities in Louisiana and Mississippi.

“We are tremendously excited to bring The Current into the Deep South Today network of newsrooms,” said Warwick Sabin, President and CEO of Deep South Today. “The Current is already doing an outstanding job of providing Lafayette with essential local journalism, and they have a lot of room to grow. We intend to use the resources and infrastructure at Deep South Today to support that growth and meet the need for critical news and information in Louisiana.”

“We launched The Current to serve Lafayette with vigorous, in-depth journalism,” said Christiaan Mader, The Current’s co-founder and executive editor. “Joining Deep South Today will amplify what we do with more reporting, more programming and more innovation.”

The Current will become the third newsroom in the Deep South Today network, alongside Mississippi Today and Verite News in New Orleans. Along with its staff, The Current will retain its mission, identity, community focus and editorial independence. Mader will serve as The Current’s executive director and editor-in-chief, remaining the local executive in charge of the newsroom.

Deep South Today will make investments in the coming year to expand editorial capacity at The Current through additional reporting staff, new topical coverage, and other support. The Current will leverage the centralized infrastructure at Deep South Today to enhance its technology, improve its audience engagement, add multimedia content, and achieve greater operational sustainability.

Deep South Today also looks forward to enhancing The Current’s suite of events and accelerating the growth of Big Towns, a summit created by The Current that brings leaders from around the country to Lafayette over two days for focused discussions about ideas that can advance mid-sized cities.

The Current is joining the Deep South Today network as it continues to develop extensive national and regional collaborations with partners that include the New York Times, ProPublica, Associated Press, Grist, The Trace, Open Campus, The Marshall Project, The Hechinger Report, KFF Health News, AJI/NOTUS, CatchLight, Gulf States Newsroom, and others.

“This merger helps Deep South Today as much as it helps The Current, because increased scale will bring more impact, more audience, and more efficiencies in our operations,” Sabin said. “Deep South Today is determined to meet the need for local news wherever it exists in our region, and the addition of The Current is an important step toward that goal.”

ABOUT DEEP SOUTH TODAY

Deep South Today is a nonprofit network of local newsrooms that includes Mississippi Today, Verite News, and The Current.

Founded in 2016, Mississippi Today is now one of the largest newsrooms in the state, and in 2023 it won the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting. Verite News launched in 2022 in New Orleans, where it covers inequities facing communities of color. The Current is a nonprofit news organization founded in 2018 serving Lafayette and southern Louisiana.

With its regional scale and scope, Deep South Today is rebuilding and re-energizing local journalism in communities where it had previously eroded, and ensuring its long-term growth and sustainability.

ABOUT THE CURRENT

The Current is a nonprofit news organization serving Lafayette and South Louisiana.

Founded in 2018 by local journalists, The Current’s in-depth reporting connects Lafayette to stories that matter and helps readers understand how our community works — and how we can make it better.