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Amid temperatures that have hit triple digits, many people who are incarcerated at the South Mississippi Correctional Institution are without air conditioning – heat relief the Department of Corrections has added to other prisons in recent years. 

Since mid June, outdoor temperatures in Leakesville, where the 3,082-bed facility is located, remained above 80 degrees – often reaching the 90s and even  into the 100s. With humidity and the prison’s metal and steel construction factored in, temperature indoors can feel over 100 degrees even in the mid-80s. 

While parts of the Greene County prison are air conditioned, officials say money is the reason why it hasn’t been installed both throughout the facility and the state prison system. The department estimates it would cost $45.5 million to complete the project – a years-long objective of Mississippi Corrections Commissioner Burl Cain. 

“The department welcomes any funding that the Legislature would provide the agency for air installation,” MDOC said Wednesday in an emailed response to Mississippi Today.

READ More: Mississippi is getting hotter. Experts say it’s hurting moms and babies

That answer wasn’t reassuring for Tammy Knesel, whose loved one at SMCI often goes to sleep early in the night and wakes up in the early morning to shower to escape the heat. 

Two weeks ago, she said she remembers seeing a story about how the Hattiesburg Zoo – located about an hour east from the prison – took steps during a heat wave to make sure its animals and staff had access to air conditioning, fans, misters and pools of water. 

But she said similar care did not happen for the people incarcerated at SMCI. 

“They did nothing for them, nothing,” Knesel said about the prison’s response during the heat wave. “ … All they do is sit there and drip with sweat.”

Fans are used in prison areas without air conditioning, and inmates receive ice and Gatorade along with water, MDOC said in its statement. 

Knesel said her loved one’s dormitory housing unit doesn’t have air conditioning or a fan. Knesel said he told her that some prisoners buy personal fans from the commissary and clip them to their beds. She said he did not want to be identified for safety concerns.

Her loved one has been in different housing units at SMCI that are air conditioned. Knesel said he also has access to it in a classroom. 

Extreme heat can lead to potentially fatal conditions, such as dehydration and heat stroke. Those with chronic conditions, such as heart disease, mental illness and poor blood circulation, are vulnerable to extreme heat, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Some medications and old age can also affect a person’s ability to regulate body temperature.

Air conditioning not only can help prevent heat illness, but it also potentially can decrease incidents of violence in prisons, which research has suggested increases with heat.

No federal mandate requires state prisons to have air conditioning, leaving states to decide whether to offer it. At least a dozen Southern states remain without it, and most state prison systems aren’t fully air conditioned.

Ongoing lawsuits have argued that extreme heat in prison is a constitutional violation amounting to cruel and unusual punishment.

Mississippi prison advocate Mitzi Magleby said the fact SMCI and parts of other state prisons remain without air conditioning is inexcusable. 

“I think that promise was gone with the wind,” she said, referring to Cain’s air-conditioning objective. 

In 2022, Cain secured funding to start adding air conditioning to the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman. He expected the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility and other prisons to follow. 

“It just takes a good while to get it all done,” he said in an April 2023 interview with Missisisppi Today. “That’s just the way the funding is.”

Cain said he was motivated to add air conditioning as a way to address constitutional violations noted in a 2022 U.S. Department of Justice report, which included problems with extreme heat inside Parchman. A later report based on the DOJ’s investigation of SMCI, CMCF and the Wilkinson County Correctional Facility found similar issues with heat. 

The Justice Department recommended proper temperature regulation and sanitary conditions in solitary confinement. 

To date, air conditioning has come to all of the state’s prisons, but not throughout entire facilities, the department said in its email. 

Walnut Grove Correctional Facility, the Mississippi Correctional Institute for Women at CMCF and Delta Correctional Facility are air conditioned. The Marshall County Correctional Facility in Holly Springs has all but one of its buildings air conditioned. All of Parchman is air conditioned, with the exception of Unit 29, a maximum security unit where the worst of the worst are housed.

Management & Training Corp., a private contractor, operates two other prisons for the state. East Mississippi Correctional Facility in Meridian has air conditioning in each housing unit and Wilkinson County Correctional Facility in Woodville has it everywhere except in the gymnasium, said Emily Lawhead, a spokesperson for MTC. 

Similar to the state-run facilities, EMCF and Wilkinson Correctional provide fans, water and ice inside the prisons for prisoners and staff, Lawhead said.

Although Knesel’s loved one has moments where he can feel air conditioning at SMCI, she said most of his days are spent in bed in the dorm. 

“I don’t know how he’s kept himself sane,” Knesel said about staying in the heat. 

Department of Public Safety Commissioner Sean Tindell has been overseeing the state Highway Patrol, Bureaus of investigations and narcotics, Capitol Police, drivers services, forensic lab and medical examiners, and many other law-enforcement divisions. Before that he was a state Court of Appeals Judge, state senator and a prosecutor on the Coast. He said his experience has prepared him to serve as the next state attorney general.

Attorneys argued in a federal appeals court on Monday whether a state law that bans diversity, equity and inclusion programs in Mississippi public schools and universities should be enforced and whether a new lower-court judge should oversee the case. 

Attorneys for a group of students, parents and educators believe the law violates their First Amendment rights, while Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch’s office contends state government has the right to regulate educational content in public schools.

The state is asking for a new judge, in part, because U.S. District Judge Henry T. Wingate’s staff last year used artificial intelligence to write a flawed order in the case, which drew national scrutiny, including from the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee.

Wingate granted a preliminary injunction in the case a year ago, after plaintiffs’ attorneys argued that the law was dangerously vague and violated the constitutional right to free speech. 

Fitch’s office argued that the plaintiffs’ interpretation of the law was “overwrought.” Wingate sided with the plaintiffs. The injunction prevents the law from being applied until there’s a final ruling in the case. Fitch’s office appealed that injunction. 

Anthony Shults, the state deputy solicitor general, told the three-judge appeals panel that Wingate’s preliminary injunction should be overturned because the restrictions in the DEI law only apply to state institutions and educators – not to students. 

He argued that the state, to some degree, has a legal right to regulate the material that public educators teach students. If not, he said the state, for example, would not be able to prevent an educator from teaching something incorrect like “the Holocaust didn’t happen.”

Rob McDuff, the attorney for the educators and students, argued that the law is incredibly vague and overbroad and would cause mass chaos in Mississippi’s public school system. 

“What does ‘engagement’ mean?” McDuff said. “Does it really mean you can not discuss issues related to race, sex, color, gender, identity, sexual orientation and national origin even though some of those issues have been part of classes for years, some for decades?”

Judge Catharina Haynes, a President George W. Bush appointee, asked if the two sides could somehow reach a compromise to dismiss the litigation. Shults said he found that unlikely, while McDuff said he would be willing to negotiate. 

The attorneys also disagreed whether the appellate court should assign the litigation to a new district judge after Wingate admitted that someone on his staff used artificial intelligence to craft an order. 

Last year, after an inquiry from U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, Wingate admitted that his law clerk used an AI program to write an order in the case. It named defendants and plaintiffs who weren’t parties to the case, misquoted state law and referenced a nonexistent case.

Wingate, a President Ronald Reagan-appointed judge, replaced the order with a corrected version after the Mississippi Attorney General’s office raised concerns and wiped the flawed order from the docket. Initially, he refused to explain the errors and referred to them as “clerical” mistakes.

Though Wingate told Grassley in a letter that he’s taking steps to ensure the mistake isn’t repeated, the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals’ clerk sent a letter to attorneys in the DEI case on Aug. 21, telling them to prepare to argue whether the case should be transferred to another district judge over the AI blunder. 

As AI usage rises in the legal profession, more lawyers are being punished by judges across the country for “hallucinations” or other mistakes caused by the systems. But there’s little accountability when the roles are reversed. 

Judge Jerry Smith, appointed by Reagan, asked if McDuff thought it was a “pretty serious matter” that Wingate’s office relied on incorrect information from AI to craft the order.  

“It is serious, but it’s not as if AI told Judge Wingate to grant the (Temporary Restraining Order),” McDuff responded. 

Shults, though, said he believed a new lower-court judge should take over the case. 

The three-judge appellate panel is expected to issue a ruling in the coming weeks. If it reverses Wingate’s injunction, it would likely mean that the Mississippi law can go into effect. 

The rest of the case is still playing out in the lower court. Both sides are in the evidence collection phase, or discovery. After discovery, Wingate will conduct a bench trial, where he will issue a final ruling.   

Mississippi Today Ideas is a platform for thoughtful Mississippians to share their ideas about our state’s past, present and future. Opinions expressed in guest essays are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of Mississippi Today. You can read more about the section here.    

A proposed railroad merger between the Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern would concentrate an unprecedented share of U.S. freight rail into a single system — and Mississippi’s farmers, manufacturers and ports would feel the impact.

As a state senator, I believe in free markets. In fact, I’ve built my career on this principle. But free markets only work when competitive balance allows small businesses to thrive, industries to grow and hire and consumers to benefit. A merger between the Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern would shift that balance in the wrong direction, and that’s why I oppose the proposed $85 billion merger.  

If approved by the federal Surface Transportation Board, this transaction would create the largest railroad in American history, with a single company controlling roughly 40% of all U.S. freight rail traffic. In an industry where four carriers already handle nearly 90% of all freight, that’s not a merger. It’’s the last step toward a monopoly. To be clear, the people who will pay the price aren’t the shareholders in Omaha or Atlanta, but instead farmers, mill workers and small businesses right here in Mississippi.

Let me tell you what I believe is at stake for our state.

Mississippi’s agricultural producers move billions of dollars of soybeans, corn and cotton by rail every year. Those farmers operate on margins so thin that even modest rate increases can wipe out a season’s profit, especially amid ongoing shifts in global trade dynamics.

The American Farm Bureau Federation has warned that this merger would reduce what little bargaining leverage shippers still have, leaving farm-product customers who can’t easily switch to another mode of transportation increasingly captive to a single carrier’s pricing decisions. Rail rates for corn, soybeans, wheat and fertilizer have already risen significantly over the past decade. Further consolidation isn’t going to reverse that trend.

If this merger reduces competition and gives one carrier more power over rates, routing and service, Mississippi automakers will face higher shipping costs, greater delays, and less leverage when they need to get products to dealers and customers on time. That is exactly the kind of supply-chain risk a manufacturing state like ours cannot afford.

Likewise, the port of Pascagoula and our connections to the broader Gulf Coast port network depend on competitive rail access to stay viable. Norfolk Southern currently provides Mississippi shippers an alternative check on pricing and service quality. Remove that alternative through this merger, and you remove the competitive pressure that helps keep shipping costs in check at our ports. When competition fades at a port, cargo doesn’t stay put — it moves elsewhere. 

I’m not alone in my concerns. 

Conservative commentator Ken Blackwell, a chair at the America First Policy Institute, drew the connection plainly: when competition disappears, what follows is stagnation, higher costs and diminished service. “That’s what happens when competition disappears,” he wrote, “which is exactly the risk posed by the Norfolk Southern–Union Pacific merger.”

This merger was not driven by a clear need to improve service or expand capacity. Instead, it reflects a financially driven consolidation that risks prioritizing returns over reliability and competition. I support healthy markets and strong investment, but those gains should not come at the expense of working Mississippians, small businesses and the industries that keep our state moving.

Unlike most issues, the American people are united in opposition to this deal. A recent national poll found that 71% of Americans oppose this merger. That number holds across party lines. Free markets thrive on competition. Concentrated power works against the people who have the least ability to push back.

Mississippi’s farmers, manufacturers and port communities cannot afford to be collateral damage in a Wall Street transaction. I’m urging the Surface Transportation Board to reject this application and calling on our congressional delegation to make sure Mississippi’s voice is heard loud and clear in Washington. 

Charles “Chuck” Younger, a Columbus Republican, has represented District 17, the Lowndes County area, in the Mississippi Senate since 2014. He is previous chair of the Agriculture Committee and currently chairs the Highways and Transportation Committee in the Mississippi Senate.

Mukta Joshi is a reporter at Mississippi Today. She is spending a year as a New York Times Local Investigations fellow. Joseph Cranney is a reporter at Verite News. Both report for the Deep South Today Investigative Reporting Center in collaboration with The Times.

Ten days ago, as our team at Mississippi Today, Verite News and The New York Times reported on the Senatobia Police Department’s fatal shooting of Kohen Wiley, a 1-year-old boy, a source came forward to share texts they said had been sent by Police Chief Harold Vanderford.

The source, a colleague of the chief’s, said they suspected the chief would know who had given us the texts. But they agreed to let us publish the messages if we agreed not to publicly identify them.

The source showed us 10 text conversations from July 2025 to April 2026. In them, Vanderford uses a racist slur more than a dozen times, spelled various ways. As we previously reported, Vanderford wrote multiple times that he had been loudly and repeatedly saying the slur, sometimes so loud that his neighbors might have heard it. In one text, he wrote that he “almost beat a nigger and white woman’s ass a few minutes ago.”

Our source said these text conversations were between them and the chief. We took a number of additional steps to verify their authenticity. Here’s why we stand behind our reporting that Vanderford sent those texts:

1. The numbers lined up.

Under the contact labeled “Hal Vanderford” on our source’s phone, the number listed was 662-897-6708. We are publishing the full number in the interest of transparency.

No one answered at that number, and there was no personalized voicemail greeting. So we contacted three separate acquaintances of Vanderford’s, each of whom confirmed that the number we had matched the number they had saved for Vanderford. In the days since, that phone number has been disconnected.

2. We looked for context clues.

In one of the text messages, Vanderford says he’s with a woman, whose name we’re withholding to protect her privacy. Two acquaintances of the chief identified her as the chief’s girlfriend. The woman is pictured with Vanderford on her Facebook profile, too.

Another text message includes a photo of a person who the chief calls “GAY!!!” We identified that person as a employee at the department. 

Vanderford appears to have sent a number of text messages while watching college sports games, and we separately learned that the chief is a Mississippi State fan.

Mississippi State’s schedules show that Vanderford was texting contemporaneously on dates when the Bulldogs were playing. On Oct. 18, Vanderford texted about a football game against Florida. Mississippi State played the Gators that day — we checked. 

3. We reviewed the attached video and photos.

A message the chief sent on Thanksgiving Day includes a video attachment. The man recording the video can be heard addressing our source by name, saying, “You’re missing out.” The metadata of the video shows it was recorded two minutes before it was sent, on the same day. 

We had already obtained the chief’s home address through his voter registration records and spoken to his neighbors, who confirmed he lived there.

So we compared the video he’d shared to a Google Street View image taken in February 2025 from the angle of the chief’s home. The images lined up perfectly.

4. We asked Chief Vanderford himself. Many times. 

We first contacted Vanderford on Friday, Aug. 21, and have since made more than a dozen attempts to reach him by phone, email and notes left at his home or office, sharing the specifics of our findings, and explicitly asking for his side of the story.

As recently as Monday, we asked Vanderford and Lt. Shane Howell, a Senatobia police spokesperson, if Vanderford denies the texts came from him.

Neither have responded to our inquiries.

Below, we are publishing Vanderford’s uncensored text messages. 

Editor’s note: Mississippi Today does not normally publish racist slurs, but we chose to do so in this case because the slurs themselves are central to why our team reported this story.

Sen. Juan Barnett, a three-term Democratic legislator from Heidelberg and chairman of the Senate Corrections Committee, resigned from the Legislature on Monday, Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann said in a statement. 

It’s unclear why Barnett resigned, and he did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but he has dealt with health issues that caused him to miss several weeks of this year’s regular legislative session.

“We thank Senator Barnett for his years of service to the state of Mississippi and wish him a happy and well-deserved retirement,” Hosemann said in a statement. 

Barnett took office in 2016 and has served as the chairman of the Senate Corrections Committee since 2020.  He has represented portions of Forrest, Jasper and Jones counties in the Senate.

Barnett in the past pushed for earlier release and shortened sentences for many incarcerated in Mississippi prisons, despite his father being shot to death in the early 1990s while Barnett was in the Army deployed to Iraq, and the shooter receiving a relatively short sentence. Barnett said he believes in forgiveness and giving people second chances.

Barnett missed several weeks of the 2026 legislative session because of an extended illness. Gov. Tate Reeves will now have 30 days to set the date for a special election.

While he was absent from the Capitol, legislation that attempted to improve medical care in Mississippi prisons died on key deadlines. The vice chairman of the committee at the time said she let the legislation die at Barnett’s direction. 

Before serving in the Legislature, Barnett was the mayor of his hometown of Heidelberg. 

Mississippi Today reporter Michael Goldberg contributed to this report. 

A group of Mississippi University for Women alumni and Columbus residents is asking the state’s college board to consider a prominent alumna as the institution’s next president. They’re also pressing trustees to disclose a timeline and details about how the board will conduct the leadership search. 

Doris Taylor, a biotechnology researcher and scientist who graduated from the W in 1977, is the top pick for the Citizens Coalition for MUW and Mississippi School for Mathematics and Sciences.

The W is at a defining moment that “demands a leader of national standing who is also a daughter of this institution,” the coalition wrote in a letter to the college board. 

That leader would be able to walk the halls of the National Institutes of Health or engage the state Legislature at the Capitol with equal authority, the coalition wrote. 

MUW’s next president, the group said, should be someone “who can mobilize philanthropic capital this university has never been able to access, and who will fight for the W with the conviction that comes from having been shaped by it.”

Taylor has had distinguished faculty leadership roles at Duke University and the University of Minnesota, the coalition noted in its letter to the college board. The group also said she is a dedicated MUW foundation board of trustee director, donor and proud alumna whose knowledge of the institution and region could benefit the institution.

Taylor, founder and CEO of Organamet Bio Inc., said the coalition’s endorsement is an honor. She had expressed interest in the top job in 2018, but the appointment went to Nora Miller. 

Taylor said she wants to give back to the university that shaped her career. She also said she wants to encourage other candidates who are interested in the role to apply. The more candidates vying for the role, the better options the state Institutions of Higher Learning board of trustees will have to select a strong leader, Taylor said. 

“MUW deserves a president that can protect it, fund it and build it,” Taylor said. “And, whoever takes on the role, it’s a critically important opportunity to eliminate those issues that have put an excessive burden on the campus and our community.”

The MUW president search has not yet started

At listening sessions IHL held in April, some speakers named Sally Burchfield Doty, director of Broadband Expansion and Accessibility of Mississippi, as a potentially strong president for MUW. Doty, from the W’s class of 1988, served in the state Senate from 2012 to 2020. 

Scott Tollison, MUW’s interim president, told Mississippi Today he is focusing on providing transitional leadership and has not thought about the permanent role.

Miller, who was the W’s president since 2018, retired in June. In April, the IHL board of trustees held listening sessions for MUW stakeholders to gather feedback on traits they want to see in their next leader. Since then, the college board has not announced its next steps and plans for the president search. 

The IHL board is still discussing details of the search, board President Steve Cunningham told Mississippi Today. IHL board member Teresa Hubbard is chair of MUW’s search committee.

Cunningham said trustees understand the importance of keeping MUW stakeholders updated throughout the search process to ensure transparency. While the college board hasn’t announced their plans, he anticipates the search process will take around three months once it’s initiated. 

“We want to ensure that alumni, community residents and other stakeholders are involved in the search process,” Cunningham said. 

Coalition forms out of concern for MUW’s future 

The coalition’s endorsement of Taylor was a way for stakeholders to assert their voice in the presidential search, said Keith Gaskin, former Columbus mayor and coalition member. IHL trustees’ selection of MUW’s next leader is critical to the university’s future. 

“It shouldn’t be about politics, favors or friendships,” Gaskin said. “It should be picking the absolute best person for MUW.” 

The group’s seven members include MUW alumni and former professors, former elected officials, judges and community residents. 

Gaskin said the coalition formed partly in response to recent legislative proposals and discussions that would close or merge MUW with Mississippi State University and relocate MSMS, a residential high school for gifted juniors and seniors. Betty Bryan, a parent of an MSMS student and MUW alumna, is also a member of the coalition. 

Bruce Hanson, a former state representative who wrote the bill to establish MSMS, serves as the coalition’s chairman.  

The merger or closure of these schools could devastate the local economy, said Martha Jo Mims, a retired MUW professor. 

“We’ve had this burden for a couple years and the communication from our legislators doesn’t reassure us that they are committed to keeping these institutions in Columbus,” said Mims, who is also a coalition member. “It’s critical that our next leader recognizes the importance of these schools as the heart of our city’s economy and future.”  

Jim Davidson Jr., a retired chancery court judge, said the coalition isn’t dissuading interested candidates from applying for the presidency. The group worried that IHL would announce a name before the process could even begin. 

“We don’t know what IHL will do,” Davidson said. “But we want them to know that people in our community are talking about names who would make great leaders. We want to help them.” 

Clarification 08/31/26: This story has been updated to reflect that Scott Tollison, interim president of the Mississippi University for Women, said he is focusing on providing transitional leadership and has not thought about the permanent role.

CLEVELAND — Just 30 minutes down the road from the Mississippi prison where they are serving time, Lee Andrew Smith and six other incarcerated people felt free — for a few hours.

On stage before a crowd of more than 100 people at the GRAMMY Museum Mississippi, Smith riffed on his guitar alongside fellow members of the Parchman prison band. About halfway through a rendition of Luke Combs’ “15 Minutes,” tears begin to stream down his face.

All kinds of things cross your mind

With all this doin’ time

And a chain gang waitin’ in a long line to use this phone

Same old view, a cinder block room, same old jumpsuit on

I’m just tryna make the best of the rest of this life sentence

But enough about me, I only get 15 minutes

The 44-year-old Smith — who has a close haircut and a salt-and-pepper beard — turned his back to the crowd. He continued playing his guitar, standing there in his well-worn brown cowboy boots and prison-issued, green-and-white striped pants, before walking off stage. After a moment, he returned.

In the audience, tears flowed down his wife’s face. “I feel what he feels,” Joann Smith said. “He was thinking about home … he misses his children, misses his mom, wants to be home with his mom, so all of those things probably ran across his mind.”

The concert this summer was the third stop on the Parchman Band’s tour through the state with country singer-songwriter Charlie Worsham. It’s part of a musical tradition that dates back to the early 1930s at the prison. The Mississippi State Penitentiary, a prison farm, has a long history of brutality and sits on about 18,000 acres of flat, fertile land in the Mississippi Delta, where the blues were born.

“The torch has been passed down to us,” said Leonard “LJ” Stevenson Jr., 33, a founding member of the latest iteration of the band. They’ve since played at other prisons and festivals and shared the stage with blues legend Bobby Rush. “I’ve heard some of the old ’60s Parchman Band originals, and I can relate to it because I’m living it firsthand,” Stevenson said. “That was basically prison blues.”

Playing in the band offers the incarcerated men a chance to experience life outside the walls, said Marc McClure, the former superintendent at Parchman who restarted the group in 2023. Proceeds from the band go into the state’s inmate welfare fund.

“(The band) gives them that opportunity for one moment to be human and be accepted, which leads them down the road to forgiveness and redemption, and they can be different than what got them there,” he said. “The crime doesn’t dictate their life forever. That band gives them that hope.”

With Smith on lead guitar and Stevenson playing bass, the band also includes Houston Jones on keyboard, drummer Jakellsey Hollis, and vocalists Steven Chambers, Charles Glassco and Michael Snell. The white and green stripes on their pants are indelible reminders of their biggest mistakes, but their music — and the album that will be coming out next year — are a testament to them being so much more.

On that spring night at the museum, the band played its way through a full spectrum of emotions, from slow ballads serenading women they love to electrifying originals that talk of wild times before prison. They also backed Worsham on some of his own songs, and recreated some country covers that evoked the reality of doing hard time in Mississippi.

Stevenson played in the background, laying the bassline that undergirded the songs. As he and his band members got into a groove, a slight smile peeked out from behind his cinnamon-brown beard. Smith’s fingers, almost a blur to the naked eye, glided effortlessly across the strings as he traded solos with Worsham and Jones.

Though he stood at the back of the stage, Smith performed in a way that demanded attention. He smiled and pointed out the prettiest woman in the room — his wife — before the band performed a soulful rendition of Chris Stapleton’s “Tennessee Whiskey.”

You’re as smooth as Tennessee whiskey,

You’re as sweet as strawberry wine

You’re as warm as a glass of brandy

And honey, I stay stoned on your love all the time

Smith stepped to the front of the stage, not missing a beat as he stared into his wife’s eyes. He walked his fingers up and down the electric guitar’s neck, delivering a complex solo that drew applause and cheers from the audience.

“Music is his freedom,” his wife said. “He’s free when he’s dealing with any type of instrument.”

The men took turns in the spotlight, telling stories of love and redemption through songs that will be featured on their upcoming album.

Vocalist Charles Glassco, also known as Beast, introduced a high-energy song he wrote for his wife called “Love You Out Loud,” about proclaiming his love publicly, no matter where they are. And Jones, who played both guitar and keyboard in the show, introduced a low-key ballad he wrote to his daughter, who he described as “a great friend.”

I tried my best, just couldn’t give it all to you

I couldn’t be who you needed me to be

But I just wanted you to see

…

I would climb the tallest mountain

Part the Red Sea

Just to have you right here next to me

The themes of love, hard times and redemption in their music have roots in the Delta. It’s a place where Black people — ensnared in the traps of racial terror and White supremacy — made meaning of life on a prison farm as they provided free labor for the state. Incarcerated people worked in the fields, picking cotton, hoeing corn, and working for the state in what historian David Oshinsky called “the closest thing to slavery that survived the Civil War.” They worked to the sounds of field hollers to keep the work tempo and pass the time.

Over the past century, legal action brought an end to corporal punishment, including with a leather whip named “Black Annie”; the end of prisoners given the power to shoot fellow incarcerated people; and upgrades to Parchman. Yet, violence, rampant drug use, poor security, and a brutal underground economy run by gangs have endured.

The music has endured, too, except for a gap in the 1990s.

Like more than 2,000 Mississippians today, Smith, Stevenson, Jones and Chambers have been sentenced to spend the rest of their lives in prison. Stevenson said his life sentence is torture, mentally. “I have a family. I’m engaged now. I have a kid,” he said. “It’s hard being on the phone with them, and not being able to hear first words, see first steps, first heartbreak, first game.”

But he and the other band members are among the few who get to leave the prison grounds and play music in the free world.

“This is as good as it gets for guys like Houston, guys like LJ, because they’re never going home. This is home,” said Trish Doty, a former prison warden who once did vocal coaching with the band and coached LJ in softball. “What sort of justice does it serve to lock them up and throw away a key and give them nothing?”

After the show ended, Smith took the stage again.

“I can’t help but to cry with certain things going on, because this is a thing that I dreamed of all my life. And even though I have this on,” he said, his voice cracking as he pointed down at his green-and-white stripes before pointing up toward the sky, “God’s still fulfilling his promise for me. I’m so grateful.”

“God is good,” an audience member shouted out.

“Yes,” Smith said, “He is.”

This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project – Jackson, a nonprofit news team covering Mississippi’s criminal justice systems.

Housing advocates are pushing for stronger protections for Mississippi renters, arguing state law leaves tenants with limited options when problems with their housing go unresolved. 

Tenants generally cannot withhold rent over needed repairs, and state law limits when they can make repairs themselves and recover the costs. For renters who cannot afford to move, advocates say those restrictions can leave few immediate options. 

Lily Coleman faced that dilemma when she and other residents at Addison Place Apartments in Jackson went more than a month without running water. 

Coleman, who has lived at the complex since 2018, said she continued paying rent because she did not want to risk eviction. 

“We’re going to still pay rent, and we are going to pay whatever we got to pay because we are not trying to get evicted,” Coleman said. “We don’t pay for the water over here — they pay for it.” 

 Coleman said the cost of moving also leaves her with few alternatives. 

“We cannot move right now,” Coleman said. “We’re trying to save some money right now to get in a position to move.” 

Several major water shutoffs at Jackson apartment complexes with large outstanding utility balances raised concerns about protections for tenants who can lose service because of bills tied to their properties.

Mississippi law strengthened those protections this year through House Bill 1404, which makes it a crime to knowingly, willfully and unlawfully fail to apply utility payments collected from tenants to the bills for which the money was collected. 

Ashley Richardson, director of housing law at the Mississippi Center for Justice, said the new utility law is progress but more is needed to protect tenants. 

The organization is seeking changes that include more notice before evictions for nonpayment of rent, regulation of rent-to-own housing contracts, changes to the repair-and-deduct law and creation of a state fair housing act.  

“In the work that I do with MCJ, I would say that the Mississippi landlord-tenant statute favors landlords more than tenants,” Richardson said. 

Mississippi’s Residential Landlord and Tenant Act requires landlords to comply with building and housing codes that materially affect health and safety and maintain rental units and their plumbing, heating and cooling systems in substantially the same condition as when the lease began, excluding reasonable wear and tear. 

Those requirements may not apply when a tenant deliberately or negligently causes the damage. State law also allows some maintenance responsibilities to be assigned through a written agreement. 

Tenants cannot simply stop paying rent when a landlord fails to make a repair. Instead, state law provides a process for making certain repairs and seeking reimbursement. 

To use that process, a tenant must provide written notice of a specific and material defect and give the landlord 30 days to make the repair. If the landlord does not, the tenant can pay for the repair and seek reimbursement.

After receiving receipts, the landlord has 45 days to reimburse the tenant or offset repair costs against future rent. 

Richardson said those requirements can make the process difficult when repairs are urgent or tenants cannot afford to pay upfront. 

“Depending on the repair, they might need something sooner than 30 days,” Richardson said. “A lot of the people that we service, they don’t have the money to pay for the repairs themselves.” 

Richardson said deposits and other upfront expenses can create similar barriers for tenants with limited financial resources. 

“We see that a lot of people don’t have the money to just pick up and move somewhere else,” Richardson said. 

Beyond the financial barriers, tenants can also struggle to understand what protections are available to them. 

Rep. Fabian Nelson, D-Byram, has twice introduced legislation to loosen restrictions on the repair-and-deduct process. 

Nelson introduced bills in 2025 and 2026 that would have eliminated the one-month rent limit on repair costs and allowed tenants to use the remedy more than once in six months. His most recent proposal, House Bill 442, died in committee. 

Correction, 8/31/2026: This article has been updated to show Rep. Fabian Nelson is from Byram.