Sen. Jeremy England, chairman of the Senate Elections Committee, says he plans to again introduce legislation for Mississippi to join most other states and allow in-person, no-excuse early voting. He also talks about the U.S. Supreme Court agreeing to hear a Mississippi case challenging the counting of mail-in ballots after Election Day, and about major issues he foresees in the 2026 legislative session.
The holidays are a time to celebrate with loved ones, not falling victim to scams that can steal your cheer. Falling for a scam can lead to losing money and putting your account and personal information at risk, which can be both time consuming and costly.
Here are some common seasonal scams and tips to help protect yourself:
• Missed packages or problems with delivery: Expecting a package? Be cautious of phishing messages through email or text impersonating delivery services like UPS or FedEx with links to view “missed deliveries.” These links may lead to fake sign-in pages or malware-infected sites. Do not respond to messages requesting personal or financial information, including money or cryptocurrency. Be wary of unexpected packages and avoid scanning QR codes, as they may be attempts to steal your information.
• Online deals that are too good to be true: When shopping online or on social media, buy only from trusted websites and vendors. If purchasing on a platform or marketplace, stay on the platform to complete transactions and communicate with sellers, as protections often only apply when you use the platform. Use payment methods that offer buyer protection, and never send money to strangers or use Zelle for purchases, especially when you can’t confirm the goods exist.
• Phony charities preying on your generosity: The holidays are also a season of giving. Before you donate money, double-check contact and payment information for your charity of choice and watch for text, email or phone call solicitations. Like any other unsolicited message, don’t click on links or open attachments that may contain malware or attempt to steal your information.
“Scammers do not discriminate and can target anyone during this festive season. Don’t let your guard down. Always remember that if something seems off, it likely is. By staying alert and informed, we can protect ourselves and our loved ones from falling victim during this holiday season,” said Darius Kingsley, Head of Consumer Banking Practices at Chase.
Tips to Avoid Scams:
• Don’t send money to unknown individuals or for goods or services that you can’t confirm exist.
• Be cautious of friendly messages from strangers on social apps. Scammers might try to build trust before asking for money.
• If a deal seems too good to be true, it probably is. Watch out for deep discounts or low prices that may be scams.
• If you shop on social media marketplaces, never pay using Zelle—it is the same as cash and you may not get back if there is an issue. For more information about ways to help protect yourself from scams, visit chase.com/scamspotting —it’s a free resource that offers information in English and Spanish.
Based on their recent comments, perhaps President Donald Trump and some other Republicans are getting ready to embrace universal health care.
Universal health care involves some form of the government ensuring everyone has medical coverage at little or no out-of-pocket cost, beyond what people pay in taxes. Many countries, including much of western Europe, have some form of universal health care.
The United States does not, even though various Democrats, ranging from Harry Truman to Barack Obama, from Kamala Harris to Bernie Sanders, have embraced some form of universal health care at some point in time.
Republicans have portrayed universal health care as the bogeyman, as socialism, as the worst thing that could happen to the United States and would eventually lead to capitulation to Russia.
Yet, Trump and others seem to be warming up to the possibility.
In recent weeks, congressional Democrats have been fighting to extend enhanced subsidies for private insurance purchased on the Affordable Care Act’s marketplace exchange – a fight that was at the center of the 43-day federal government shutdown that ended last week. The federal subsidies pay a significant portion of the cost of the health insurance purchased on the exchange.
Trump recently posted on social media, as he is wont to do, that instead of providing these subsidies to big insurance companies, he would prefer to give the money for health care directly to the American people.
How would this work? He didn’t say, but that did not stop many Republicans from embracing the idea. And it does not appear many Republicans voiced concern about such a scheme.
But according to the Congressional Budget Office, as explained in an MSNBC article by Miranda Yaver, a University of Pittsburgh assistant professor of health policy and management, the health insurance companies received about $92 billion in federal ACA subsidies in 2023. During the same year, just the out-of-pocket costs – those not paid by the insurance companies – totaled $500 billion for Americans.
So, in short, if Trump diverts that $92 billion from insurance companies to individuals, there also must be a method to pay for the additional costs of health care Americans will incur.
The amount of the subsidies each individual would receive will not cover the cost of a serious illness or accident. Would the people facing major medical expenses be left to face the impossible-for-most task of paying those tens of thousands of dollars in health care costs by themselves? Or would they need some, gulp, insurance, to help pay for those additional costs?
Insurance, love it or hate it, exists to level the playing field. By having a large number of people on insurance, the costs paid by those with expensive medical needs are held down by those who have insurance but seldom or never have to use it.
So, all this begs the question: What is the answer for those, like President Trump, who don’t like subsidizing big insurance?
The obvious answer to that question is, drum roll please, universal health care coverage, often referred to as Medicaid and Medicare for all or a public option.
Universal health care could be fashioned a number of ways. People could be expected to provide, as Republicans like to say, some “skin in the game” by paying for some of the costs themselves.
It could be a program where, if you have private insurance and you like your private insurance, you can keep it just as long as it is not paid for with federal dollars.
President Trump and others have been obsessed with getting rid of the Affordable Care Act. The president seems upset that it is called Obamacare.
It is important to note that it was first labeled Obamacare by those who opposed the legislation that was passed way back in 2010. But now that polls show it is popular, Trump seems upset that it is called Obamacare.
As a matter of fact, he said that money for health care being sent directly to the American people “would be so exciting. Call it Trumpcare. Call it whatever you want.… Anything but Obamacare.”
Perhaps Democrats, many of whom always supported universal health care as the most logical way to deal with an often broken and complex American system, could achieve that goal by just agreeing to call it Trumpcare.
The Trump administration took down a congressionally mandated report on missing and murdered Native Americans from the Department of Justice’s website nearly 300 days ago to comply with an executive order against diversity, equity and inclusion.
It’s still not back online yet, and the senators who worked to pass the law are furious.
The Not One More Report was the product of The Not Invisible Act of 2020, which intends to provide tribes with solutions to combat the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous people and educate the general public about the crisis. The act was signed into law by President Donald Trump in his first term.
Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, a moderate Democrat from Nevada who sits on the Senate Indian Affairs Committee and introduced that act, said she was “outraged” to see the report had vanished from the federal forum.
“It is astounding that an administration that actually signed these bills into law, that wants to address the issue of keeping our communities safe from violent criminals, including our tribal communities, thinks that this isn’t an important issue,” Cortez Masto told NOTUS during an interview in her Capitol Hill office.
The report was taken down amid a purge of material from federal websites that the Trump administration deemed DEI-related. Both Cortez Masto and Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican senator from Alaska who chairs the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, told NOTUS that they reached out to the administration to inquire about restoring the Not One More Report.
Murkowski said that she wants the report restored “so that the information is out there.”
“If we don’t know what we don’t know, it’s pretty tough to say it’s a problem,” she said.
A commission including tribal leaders, human trafficking survivors, relatives of victims, and federal partners compiled the report from over 250 testimonies from tribal members about how the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous people has affected their lives. It also gave recommendations on how to alleviate the crisis — like having the U.S. Marshals Service help tribal law enforcement address the MMIP crisis, the premise of legislation that Cortez Masto recently introduced alongside Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma.
On Feb. 3, over a dozen tribal leadership and advocacy organizations sent a letter to the administration and several high-ranking lawmakers who work on tribal affairs, urging them to preserve tribal members’ “legal status as a political class rather than a suspect racial class,” and exempt tribal nations from DEI-related crack downs. Less than a week later, Cortez Masto’s office noticed the Not One More Report was no longer available on the DOJ’s website.
“It’s an epidemic of violence against Native women, Native people,” Senate Indian Affairs Committee member Tina Smith told NOTUS. “If you want to solve a problem, you first have to see it and understand it, and that’s what that work was all about.”
Cortez Masto said that she and Murkowski sent a letter to the administration asking why the report was taken down. The White House responded it was taken down in compliance with the executive order, which Cortez Masto’s office specified was the “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” order issued on Jan. 20. Cortez Masto said she’s received no other information from the administration or an explanation on why it sees this report as a DEI issue.
The White House did not answer NOTUS’ question about whether or not it believes issues regarding missing and murdered Native Americans qualify as “DEI” issues and directed NOTUS to the DOJ. A DOJ spokesperson told NOTUS in a statement that the “report was removed to ensure compliance with OPM guidance regarding President Trump’s Executive Order Defending Women. The Commission’s report is still available on numerous external websites.”
The spokesperson added that the “joint DOJ/DOI response continues to be posted on the DOJ’s Tribal Justice and Safety website,” and included this link to a page of “archived content” that does not include the report itself. The DOJ did not answer NOTUS’ questions about whether it intends to restore the report.
The Wayback Machine shows a PDF of the report was last available on Feb. 8. A “Page not found” message appears in its place on Feb. 9. An error message was still present on that page as of Nov. 13.
When NOTUS asked Cortez Masto why she thinks the administration has kept the report off the DOJ’s website, she said: “They think they’re a race. They are ignorant to the fact of the trust and treaty obligation that we have to our tribal communities.”
“They don’t really care about addressing the violent crime in our tribal communities and Indigenous communities, and that has been very clear to me based on their reaction to the bipartisan letter from both [Murkowski] and I, to the comments that I get in the hearings when [nominees are] before me,” she continued.
Smith also described the administration’s re-classification of Native American nations from sovereign states to groups subjected to DEI.
“The Trump administration continually, and seems to me, purposefully, misunderstands the difference between Native people and tribal nations and other important and big groups in this country,” Smith said. “Tribal nations are not just another constituency. They’re sovereign nations, sovereign people, and it’s just so offensive to see that the administration isn’t interested in understanding what’s causing this epidemic of violence and what we should do about it.”
Cortez Masto said she wanted to “make it very clear to this administration” that this is not a DEI issue, and that the recommendations in the report will still continue to inspire more of her legislation.
“They can try to keep it off of the website, but the report’s there. The recommendations are there. The commission, I’m assuming, is still happening, and we’re still going to move forward to address it,” she said.
This story is provided by a partnership between Mississippi Today and the NOTUS Washington Bureau Initiative, which seeks to help readers in local communities understand what their elected representatives are doing in Congress.
Mississippi is one step closer to receiving nearly $41 million from the prescription pain manufacturing company Purdue Pharma after a federal bankruptcy judge in New York said he will approve a plan to recoup billions of dollars from the Sackler family for its role in contributing to hundreds of thousands of American overdose deaths.
Purdue developed and patented the drug OxyContin in 1996. The prescription painkiller is an opioid, a class of drugs that can relieve pain but can also be highly addictive and debilitating. For years, company officials and the Sacklers, the family that owned the company, downplayed the risk of OxyContin, even as evidence mounted that its frequent prescriptions were leading to more overdose deaths across the country.
Although physicians prescribed fewer bottles of OxyContin and other opioid painkillers over the last decade, research indicates the legacy of Purdue’s marketing campaigns continue to jeopardize American lives. People addicted to prescription painkillers often switched to using illicit opioids, like heroin and fentanyl, when pills became less available. A 2023 Yale study found that states where the company’s marketing was less regulated continue to have higher rates of fentanyl overdoses and infections related to injection drug use, such as hepatitis C.
Each year since 2022, Mississippi has been paid tens of millions of opioid settlement dollars, money that is supposed to help respond to the overdose public health crisis. But 15% of those dollars — the money controlled by the state’s towns, cities and counties — is unrestricted and being spent with almost no public knowledge. Mississippi Today spent the summer finding out how almost every local government receiving money has been managing the money over the past three years.
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The company has pleaded guilty for its marketing of OxyContin in the past, but it and the Sackler family have largely avoided the large national lawsuit payouts other companies have agreed to by filing for bankruptcy in 2019. A previous proposal would have required the family to pay up to $6 billion throughout the United States, but the Supreme Court rejected that settlement in June 2024 because of its civil lawsuit protections for the Sacklers.
The new settlement, agreed to by state attorneys general in June, instructs the Sacklers to pay $7.4 billion to the states and doesn’t include the same legal shields for the Sacklers. Mississippi is set to receive its nearly $41 million share of that over the next 15 years.
If finalized, Purdue’s payout brings Mississippi’s contributions from companies to around $421 million in reparations for their roles in the opioid epidemic — a public health catastrophe that has killed over 10,000 Mississippians. Health services in the state responded to close to 5,500 non-fatal overdoses just in the first seven months of 2025, according to the Mississippi State Department of Health.
Purdue’s settlement is subject to similar rules as the previous opioid lawsuits — 70% must be used for future strategies to address addiction, and the remaining 30% can be used for any other public purpose.
The Legislature and 147 Mississippi local governments will split that 30%, or $12.3 million. So far, few of those local governments’ leaders have chosen to use their money to address the crisis Purdue and the other companies contributed to. Those decisions and delays in the state portion of the opioid settlements have led to Mississippi having committed less lawsuit money to prevent overdoses than every other state in the country as of this summer — both in total dollars and as a percentage of settlement shares.
The 70%, or $28.7 million, that does need to be spent on addiction-related purposes will be overseen by Mississippi Opioid Settlement Fund Advisory Council. The council has been meeting over the past few months, and state law says the council is required to recommend how the Legislature should spend the funds by Dec. 7 of this year.
The Okolona Municipal Separate School District is under state control for the second time in 15 years.
The Mississippi Board of Education voted to take over the school district during a special called meeting Friday. District officials had reached out to the state education agency on Oct. 30 because the school system couldn’t make its November payroll.
“This was a difficult but necessary decision to protect the educational interests of students in Okolona,” State Superintendent Lance Evans said in a statement. “The financial challenges facing this district have reached a point where state intervention is required to ensure students continue to receive the education they deserve.”
Over the past two weeks, Mississippi Department of Education officials have been meeting with district leaders to determine the financial state of Okolona schools. The district sent the agency some paperwork that show a budget shortfall of more than $100,000, but other financial documents, such as payments to vendors, were incomplete, according to information state education officials presented.
Education department officials discovered that the district hasn’t had a financial audit since 2021, and has been outspending since fiscal year 2023-24.
“That’s part of the work … for our staff to perform, really, a forensic account and review of their finances,” said Kymberly Wiggins, the agency’s chief operating officer.
The state board determined today that the district’s situation was critical enough to warrant a takeover, citing ongoing insolvency and a pattern of financial mismanagement and accreditation violations. Effective immediately, John Ferrell, the agency’s chief of school and district transformation, will become Okolona’s interim superintendent. The district will get financial relief through the state’s school district emergency assistance fund.
Without intervention, Okolona schools would continue to have “an inadequate and unstable educational environment, thereby denying the students of the district the opportunity to learn to excel and to obtain a free and appropriate public education,” said Matt Miller, president of the state board of education.
The state took control of the district in 2010 for similar financial issues and accreditation violations. Okolona was also academically failing then. The state returned the district to local control in 2012.
The Okolona district enrolled 517 students in 2024-25, a decrease from 688 students in 2010, the year of the last state takeover. More than 90% of the students are Black.
The state Department of Education has taken over 18 school districts since 1996. Four of those — North Panola, Oktibbeha County, Tunica County and now Okolona — have been taken over twice.
In addition, two districts — Yazoo City and Humphreys County — were consolidated and put into a different form of state supervision in 2019. They remain under state control, but they were separated earlier this year. The two districts are not included on the department’s list of takeovers.
“This is a total shock to me,” said Okolona Mayor Sherman Carouthers, a lifelong resident of the area. “We’ve seen so much improvement. You’ve really caught me off guard. This is something I’m going to have to process.”
Since 2017, the district’s academic rating has improved from a D to a B.
“The educator part of the district has done quite well,” state board member Mary Werner said during the meeting. “But the leadership has failed miserably.”
Barbara Carouthers, an Okolona school board member and a distant relative of the mayor, would not answer questions when reached by Mississippi Today.
Superintendent Paul Moton and the majority of the Okolona school board could not immediately be reached for comment.
Clarification: This story has been updated with additional details about school district takeovers.
A federal court Thursday halted, for now, a rate increase the manager of Jackson’s beleaguered water and sewer systems has for months said is necessary to keep the utility afloat.
U.S. District Court Judge Henry Wingate said he needed more time to make a decision, adding he would have an update on the matter by the next hearing on Nov. 19.
JXN Water also received news Wednesday that Congress approved to set aside $54 million for daily operations, Ted Henifin, the manager of the third-party utility, said. Lawmakers had already awarded the funds to the city, but initially did so only for capital projects.
Since 2022, the utility has made relatively fast strides improving water pressure throughout Jackson as well as repairing burst sewer lines across the city. Moreover, for the first time in a decade, the water system is compliant with all federal drinking water regulations, Henifin said last week.
But without added revenue, JXN Water said it will continue to lose money and be unable to address sewer system repairs, including two major, ongoing overflows – one on Mill Street and another on I-55 near Home Depot.
Since the spring, Henifin has pleaded with the court for a rate increase after JXN Water ran out of its initial $150 million allocated for daily system upkeep. The hike would raise the average Jacksonian’s monthly bill – which includes costs for drinking water as well as garbage pickup and wastewater – by 12%, the utility says.
City officials, including Mayor John Horhn as well as all of the Jackson City Council, have argued the utility shouldn’t be able to charge more until it collects payments from a broader swath of the city.
Even if JXN Water had a 100% collections rate – it currently sits around 70%, far below the national average of over 90% – those bills wouldn’t yield enough revenue to keep the utility from losing money, Henifin has repeatedly told critics of his proposal.
Jackson officials, attorneys for the ACLU, and Rep. Fabian Nelson, a Democrat whose district includes south Jackson, all spoke against the rate increase during a status conference in front of Wingate on Thursday. Wingate appointed Henifin to lead the city’s water recovery in 2022.
Jackson City Attorney Drew Martin criticized JXN Water for not considering sooner its revenue needs. This increase would mark the second rate hike since Henifin took over. The manager previously has said it took a while to realize how much money the system needed to function.
“What we hear from residents is ‘you can’t just spend money first and assume we can afford it,’” Martin said Thursday.
In September, the utility ramped up its collection efforts, shutting off about 1,800 accounts. JXN Water has disconnected 4,403 total accounts since the start of 2025, adding it plans to continue disconnecting 500 to 1,000 accounts per week. It did not say how many accounts have since caught up or have been reconnected. The utility said it plans to have “worked” all accounts by mid-2026.
In a court filing last week, Nelson submitted letters from constituents with thousands of dollars in water debt. After not receiving a bill for the first time in years, they couldn’t afford the down payment JXN Water requires to keep their taps on, the letters said.
For others who wrote in, the utility told them they had high charges because of a leak at their home, although some claimed to have hired plumbers who told them the opposite. Some constituents complained of rude representatives from the JXN Water call center.
Wingate himself said he called the center as an experiment and got conflicting answers from different operators. Henifin admitted Thursday the utility needs to better train its operators, which he said would begin around the new year.
“JXN Water has forgotten about the people and the citizens,” Nelson told the court while also praising the progress Henifin’s team has made so far.
The utility initially planned to send a notice of the rate increase to customers on Nov. 15 and for the change to take effect Dec. 15. In Wingate’s 2022 order that put Henifin in charge, the language doesn’t say the manager needs the court’s approval to implement a rate increase.
But at the eleventh hour of Thursday’s conference, Wingate enjoined, or stopped, Henifin from moving forward. JXN Water attorneys said they would need a decision by the end of November to enact the rate hike by the end of 2025, leading to the judge setting the next conference for Nov. 19.
The two-day hearing, which began last week, looked in-depth at a number of issues, including both the city and JXN Water alleging the other owes it money.
Henifin on Thursday discussed the city’s water debt, which as of October was $6.9 million. Most of that is from leaks at the Jackson Zoo, which should be fixed in the next two to three weeks, Jackson’s chief administrative officer Pieter Teeuwissen said.
But in the meantime, Henifin said, JXN Water has held “hostage” $6.3 million the utility owes the city in sanitation fees. Because residents pay for garbage pickup in the water bill, that money first goes to JXN Water.
Wingate questioned the utility chief about withholding those funds. Henifin said JXN Water has spent the money to help keep its daily operations afloat. When the judge asked Henifin what authority allowed that power, he admitted he had “none.” The manager said the utility will pay back the city once Jackson pays its water debt.
Teeuwissen and other city officials criticized JXN Water, saying not having sanitation revenue puts a strain on Jackson’s budget. Martin, the city attorney, said “it is more than frustrating” to hear Henifin withheld the funds without any authority.
Horhn reaffirmed his stance Thursday against the proposed rate increase. The mayor is hopeful the state Legislature will work with him in the 2026 session to find other streams of revenue to invest into the water and sewer systems, and said it’s premature to raise rates before seeing what that may look like.
Horhn offered several suggestions to lawmakers in October, such as raising the sales tax or diverting funds from the Capitol Complex Improvement District.
City officials also appealed to Wingate to allow access to JXN Water’s financial records, stating they couldn’t agree to a rate increase without having that information.
While Henifin last week agreed to do so, he later asked to condition that access to prevent records from becoming public. Without context, he argued, it’d be easy for someone to misinterpret the numbers. The 2022 order gave Henifin the power to run the utility without being subject to public record laws.
After initially pushing back on the conditions, the city said it would agree to a protection order preventing the records from becoming public without Henifin’s approval.
Editor’s note: This essay is part of Mississippi Today Ideas, a platform for thoughtful Mississippians to share fact-based ideas about our state’s past, present and future. You can read more about the section here.
When legislators talk about “school choice” and diverting public dollars to private schools, they often package it as empowering parents. But often overlooked in the conversation is that after years of underfunding and unfair criticism, Mississippi’s public education is seeing measurable success.
According to the latest Kids Count Data Book, Mississippi was ranked 16th in the nation for K-12 education. Our fourth graders have led the nation in reading and math gains on the National Assessment of Educational Progress rankings, and graduation rates have reached historic highs.
There are so many wonderful things happening in Mississippi public education. Now is not the time to pull away from a shared system that is working. Vouchers and unaccountable “choice” schemes threaten the progress of the many in favor of a few.
The adage “it takes a village to raise a child” has never been truer. Educators are not seeking to replace parents but to partner with them. Schools consistently plead for parents to be active participants in the educational process.
Public schools are our community’s schools, run by local boards, funded by taxpayers and accountable to the public. Suggesting that only private schools or home options are legitimate undermines our collective investment that ensures every child, regardless of income or zip code, has access to quality education.
Mississippi’s recent gains were not driven by privatization. The state directs a very small percentage of kindergarten–12 funding to private programs. Our progress stems from intentional public investments in early literacy, Pre-K expansion, teacher support, accountability and local district innovations.
Yet, Mississippi has chronically underfunded its schools. Since the Mississippi Adequate Education Program was created in 1997, legislators only fully funded it twice, leaving a cumulative shortfall exceeding $3.3 billion.
Even in 2023, despite revenue surpluses, education was shorted by $161 million. The newly created 2024 Mississippi Student Funding Formula provided roughly $50 million less than full MAEP funding would have delivered.
We cannot afford to carve public money away from schools already asked to do more with less. Each diverted dollar reduces resources for classrooms, support staff, fine arts programs, counselors, nurses and special education.
Who truly benefits — and who loses — when vouchers enter the system? These programs primarily serve affluent families already able to afford private school tuition. They cluster benefits in urban areas, where private schools are more abundant, leaving rural Mississippians with fewer options and underfunded local schools.
When voucher programs win, public-school students and their teachers lose — facing larger class sizes, fewer resources and diminished support in the classrooms where most Mississippi children learn.
Public schools are accountable through testing, audits and transparency. Voucher-funded schools, however, are rarely held to the same standards. Many select their students, exclude those with disabilities or cloak financials in privacy.
Public dollars deserve public oversight. If a school takes tax money, it should be held to the same accountability expectations as every Mississippi public classroom.
Other states offer clear warnings. In Tennessee, voucher students underperformed compared to their public school peers. In Arkansas, costs ballooned and private schools hiked tuition, excluding low-income families. Louisiana’s choice expansion deepened budget gaps.
Mississippi should learn from these examples: When states funnel public money into private schooling, inequality grows while outcomes stagnate.
Rather than dividing limited resources, Mississippi should double down on what works.
We should:
Proponents of vouchers call “choice” freedom, but real freedom is not abandoning public responsibility. It is building a society where every child, regardless of income or geography, can attend a great public school.
Mississippi’s progress proves what collective investment can achieve. We should not dismantle progress with policies that favor the few. Public dollars belong in public schools.
The real choice before us is simple: a future where all children succeed, or one where some succeed at the expense of others. That’s a choice we must not accept and must do our due diligence to fight against.
Bio: Louise Smith, 2023 Mississippi Teacher of the Year and 2024 NEA Foundation Horace Mann Award Winner, is a band director on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. She has been featured on the cover of NEA Today, where she talked about teacher trauma and stress, and in US News and World Report, where she was named as one of the “Twenty Professionals Who Made a Difference During the Pandemic.” In her spare time, she enjoys playing her flute in the Coastal Winds Wind Ensemble and traveling the world with her husband.
If this Saturday’s Florida-Ole Miss football game were a bowl game, we all know what its name would be: The Lane Kiffin Bowl. That’s because the worst kept secret in college football is that Florida has zeroed in on Kiffin to be its next head coach.
And, in keeping with the corporate sponsorship of bowl games these days – as in the Allstate Sugar Bowl, Goodyear Cotton Bowl and the Rose Bowl presented by Prudential – I’ve got the perfect name for this one: The Lane Kiffin Bowl, presented by Jimmy Sexton.
Sexton, of course, is Lane Kiffin’s agent. He also represents coaches named Nick Saban, Kirby Smart, Kalen DeBoer, Steve Sarkisian, Mike Norvell, James Franklin, Hugh Freeze and a host of others. He has negotiated hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts for both coaches and athletes so he could easily fund the bowl game sponsorship. He is the Babe Ruth of sports agents. And you know he is loving Saturday’s Lane Kiffin Bowl (6 p.m. kickoff, Vaught-Hemingway Stadium).
Sexton also loves the fact that coaching vacancies exist at LSU and Auburn. The more the merrier, you know. So get your calculators out, and let the bidding begin. You get college football blue bloods Florida and LSU involved in a bidding war and no telling how high the bids will go.
The fact Ole Miss is a 16.5-point favorite over Florida on Saturday tells you all you need to know about why the demand for Kiffin’s services is so high. Florida has won three national championships and eight SEC Championships since 1990. Ole Miss hasn’t won so much as an SEC division championship in that same period.
Yet, in his six seasons at Ole Miss, the 50-year-old Kiffin has guided the Rebels to 53 victories against just 19 defeats. Perhaps more impressively, his Ole Miss teams are 13 games over .500 in the SEC. Compare that to Tommy Tuberville, who was 12 games below .500 in the SEC when he left Ole Miss in 1998 to take the Auburn job. (Sexton was Sen. Tuberville’s agent, too.)
Little wonder Florida wants Kiffin. Gator fans look at Kiffin and see Steve Spurrier 35 years ago. They see a brash, visor-wearing, offensive-minded coach whose wide receivers always seem to run wide open through opponents’ defenses. They see what Kiffin has done at Ole Miss and can only imagine what he might do at Florida.
Ole Miss enters Saturday’s game at 8-1 and No. 7 in the college football playoff rankings. This has the potential to be the greatest season in Rebel football history. But at a time when everyone who bleeds red and blue should be focused on beating Florida, many are instead worried sick about losing their coach. Keep in mind, they have been down this road before.
The Rebels were 8-1 and ranked No. 11 about this time in 2022. The Auburn job was open then and various news reports had Kiffin headed for the Plains. And you know what happened next. Ole Miss, a clearly distracted football team, lost four straight games.
Eventually, Kiffin stayed at Ole Miss. The Rebels have won 30 games in the nearly three seasons since. Ole Miss has given Kiffin everything he has asked for – beyond a salary of about $9.5 million per year. Ole Miss supporters are bankrolling a football NIL budget of more than $20 million a year and an assistant coaches salary pool of more than $8 million a year.
We could debate forever which is the better job. Five years ago, I would have said Florida, hands down. But not now. The transfer portal and NIL have changed everything in college football. Ole Miss athletic director Keith Carter, NIL guru Walker Jones and, yes, Kiffin have been on the cutting edge in all that.
Florida, with a bigger stadium, is located in a much larger state amid much more football talent. But with all that comes higher expectations. Remember, Dan Mullen won 60% of his games in nine seasons at Mississippi State and then took the Florida job. He won nearly 70% of his games in four seasons with the Gators – and got his butt fired.
Kiffin could end all that speculation and avoid a repeat of 2022, Instead, in a press conference earlier this week he added fuel to the fire. “There are still advantages for the traditional ‘blue bloods,’” Kiffin said. “Kids still care about stadium size, history, Heismans, national championships, and location to talent…”
I have no clue what Kiffin will do. He may not either. I do know all this speculation has really increased interest in a game in which a 9-1 team is heavily favored over a team that has won only three games and already has fired its coach. The Lane Kiffin Bowl, it is.
Brian Howey, Mukta Joshi and Nate Rosenfield are reporters for Mississippi Today. They examined the power of sheriffs’ offices as part of The New York Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship. This story was reported in collaboration with Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting. To listen to an audio version of this investigation, visit the Reveal website. This story also was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism, the Alicia Patterson Foundation and The Pulitzer Center.
For years, guards in a jail outside Jackson terrorized those in their care, according to dozens of people who say they endured, witnessed or participated in violent assaults.
Guards dragged inmates into blind corners, where cameras couldn’t capture acts of violence. They beat people behind closed doors. And they encouraged favored inmates to join in on the brutality.
Former inmates and guards said the violence at the Rankin County jail created a culture of fear and was widely accepted by officials as a way of keeping order, an investigation by Mississippi Today and The New York Times has found.
More than a dozen former inmates recounted being beaten for nonviolent infractions, like talking back to guards or getting caught with contraband. Many said a special group of inmates, known as trusties, helped guards beat troublemakers, lending fists whenever needed. Sometimes, the jail’s highest-ranking officials instigated the punishments or handed them down themselves, according to former guards and inmates.
The Rankin County Sheriff’s Department, which runs the jail, has a documented history of brazen violence. Last year, the Justice Department began investigating the agency for potential civil rights violations after Mississippi Today and The Times revealed that a group of detectives and patrol deputies, some of whom called themselves the “Goon Squad,” had been torturing suspected drug users for nearly 20 years.
This portrait of life inside the Rankin County jail is drawn from interviews with more than 70 former inmates. Many of their descriptions of widespread violence are supported by medical records and photographs, as well as incident reports written by guards and a video that shows guards shocking a man with an electrified vest.
Four former guards, three of whom asked to remain anonymous, also said they had witnessed unjustified beatings by other guards and trusties. Most described the violence as a weekly occurrence.
In a statement, the department’s attorney, Jason Dare, called the reporting “baseless.” The Rankin County jail, he wrote, “is one of the cleanest and best-run jails in Mississippi, with jailers never having been found to use excessive force in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.”
After reviewing the findings, Sean Tindell, the commissioner of the Mississippi Department of Public Safety, said on Wednesday that agents from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation had been assigned to investigate the allegations.
Since 2013, at least 11 inmates from the jail have sued the department, alleging they had been assaulted by guards or trusties. The vast majority represented themselves and most of the lawsuits were dismissed because of missed deadlines and court fees, or other technicalities.
The attacks, described in the lawsuits and in interviews with former guards and inmates, ranged in severity from slaps and whippings to brutal beatings that left inmates with bloody wounds and broken bones. Three guards and nearly two dozen former inmates said that trusties and guards would purposefully drag inmates into areas with no surveillance cameras before beating them.
Morgan Curtis, a former trusty who has been in and out of the jail since 2015, said the way guards would order trusties to attack inmates was “like a command to a pack of dogs.”
In interviews, nine former trusties, most of whom requested anonymity because they feared retaliation, admitted to helping guards beat inmates. They said the highest-ranking trusties were expected to back up guards during volatile situations or attack inmates so that guards would not have to do so themselves.
This group of trusties, recognizable by their blue jumpsuits, earned a nickname: the Blue Wave.
One former trusty described an incident from 2020. He said that on the orders of guards, he beat an inmate who had flooded his cell, kicking him repeatedly.
The following year, the jail’s top administrator, Barry Vaughn, confronted an inmate who had failed a drug test. Vaughn punched him so hard, the inmate said, that it broke his nose and knocked out two dental crowns.
Christian Dedmon, one of five former Rankin County deputies who was sentenced to federal prison for torturing two Black men in 2024, said that while he was working at the department he had watched Vaughn beat inmates in his office. A former guard described seeing several similar beatings. Vaughn declined to comment on the allegations.
In 2019, a man who briefly escaped the jail was lifted into the air by his throat and choked by a sheriff’s deputy, several inmates and a guard said. Bryan Bailey, the sheriff of the department, later bragged about the incident, according to Dedmon.
Dedmon has sent hundreds of emails from a federal prison in New Jersey, describing how his willingness to partake in violence helped him rise through the ranks. He has said that he wanted it known that the brutalities he committed were part of a deeply ingrained culture at the department.
He previously shared information about the use of taxpayer-funded equipment at Sheriff Bailey’s family farm, allegations that led to an investigation by the state auditor.
“They made me powerful and respected, made me actually feel like somebody, like I had done a good job,” Dedmon wrote. “It’s OK to beat drug addicts, it’s OK to take from the taxpayer, so why would I not mirror them?”
The Rankin County Adult Detention Center is tucked behind the courthouse on the main drag of Brandon, a town of about 25,000 people with one of the lowest crime rates in the state.
Several hundred inmates, many of them accused of drug crimes and other nonviolent offenses, live in rows of beige cells stacked two stories high. Many have not been convicted of a crime and are awaiting their day in court.
Over 10 months, reporters examined 69 alleged incidents of violence against inmates at the jail that occurred from 2012 to 2024.
They included 21 encounters in which guards documented that they had used force against inmates, and why, in incident reports. These reports are routinely filed whenever guards encounter issues. Their descriptions of violence differed greatly from what inmates said had happened.
But in a number of cases, reporters were able to interview eyewitnesses who supported the accounts of the victims. In several cases, medical records corroborated the injuries that inmates described.
In the case of Larry Buckhalter, the violence was filmed — by a guard.
In 2018, Buckhalter began a one-year sentence for possessing a small amount of cocaine. He was intellectually disabled, his family said, and people often took advantage of him.
According to three former guards who spoke on the condition of anonymity, Buckhalter was nicknamed “Crying Larry” by guards and other inmates because he had a habit of pestering jail staff with small requests.
One day, he asked for a Coca-Cola. A cellphone video obtained by Mississippi Today and The Times shows Buckhalter sitting quietly in a chair, strapped into a stun vest that is typically used to control violent inmates during court hearings.
Off camera, a man jokes that Buckhalter is going to bite off his tongue. A woman, who is also off camera, tells Buckhalter to give his consent.
Buckhalter takes a deep breath. “My name Larry and I volunteer to this,” he says.
The vest is activated. Buckhalter screams as his body convulses.
“Now you get a Coke,” the woman says. “It’s all over! I’m so proud of you, Larry!”
In his statement, Dare, the department attorney, did not address the guards’ actions. He criticized the reporting as “alleged rumors by unnamed sources who have no personal, first-hand knowledge of events,” and pointed out that reporters had not spoken to Buckhalter, who died in 2021.
Tindell, Mississippi’s public safety commissioner, called the video “appalling and utterly unacceptable.”
David Fathi, the director of the National Prison Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, said that using force can be justified in certain circumstances, like if an inmate poses a threat; but doing so without cause or as punishment, he said, is “categorically inappropriate.” Corporal punishment in U.S. jails and prisons was deemed unconstitutional in the 1960s.
Fathi reviewed several incident reports filed by guards. He said the reasons they cited for using force were so vague they should have raised red flags to supervisors, and that the justifications fell far short of the typical threshold followed by jails and prisons.
In one such report, a guard wrote that he had struck an inmate, Dustin Rives, in the face because Rives had verbally threatened another guard. The blow broke Rives’ jaw, medical records show. Another report stated that guards struck Carvis Johnson and threw him to the floor in 2020 because he yelled threats and turned toward them after being ordered to face a wall.
For years, the man in charge of monitoring the jail was Vaughn, a captain who was recently promoted to undersheriff, making him second-in-command of the sheriff’s department.
According to a former deputy, a former guard and 14 former inmates, Vaughn often beat inmates who broke the rules, slapping and whipping them during interrogations in his office.
“ When you walked through his door, he had a shelf. And on the side of the shelf, he had like a wooden stick, a wooden baseball bat, two or three antennas,” said Cameron Kennedy, a former inmate who said Vaughn had questioned him on several occasions.
In June 2021, Vaughn called Kennedy and several other trusties who had failed drug tests into his office, one by one.
When Kennedy refused to explain where they had gotten the drugs, he said, Vaughn slapped him hard enough to give him a black eye.
Three of the other men who had failed drug tests said Vaughn had punched or whipped them with a car antenna. One of the men was Woodrow Lamont Lewis, the trusty who said Vaughn had knocked out his dental crowns that day. The men said they also saw other inmates return bloodied and bruised from Vaughn’s office.
A few months after the failed drug test, Kennedy was caught with a cellphone, an incident report shows. Vaughn handcuffed him to a chair and struck his shins and thighs with a car antenna, he said.
“He never did stop,” Kennedy said. “I’m talking about, like, 10 or 15 minutes, rapping me with it.”
Dedmon, the former deputy who is in prison, wrote in an email that he once saw Vaughn repeatedly punch an inmate who had smuggled drugs into the jail.
Vaughn directed reporters to speak with the department’s attorney, who denied the allegations.
Some of the country’s first trusty programs began in the early 1900s in Mississippi prisons.
Places like Parchman, a notorious prison in the Mississippi Delta, were known to select trusties from among their most violent inmates. The trusties, armed with guns and whips, were tasked with disciplining other inmates or forcing them to perform backbreaking work in cotton fields.
A federal court ruling in 1972 deemed trusty-on-prisoner violence unconstitutional, leading to the widespread dismantling of the programs in prisons across the nation.
Today, modern versions of trusty programs are common in county jails, though participants are generally banned from using physical force. These programs put nonviolent offenders to work, helping them learn job skills.
In Rankin County, many former trusties spoke glowingly about the program, crediting it with turning their lives around.
“It was the biggest blessing in my life,” said Cameron McKenzie, a former trusty. “I’ve been out now 20 months. I’m married, got full custody of both my kids, just bought a house, good job, you name it.”
Many inmates in the county jail are there only for short periods, while they await sentencing, but trusties usually serve their entire sentence in the facility, rising through the ranks over months or even years.
The most senior trusties — those who earn blue suits — have far better living conditions than other inmates. Former trusties said they slept in their own cellblock, in unlocked cells, and sometimes got passes to visit their families.
Many could roam the facility freely, play video games and work outside the jail. One former trusty, Cameron McCaskill, said he was allowed to keep a pet dog and order pizza.
“A blue suit is unrestricted,” Sheriff Bailey said during a 2020 interview with a Mississippi lobbying group. “Once they get a blue suit status, that is almost like being an employee here.”
Dare said trusties were not allowed to use force.
“ I do not believe that is specifically spelled out in a policy,” he said in an interview. “I do know it is a practice that trusties do not go hands-on.”
But several former guards and participants of the program said that the jail staff expected some trusties to provide extra muscle in exchange for their privileges.
“ If something is going on with the officer and they need assistance, you need to be there,” said Lewis, the former trusty. “If you ain’t there to help them, whether they are winning or losing, then you already know you’re next.”
Three others said trusties were rewarded, sometimes with “free world” food, for joining the violence.
“People would do just about anything for a cigarette, or a box of Church’s chicken with a honey biscuit,” said Phillip Smith, a former trusty. “That was the motivation of the Blue Wave.”
Dozens of former inmates, including many who participated in the program, said they had witnessed trusties hitting or kicking other inmates, or holding them down while guards beat them.
Of the 11 inmates who have sued the sheriff’s department since 2013, five said in their lawsuits that trusties attacked them with guards. All but one had their lawsuits dismissed.
Carvis Johnson, an inmate who had a long history of disciplinary infractions, claimed in a 2020 lawsuit that he had been beaten by guards and trusties. Court records show that Mr. Johnson settled his lawsuit, but the department declined to provide further details about the settlement.
Incident reports show that a confrontation began after Mr. Johnson shoved feces under his cell door and broke a sprinkler, flooding his cell. Trusties were brought in to clean up the mess. Guards led Mr. Johnson out of his cell and knocked him to the floor after he verbally threatened them, the reports show.
In an interview, Brock Reed, a former trusty, said a guard told a group of trusties to give Johnson “a sample” and that they should beat him because they would be the ones stuck cleaning up his mess.
Reed said the guards led Johnson to a corner widely known for being a camera blind spot. A supervisor’s routine review of the incident confirmed there was no security camera footage of what happened, in part because “hallway camera does not show where inmate was in the hall.”
When Johnson hit the floor, Reed kicked him in the hip and lower back, he said.
“I wasn’t going to be the one trusty to tell the police, ‘No, I’m not doing this,’” he said. “I know how they look at you for that.”
Christopher Mack, a former inmate, sued the department last year, claiming trusties and guards beat him in 2021. When he made bail and left the jail with twin black eyes the next day, Mack said, Sheriff Bailey approached him and asked who had caused his injuries.
“ I looked at him and said, ‘Mr. Bailey, you know who did this to me, your officers and trusties did this to me,’” Mack said.
The sheriff cursed under his breath, Mack said, and stormed off.
In September 2019, William Keith Richards found out what could happen to trusties who took advantage of their freedom.
Richards, a blue-suit, had nearly completed his sentence when he walked out of the jail one Friday. Officials did not notice he was gone until he missed church that Sunday, an incident report shows.
When Richards was caught, other blue-suit trusties were ordered to gather at a garage entrance of the jail, where Bailey berated them for not informing guards of the escape, four former trusties said in interviews.
Bailey told the trusties they should take a good look at Richards, because he was the reason they were about to lose their special privileges, two of them said.
Richards was escorted back to the jail by Deputy Wes Shivers, a 6-foot-8 former U.F.C. fighter. After they arrived, Shivers lifted the inmate into the air by his throat and choked him, said two former trusties and a former guard. In an interview, Shivers confirmed that he had returned Richards to the jail but denied choking him.
It is unclear whether Bailey saw the incident or when he left the room. Shivers said he could not recall whether the sheriff was nearby when he arrived with Richards.
A group of guards and trusties dragged Richards into the jail’s dressing room, which was known to not have cameras, and beat him, according to four former inmates familiar with the incident.
They saw Richards in the days following, and said his face was swollen and his neck was ringed with bruises.
“They did a number on him,” Reed said.
Richards declined to comment for this article, citing fears for his safety. Bailey declined a request to comment, deferring to the department’s attorney. In a statement, Dare, who called the reporting “baseless,” did not address whether Bailey was present during the incident.
The department did not produce reports detailing Richards’s capture despite repeated requests.
During email exchanges with reporters, Dedmon recounted the sheriff bragging to him and others about how Shivers had choked an inmate who had escaped.
“Bailey used to talk about it,” Dedmon wrote. “I can just remember Bailey saying, ‘Wes held him up against the wall with one hand.’”
Mississippi Today and The Times obtained formal grievance documents from lawyers who sued the department, providing a rare window into how jail officials handled inmate complaints. From 2018 to 2022, eight inmates filed grievances that described assaults by guards or trusties.
In 2022, Rives, the inmate whose jaw was broken by a guard, filed a grievance. Jail incident reports show that after Rives was struck, guards strapped him into a restraint chair overnight and then locked him in an isolation cell for 25 days. It was there where he filed his grievance, saying he had not been taken to the hospital. His jaw was infected by the time he was hospitalized and required surgery, according to medical records.
“ It never healed,” he said. “ If I take a bite out of a hamburger, it’ll lock up and pop and grind like you wouldn’t believe.”
A report from Rives’s grievance file shows that a supervisor closed his complaint three days after it had been filed, saying the department had documented the incident and provided a “satisfactory response,” which included scheduling a hospital visit for Rives and informing him that he could not press criminal charges against the guard while incarcerated.
Rives said the department did not contact him again.
The report does not indicate whether the guard who broke Rives’s jaw, Jordan McQueary, was disciplined or questioned about the incident. Rives is among at least nine inmates who have filed complaints or federal lawsuits claiming they were assaulted by McQueary, who still works at the department.
Last year, the department honored McQueary for his “outstanding” work.
He did not respond to requests for comment.
At least six other grievances were closed under similar circumstances, with no indication that the guards or trusties accused of violence were interviewed or disciplined.
Supervisors also listed “satisfactory response” as the reason for closing three other complaints. The forms do not define the term, and department representatives did not respond to requests for clarification.
Two former trusties who spoke to Mississippi Today and The Times about their experiences said they have since been confronted by jail officials about their interviews.
John Phillips, a former trusty who said he witnessed and participated in violence between 2017 and 2021, was brought back to the Rankin County jail in August to face new criminal charges.
While there, he was taken to Vaughn’s office, where Vaughn and Dare questioned him about what he had told the publications.
Phillips then wrote and signed a statement contradicting the comments he had made to reporters. His lawyer was not present during the meeting, Phillips and Dare said.
“I never seen anything that the news reporters are talking about when spoken about inmates on inmates or the Blue Wave,” the statement reads, according to a copy provided by Dare. “There is no wrong doing at the Rankin jail or in the program.”
In a later interview, Phillips stressed that his statements to reporters had been true, and that he had felt pressured by the officials to write the letter. Dare said he had not pressured Phillips. He provided a recording of a portion of the August interaction in which Phillips says he is giving his statement voluntarily.
Dare said that he had collected similar statements from several other former trusties, but he declined to share their names.
“I sit down and try to meet with folks, figure out what they know,” he said in an interview last month. “I’m trying to defend the trusty program, that’s all.”
This story was co-reported by Steph Quinn. Jerry Mitchell, Lili Euzet and Leonardo Bevilacqua contributed reporting.