OurTupelo

The Justice Department is accusing the state of Mississippi of violating the constitutional rights of those held in four prisons: the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility, the South Mississippi Correctional Institution and Wilkinson County Correctional Facility.

“Our work makes clear that people do not abandon their civil and constitutional rights at the jailhouse door,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division told reporters in a press conference Wednesday. “The unconstitutional conditions in Mississippi’s prisons have existed for far too long, and we hope that this announcement marks a turning point towards implementing sound, evidence-based solutions to these entrenched problems.”

Department officials released a 60-page report Wednesday that centers on the three prisons besides Parchman. The report concluded that the Mississippi Department of Corrections “does not adequately supervise incarcerated people, control contraband, and investigate incidents of harm and misconduct. These basic safety failures and the poor living conditions inside the facilities promote violence, including sexual assault. Gangs operate in the void left by staff and use violence to control people and traffic contraband.”

Clarke said one major reason for this problem is that vacancy rates for correctional officers run between 30% and 50% at these prisons.

“It should be corrections officers running prisons, not gangs,” said U.S. Attorney Todd Gee for the Southern District of Mississippi. “When inmates are forced to join gangs, they bring that violent culture with them when they are released.”

A former gang intelligence officer estimated that more than half of those inside the Central Mississippi prison belong to gangs, according to the report. In recent years, the percentage of validated gang members inside Wilkinson was as high as 90%.

“The strength of prison gangs inside the MDOC facilities that we investigated is so great that even some staff members have gang affiliations and are on the gangs’ payroll,” the report says.

A coordinator attributed the gangs’ strength “to staff corruption and estimated that more than half the staff are on the payroll of gangs,” according to the report.

Corrections Commissioner Burl Cain has repeatedly vowed to put the gangs out of business and replace them with faith-based alternatives. The Justice Department concluded that “these efforts are inadequate. MDOC’s statewide gang coordinator could not share any metrics that assess the effectiveness of their gang control strategy. Nor do MDOC’s measures appear from our review to have broken the gangs’ stranglehold over MDOC facilities.”

The report also alleged that housing practices at some prisons “create a substantial risk of serious harm. MDOC holds hundreds of people at Central Mississippi and Wilkinson [a private prison run by MTC] in restrictive housing for prolonged periods in appalling conditions. Restrictive housing units are unsanitary, hazardous, and chaotic, with little supervision. They are breeding grounds for suicide, self-inflicted injury, fires, and assaults.”

MDOC officials have not responded to a request for comment about the Justice Department report. MTC, which operates Wilkinson, said in an emailed response that the Justice Department’s conclusions about the Wilkinson prison were drawn from visits conducted nearly two years ago and it has made “many improvements since.”

“While some challenges are inherent in operating a correctional facility, especially at facilities that house high-security inmates like Wilkinson, we continue to enhance the services we provide,” MTC said.

“The report serves as a reminder of the broad challenges faced by most, if not all, correctional facilities in all jurisdictions. These include staffing, contraband, and inmate behavior.”

Management & Training Corporation (MTC) was founded on a mission to help people improve their lives through education, training, and rehabilitation. We invest often and heavily in programming.

These constitutional violations are “systemic problems that have been going on for years,” according to the report.

In 2019, the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting and ProPublica published a series of stories on these prisons, exposing grisly violence, gang control and subhuman living conditions, noting that lawmakers had known about these issues for years and had done little to fix Parchman and the other prisons.

After that reporting, U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and others called on the Justice Department to investigate. The department began to do that in February 2020, starting with Parchman, which the department concluded in April 2022 that those imprisoned were being subjected to violence, inadequate medical care and lack of suicide prevention.

Asked what steps those officials have taken on Parchman since the Justice Department’s 2022 report, Clarke replied, “We are aware of preliminary steps they have taken, but as laid out in great detail, the problems are severe, egregious and long-standing.”

In its latest report, Justice Department officials concluded that all four prisons are “riddled with violence. … Gross understaffing, poor supervision, and inadequate investigations create an environment where violent gang activity and dangerous contraband trafficking proliferate.”

Central Mississippi averages an assault every other day between September 2020 and June 2022, 23 of them requiring hospitalization, according to the report. South Mississippi reported nearly 100 assaults, about 4o of them requiring hospitalization. And a fifth of the more than 150 assaults at Wilkinson required hospitalization.

These numbers underestimate the violence, the report says. “In light of the large number of documented assaults …, MDOC officials cannot claim ignorance of the substantial threat of violence at these facilities.”

At Central Mississippi, camera footage showed an inmate choking and kicking a victim in the head at 3:41 a.m. on an unspecified date. Later, another assailant punched him in the face. By 8:43 a.m., the body was rigid.

It wasn’t until 8:45 a.m., five hours after the assault, that an officer ever came to the cell. It was the officer bringing the morning meal.

Medical help arrived 20 minutes later, but it was far too late. The victim, who wasn’t identified, died.

“The Warden’s report makes no mention of an officer being present on the housing unit at any point during the five hours between the assault and the [man] foaming at the mouth,” according to the report.

At South Mississippi, gang members attacked a man over $68 that he supposedly owed, the report says. “The assailants dragged the victim across different zones of the same housing unit, then after he lost consciousness, brought him to the showers and poured cold water from a garbage can on him to wake him up. Once the victim started coughing and spitting up water, the assailants continued the assault, pouring boiling hot water on him and beating him. The attackers reportedly prohibited anyone in the housing area from contacting medical [services] following the assault. After conferring with other gang members, the assailants agreed to request a security check from officers, because of the severity of the victim’s injuries. Responding staff found the victim lying on the floor behind benches. He was unable to stand up and moaned when asked questions. He had burns over 10–20% of his body, a nasal fracture, head injury, lack of cognitive response and encephalopathy (brain injury).”

The report details how often no one is monitoring the prisons’ video surveillance.

Violence at these prisons includes sexual assaults. The Prison Rape Elimination Act Manager for Central Mississippi receives between 20 and 25 complaints a month, and that number doesn’t include the attacks that go unreported.

Justice Department officials determined that staff could easily introduce contraband into these prisons.

“Drugs, cell phones, and weapons are the most common type of contraband found in the facilities,” the report says. “Many of the assaultive incidents at Central Mississippi, South Mississippi, and Wilkinson, involve contraband weapons. During one altercation at Wilkinson, an incarcerated individual sustained a laceration to his chest. Security staff recovered a piece of a kitchen knife from the scene. After an assault at Wilkinson that sent an incarcerated person to the hospital, staff recovered an eight-inch implement.”

In a single month in 2022, Wilkinson officials recovered 28 grams of meth, 8 ounces of marijuana and 10 cellphones. Over a 13-month period, South Mississippi found 1,200 cellphones, which are commonly used to “conduct business, including contraband trafficking,” according to the report.

The volume of these drugs “leads to extreme, drug-induced behaviors that contribute to violence and fatal overdoses,” according to the report. “An individual who died at Wilkinson after cutting himself and assaulting and choking his cellmate was found to have amphetamine and methamphetamine in his system.”

In addition to the lack of staff to monitor towers and videos, the report found officers “fail to do basic security tasks such as making rounds, counting incarcerated persons, and keeping doors secure. MDOC has long known about this gross understaffing and the harm it causes, but has failed to take reasonable, effective measures to fix the problem.”

Since 2020, when Gov. Tate Reeves appointed Cain, MDOC has raised starting pay for correctional officers, lowered eligibility requirements, shortened training and expedited hiring.

Despite that, the prisons are operating at “dangerously low staffing levels,” the report says. Despite significant pay raises, the pay remains lower than “other correctional agencies in the region and in other industries in Mississippi.”

MDOC also struggles to retain those it hires. One human resources officer said South Mississippi lost about half of its new hires from the previous year.

The reasons why? People aren’t prepared for the job, some have gang affiliations, and others help bring in contraband, sometimes “because of threats from incarcerated individuals,” sometimes because of “significant money being paid to officers.”

U.S. Attorney Clay Joyner for the Northern District of Mississippi said that ensuring “constitutional and humane conditions of confinement in our prisons is a key part of public safety. By allowing physical violence, illegal gang activity, and contraband to run rampant, Mississippi not only violates the rights of people incarcerated at these facilities, but also compromises the legitimacy of law enforcement efforts to protect our communities.”

UPDATE 2/28/24: This story has been updated to include MTC’s response to the report.

The post Justice Department slams ‘unconstitutional conditions’ at Mississippi prisons appeared first on Mississippi Today.

A lawmaker behind a controversial bill to close three public universities in Mississippi says its chances of becoming law this session are “slim.” 

Sen. John Polk, R-Hattiesburg, told Mississippi Today that he just wanted to start a conversation when he filed Senate Bill 2726, which would require the governing board of Mississippi’s eight public universities to shutter three by 2028. 

“It’s pretty out there,” Polk said. 

Start a conversation, Polk did. Social media was a flurry the weekend after the bill dropped. By Wednesday, an online petition opposing the bill had gained more than 7,500 signatures. A local newspaper serving Columbus, the northeastern city home to Mississippi University for Women, published an op-ed warning the bill would devastate the local economy. 

And alumni of the state’s three historically black universities and colleges decried the bill as a do-over of former Gov. Haley Barbour’s plan to merge those schools. 

That isn’t his intention, Polk said. Any of the eight universities could be closed under his bill. And among the most vulnerable based on enrollment are three of the state’s regional colleges: MUW in Columbus, Delta State University in Cleveland and Mississippi Valley State University, a historically Black university in Itta Bena.

“If I were trying to close an HBCU, I would’ve put that in the bill,” Polk said. 

The bill will likely die in the Senate Colleges and Universities Committee due to politics, Polk said, and the emotional ties that Mississippians have to their colleges. His bill is not on the committee’s agenda for Thursday.

Still, it comes at an inauspicious time for higher education in Mississippi as university officials are scrambling to contend with a dwindling number of high school graduates going to college, a trend that will hit the regional colleges the hardest. It also comes on the heels of a failed push this session to rename MUW, part of an effort to boost the college’s declining enrollment.

“You can see how changing the name of the W causes such angst,” Polk said. “This bill will cause much more, and I know that.” 

A number of solutions have been offered to this problem. Sen. Nicole Boyd, R-Oxford, the chair of the Senate Colleges and Universities Committee, has introduced a bill that would create a legislative taskforce to study how the “enrollment cliff” will impact the state’s higher education system.

But Polk’s bill is the first to propose the state close universities instead of coming to their rescue. 

“Sometimes you just have to pull the Band-Aid off the wound,” Polk said. “Until I introduced this bill, no one was talking about that.” 

Polk said the bill was his idea and that he did not consult the 12-member Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees before filing it. An IHL spokesperson said the board does not comment on pending legislation. 

If passed, IHL would be required to decide which three schools to close after conducting statewide listening sessions and evaluate criteria such as enrollment data; tuition rates; economic impact; additional services such as medical, agricultural, engineering or research; and “any other special factors that the board believes the institution offers that cannot be easily replaced or replicated.” 

Involving IHL, Polk said, seemed like a way to make this process less political than if the Legislature decided which three to close. But many universities in Mississippi have felt overlooked by the board at various points in their history. Nine of the 12 trustees are graduates of Mississippi’s three largest research universities. Some are high-dollar donors to Gov. Tate Reeves, and all are gubernatorial appointees.

“IHL has the best interest of the education of students in higher education settings in Mississippi, and they’re the ones that can make the best decision for all of Mississippi,” Polk said. 

Though Polk says his bill will save taxpayer dollars, he does not envision it reducing the annual funding IHL receives. He referred to an IHL handout showing the appropriations each school received last year. 

If IHL closed the three schools with the smallest enrollments — Delta State, Valley State and MUW — the state could save $85 million, Polk said, money he sees as better off distributed among the remaining five. 

“If they didn’t choose the three I just mentioned, the savings to the state would be better,” Polk said. 

What would happen to the towns around these smaller colleges, like Itta Bena, Cleveland and Columbus? Polk said that’s not why the state universities exist. 

But he noted his bill would not permit the closed campuses to become branches of the remaining five. The buildings would have to be sold or repurposed, he said. 

“Our universities have a mission,” Polk said. “We forget sometimes their mission is to educate in a higher form than K-12. It is not economic development.” 

If the University of Southern Mississippi closed, Polk said he would say he’s sorry, “but that’s what IHL thinks is best for the state of Mississippi.”

The post Lawmaker behind bill to close three universities says its has ‘slim’ chance to pass appeared first on Mississippi Today.

If Mississippians are allowed to vote to enact a new initiative process to allow citizens to bypass the Legislature and place issues on the ballot, it is likely to be much more restrictive than the process that was deemed invalid in 2021 by the state Supreme Court.

On Wednesday, the Senate Accountability, Efficiency, Transparency Committee passed a proposal to restore voters’ initiative rights. But the Committee proposal is significantly more restrictive than the one first enacted in the early 1990s and used until the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional. The Senate AET proposal would require double the number of voters’ signatures to put something on the ballot, and limit the issues that voters can take up.

The AET Committee measure most likely will be taken up in the coming weeks by the full Senate.

Earlier this session the House passed a proposal, now pending in the Senate, that also is more restrictive than the old process. If the Legislature does pass a proposal to finally renew the initiative, it still must be approved by the voters before it will be valid. But voters will have to accept or reject what the Legislature offers. They cannot change it.

Senate AET Chairman David Parker, R-Southaven, said any procedure allowing citizens to bypass the Legislature and change the state’s laws should be “onerous” and safeguards should be taken to limit out-of-state influence on the process.

Sen. David Blount, D-Jackson, pointed out that under the old process a limited number of initiatives garnered the necessary signatures needed to make the ballot. Blount said the fear that the process would be overly influenced by out-of-state interests “is a theory, but we have 30 years of evidence to show what the people of Mississippi did with the initiative process they used to have. And they voted for good things and voted against bad things.” Only three initiatives were approved by votes during those 30 years.

Both the House and Senate proposals prohibit the initiative process from being used to change the state’s near total ban on abortions. In other states, voters have rejected placing restrictions on abortions. Both House and Senate leaders say they do not want out-of-state interests influencing Mississippi’s abortion laws.

The Senate proposal passed out of committee Tuesday would require the signatures equal to 10% of the registered voters from the last presidential election – more than 200,000 signatures of registered voters – to place an issue on the ballot. The House plan would require the signatures of about 166,000. The proposal ruled invalid by the Supreme Court because of a technicality would have required about 100,000 signatures of registered voters.

Parker said the higher signature threshold is needed because technology has made it much easier to gather signatures than it was in the early 1990s.

The Senate bill would not remove the often-criticized provision in the old initiative process that allowed the Legislature to place a competing alternative to the citizen-sponsored initiative on the ballot, causing confusion among voters.

The Senate bill would require sponsors of an initiative to take money from another area of state government if their proposal cost money, Blount said. He said the process would be unworkable for a number of issues, such as expanding Medicaid. For instance, the Legislature is considering a proposal to require medical providers to pay for a portion of the cost of expanding Medicaid. Citizens could not offer such a proposal under the House and Senate initiative plans, Blount said.

In addition, the Senate proposal would require 60% of voters to approve an initiative in order for it to pass. Of the 26 states with initiatives, none have as high of voter threshold to change all general laws.

The post Voter initiative would be hard to use under bills moving in Legislature appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The Senate Elections Committee on Tuesday advanced legislation to eliminate the five days local elections workers have to count mail-in absentee ballots. 

The majority-Republican committee passed Senate Bill 2579 with little debate, sending it to the full Senate. 

“In my opinion, when we have votes that are being counted after Election Day like this, whether there’s any bad intent or not, it’s not received by the public well,” Senate Elections Committee Chairman Jeremy England, author of the bill, said.

To address concerns with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the GOP-dominated Legislature passed a law to allow local election workers to count mailed absentee ballots for up to five days after the election date, but only if the ballots were postmarked by the election date. Republican Gov. Tate Reeves signed the bill into law. 

The legislation comes at a time when the Republican National Committee, the Mississippi GOP and the Libertarian Party of Mississippi have filed federal litigation against Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson and several local elections officials to prevent the five-day timeframe from being used in federal elections.

A veterans advocacy group and a disability rights organization are currently attempting to intervene in the litigation to argue the lawsuit should be dismissed. U.S. District Judge Louis Guirola Jr. has not issued any substantive rulings on the suit.  

England, R-Vancleave, told Mississippi Today that the pending federal litigation did not have any influence over his decision to advance the legislation. 

“It’s time to move this back to the way we had it before COVID,” England said. 

The second-term lawmaker also said he plans to pass legislation out of the Senate committee that creates in-person absentee voting and reforms the state’s campaign finance laws.

The post Lawmakers move bill to eliminate 5-day period to count mailed ballots appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The MHSAA and MAIS State Tournaments are in the Jackson metro area this week and the Crooked Letter Cleveland boys are all over it. Every game is an emotion-packed passion play in which dreams are both realized and dashed. And that’s not all. This week’s discussion includes college basketball, college baseball, and the amazing story of Jackson Prep baseball phenom Konnor Griffin, who could be a multi-millionaire soon after he turns 18.

Stream all episodes here.

The post Podcast: Balls are bouncing all over town. appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The post Marshall Ramsey: A New Attack appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Feb. 28, 2003

A U.S. District Court jury in Jackson, Mississippi, convicted Ernest Avants of murder — the first federal murder charges connected to the pursuit of unpunished killings from the civil rights era. 

Avants received a life sentence for joining other Klansmen in killing an African-American handyman, Ben Chester White, near Natchez, Mississippi. The Klansmen had hoped to lure Martin Luther King Jr., who was taking part in a march in Mississippi, to the area by killing White. The plot failed. 

White is among the 40 martyrs listed on the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama.

The post On this day in 2003 appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The state’s Republican-led House is expected to vote on Mississippi Medicaid expansion as soon as Wednesday after a committee unanimously approved it Tuesday.

House Bill 1725, authored by Republican House Speaker Jason White and Medicaid Chairwoman Missy McGee, R-Hattiesburg, has bipartisan support in the House, even as the state’s Republican governor continues to oppose the policy.

The morning after Gov. Tate Reeves didn’t mention health care or Medicaid expansion once during his State of the State address, he posted on Twitter “Count me amongst those ‘extreme MAGA Republicans’ who think Government should not run health care.”

During Tuesday’s meeting, McGee explained to committee members that Mississippi during the first two years of expansion would receive an extra $600 million in federal money for Medicaid. She said that amount would cover the state’s share of expansion for four years. After that, under the House plan, hospitals and managed care organizations would pay more taxes to cover the state’s 10% match, with federal funds covering 90% of expansion costs.

“You could almost look at it like the federal government is giving us a free pilot program, to run for four years,” McGee said during the committee meeting. McGee said hospitals and MCOs would start paying the increased tax in the first year and the state could bank that money, perhaps in a health fund.

The bill, which expands Medicaid eligibility to adults without dependents between the ages of 19 and 65, has a built-in repealer, meaning it would automatically end after four years if lawmakers chose not to renew it.

Currently, low-income, adult Mississippians fall into the “coverage gap,” which experts believe is a leading cause of Mississippi’s poor public health metrics – such as leading the nation in preventable deaths, infant and maternal mortality, and lowest life expectancy. Mississippi remains one of only 10 states not to expand Medicaid. Expansion would provide health care to about 200,000 to 250,000 Mississippians, experts said.

The bill would expand Medicaid income eligibility to 138% of the federal poverty level. For a family of four, that would be an annual household income up to about $43,000.

The House bill has some strict limitations. It would not cover those who are offered health insurance from their employer — even if they couldn’t afford the sometimes very expensive deductibles — and would make those who drop coverage even from the Affordable Care Act exchange wait 12 months before being eligible.

“If it doesn’t work out, if we decide that our health outcomes have not improved, if it costs too much for the state, if for any reason we do not believe that it is doing the things that we want it to do, the program will simply repeal in 2029,” McGee said.

The bill passed committee the day after it was assigned. But that’s after 10 years of debate and GOP leaders in the poorest, unhealthiest of states eschewing “Obamacare” Medicaid expansion. Reeves and his Republican predecessor, Phil Bryant, likened the state-federal health coverage to welfare and voiced opposition to taking more federal tax dollars from it, even as Mississippi remains one of the most federal funding reliant states in the nation.

Meanwhile, lawmakers in the Republican-led Senate are moving at their own pace.

McGee and Blackwell say the House and Senate will be working together, but they haven’t met yet. Their expansion bills are quite different – and coming to an agreement would involve heavy concessions from one or both sides. 

“They can rush it all they want on their side,” Medicaid Chairman Kevin Blackwell, R-Southaven, said Tuesday. “We’ve got our own pace. So they can pass it today and send it over tomorrow. It’s going to sit in my committee until we get ours in.”

While both bills are expected to have a work requirement, the House bill’s work requirement is only a “best-case scenario.” The bill has a “Section 2” provision that states that if the waiver necessary for federal Medicaid authorities to allow a Mississippi work requirement is not granted by Sept. 30, 2024, Medicaid would still be fully expanded to people up to 138% of the federal poverty level. 

But the Senate bill, which as of right now is only a skeletal bill bringing forth Medicaid code sections to start, would according to Blackwell be entirely contingent on the federal government approving a waiver for a work requirement.

During the Biden administration, Centers for Medicaid Services has rescinded work requirement waivers previously granted under the Trump administration, and has not approved new ones. It is unlikely the administration would grant Mississippi’s 1115 waiver – which Blackwell says is a must for him.

“If no work requirements, no expansion,” Blackwell said about the bill he calls “expansion light.”

McGee said she hopes the House doesn’t back down on its provision to expand Medicaid even if the Biden administration doesn’t grant the waiver. 

“I think that Section 2 provides an opportunity for us to still get this across the finish line if for some reason CMS does not approve the work requirement,” McGee said. “I think that we still want to help working Mississippians find a way to have health insurance. I would really hope we would leave Section 2 in the bill as a backstop in case we cannot get the waiver done, we still have an opportunity to provide the program and not delay another year in making this happen.”

The Senate Medicaid Committee is still working on language and Blackwell said it “will have something next week,” after which he said Senate leaders will sit down with the House and “see where the differences lie.”

Blackwell, who said he didn’t necessarily expect to author an expansion bill this session, is still adamantly opposed to full Medicaid expansion — which he calls “socialized medicine” and “welfare” — without work requirements and a private insurance option.

Republican Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, who oversees the Senate, said he would also like to see a work requirement in any expansion bill, as well as a premiums payment plan.

“When I get a plan that covers working people,” Hosemann said, “I would like for them to make some contribution to their health care,” he said. “I think that’s important, I think that’s self dignity, you become part of the system when you’re paying some part of it.”

Blackwell has said he would not author a bill that allowed expansion without a work requirement and a premiums plan. At that point, he says, expansion becomes “palatable” — especially when thinking about the labor force participation rate.

“It’s becoming a bigger need when you take a look at the hospital situation which was really highlighted during COVID,” Blackwell said. “With what we’re doing from an economic development standpoint, bringing in these large development projects, we need to have a healthy workforce. So from that standpoint, I can tolerate it.”

Blackwell said he believes that with a work requirement, expansion would have the support it needs in the Senate to be veto-proof. That is, the Senate could muster a two-thirds vote to override a Reeves veto.

House Democratic Leader Robert Johnson III, said Tuesday morning at a press conference that Democrats are not in favor of a work requirement, as it would delay things and likely not be approved by federal authorities. But Johnson said House Democrats would accept a work requirement in a bill if it was the only way Medicaid expansion could pass. That was evident Tuesday as no Democrats offered amendments in committee and all voted to move the bill forward.

“The vast majority of people are already working or are not able to do so,” Johnson said. “Far fewer people just choose not to work than our Republican colleagues would have you believe.”

Johnson has also authored House Bill 38, which would create a commission to run Medicaid and take it out from under the governor. He said he knows it’s not likely to pass.

“People’s health care should not be politicized,” Johnson said. “If we had a commission running it 10 years ago, we would already have expansion … I hope it at least starts a conversation about taking the politics out of health care.”

The post Mississippi Medicaid expansion bill moves forward in GOP-led House over governor’s opposition appeared first on Mississippi Today.

A proposal to close most of Mississippi’s oldest and most infamous prison faced its first hurdle Tuesday afternoon in a state Senate committee where a majority of members decided to hold off voting on the bill until they receive better cost estimates. 

The Senate Corrections Committee discussed Senate Bill 2353, which proposes a four-year process to phase down the use of the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman by moving incarcerated people, staff and programs to other prisons in the state. 

Committee chair and bill author Juan Barnett said a phasedown would be a better use of taxpayer money and a chance to reimagine the state’s approach to incarceration. 

“Parchman prison, a name that resonates with both notoriety and despair, has stood for decades as a symbol of systematic failures within our criminal justice system,” said Barnett, a Democrat from Heidelberg, before discussion began. 

“We cannot allow a facility to operate under conditions that are antithetical to the principles of fairness.”

Years of neglect and funding have led to deteriorating infrastructure and decrepit conditions at Parchman and fed into the violence and deaths that erupted at Unit 29 and at other state prison facilities, a 2020 investigation by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting and ProPublica found. 

The U.S. Department of Justice opened a civil rights investigation into Parchman and three other prisons several months later, and by 2022, the DOJ released a report detailing conditions that violate the Constitution.

Ted Booth, executive director of the Legislature’s Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review Committee, said the bill is in line with PEER’s recommendation to reduce operations at Parchman, which would help maintain a secure environment. 

Barnett gave a rough estimate of about $100 million over four years to phase down Parchman. In response to committee member questions, he said that cost wouldn’t include spending on the facilities that would remain on site. 

A major part of the phase down bill would involve the state purchasing the Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility to house Parchman’s inmates. The private is located less than 10 miles away in Tutwiler and is run by CoreCivic. 

Through that purchase, Barnett said the staff at Parchman would be able to remain state employees with benefits, which would help keep jobs in the Delta. Moving Parchman staff over to Tallahatchie Correctional could also help close vacancies at both prisons and help reach full staffing, he said. 

Sen. Joey Fillingnane, R-Sumrall, asked whether there is any kind of binding memorandum of understanding or contract with the owner of Tallahatchie Correctional. Barnett said there is not, and added that the Appropriations Committee would not pass the bill if the financial situation is not figured out. 

“We’re just supposed to trust that it’s all going to work out in a sweet by-and-by and send it on down to Appropriations and hope that they take care of all of our miscues?” Fillingane asked. 

Instead of spending $100 million to phase down Parchman, that money could be used to update the building, Fillingane said, but Barnett pointed to a similar situation going on in Alabama, which is on the hook for $1 billion to build a new prison because the DOJ found its current ones are unconstitutional.

Fillingane also asked about the conditions at Tallahatchie Correctional, which has had similar problems with violence like Parchman. He wanted to know whether action has been taken to address those problems, to which Barnett replied yes. 

After an hour of discussion, a majority of the committee voted to lay the bill on the table with the ability for Barnett to bring it up at a later time. He said he will gather more financial information for the committee to review. 

If it passes the Corrections Committee, SB 2353 will also need approval from the Senate’s Appropriations Committee before the entire Senate chamber could vote on it. 

The post Senate bill to close most of Parchman hits snag over cost, logistics appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Former Gov. Phil Bryant’s intent to accept stock in a pharmaceutical company that had received hundreds of thousands of federal funds from the welfare agency he controlled was a topic of conversation at his final Christmas party at the Governor’s Mansion, a recent court filing alleges.

Nancy New, the nonprofit operator pegged as a ringleader of the ever-unfolding Mississippi welfare scandal, has again alleged through new details in a court filing that Bryant was behind some of the spending that officials have called the largest public embezzlement scheme in state history.

Mississippi Department of Human Services’ current civil complaint — the state government’s legal effort to recoup misspent welfare funds — accuses New of meeting with Bryant’s appointed welfare director at former NFL quarterback Brett Favre’s house in early 2019 to discuss a “substantial stock investment” in the pharmaceutical startup. 

New began funneling grant funds through her nonprofit Mississippi Community Education Center to the drug company, called Prevacus, in the following weeks. State prosecutors originally accused New in 2020 following a state auditor’s investigation of embezzling welfare money in order to make personal investments in Prevacus. In 2022, she instead pleaded guilty in state court to three counts of wire fraud related to the payments, since Prevacus was “known to be ineligible to receive such public grant funds.”

But in her Monday filing, New states that “the only ‘substantial stock investment in Prevacus’ that I am aware of is the one Governor Bryant told me about during a Christmas party at the Mansion in 2019.” 

Around the time of the party, Prevacus founder Jake Vanlandingham had been talking to the governor about “bring(ing) you onboard with ownership,” according to texts Mississippi Today first published in a 2022 investigation “The Backchannel.”

“The Governor had been funding Prevacus through MDHS and MCEC for about a year,” New’s latest filing states, “so it was not unusual for Brett, or Jake, or Prevacus to come up in conversations with the Governor. At the Christmas party, Jake’s name came up. Governor Bryant got excited and told me that Jake had offered him ‘half the company,’ which I understood to mean a substantial amount of stock, but the Governor said he was going to have to wait until he was out of office to accept.”

Bryant’s alleged involvement in the scandal is important to New’s defense, which relies in part on the fact that as a contractor of the agency, her nonprofit was acting in accordance with the state’s directives.

Vanlandingham first reached out to New in late 2018 shortly after meeting with Bryant about locating a drug manufacturing operation in the state. By this point, New’s nonprofit Mississippi Community Education Center had been receiving tens of millions of federal grant funds from Mississippi Department of Human Services, an agency under the purview of the governor’s office.

New had already used some of the funds starting in 2017 to fund the construction of a volleyball stadium at University of Southern Mississippi — another project promoted by Favre and directed by Bryant, according to New. When New and Favre initially hit a snag pushing the needed funding to the volleyball stadium, for example, “Governor Bryant called me and said he liked the volleyball project and wanted me to provide the additional funds that Brett needed,” New’s filing this week reads.

Bryant has denied directing welfare spending on either project or agreeing to accept stock in the drug company. Citing a gag order in the state’s civil case, Bryant’s attorney declined to comment to Mississippi Today for this story. The former governor is not facing civil or criminal charges.

On the call in late 2018, Vanlandingham told New that “he, Brett Favre and Governor Bryant were working together to fund a concussion drug company called Prevacus. Jake knew that Governor Bryant, (then-MDHS director) John Davis and I had funded the volleyball facility/wellness center at USM through MDHS and MCEC,” the filing reads.

Prevacus was looking for $750,000 to complete the first phase of drug trials, New said, plus $1 million more down the road. New said she agreed to relay the message to Davis, Bryant’s appointed welfare director. New alleged that Davis then spoke to Bryant and, after the conversation, agreed to meet with Vanlandingham.

Davis’ calendar entry for the meeting, first obtained by Mississippi Today in 2020, recorded that, “This meeting was requested by Brett Favre and the Governor to discuss the Educational Research Program that addresses brain injury caused by concussions. They also want to discuss the new facility at USM.”

New, Davis and his close associate, former WWE wrestler Ted “Teddy” DiBiase Jr., traveled to Favre’s home outside of Hattiesburg on a stormy day in early January of 2019.

“I understood the purpose of the meeting was for John to hear about Prevacus, so he could decide whether MDHS should provide funding. I later learned the decision to fund Prevacus through MDHS had already been made,” New’s latest filing states. “After the meeting, I asked John why he had committed so much funding so quickly. John said he had spoken with Governor Bryant and the Governor wanted Prevacus funded. John said the Governor was ‘all about this happening.’”

New’s filing also alleges Bryant instructed Davis to fund the volleyball stadium project. The federal government prohibits states from using welfare funds on brick-and-mortar, so the welfare agency began creating expensive subleases that they said would allow them to conduct programming at various properties, but more importantly, would allow for them to conduct high-dollar renovations or builds. The volleyball project was not the first time this idea was raised.

“Governor and Mrs. Bryant wanted a ‘palliative care’ center built in Jackson, Mississippi, so MDHS created a lease structure to use grant funds to pay for construction,” New’s filing reads.

Forensic auditors found that this lease was never executed, but it appears the lease arrangement was utilized later for the USM facility.

Davis has not commented publicly about the circumstances surrounding Prevacus and the volleyball stadium projects. While Davis pleaded guilty in 2022 to two federal charges and 18 state counts of fraud or conspiracy related to the scandal, each count pertained to payments made to benefit former professional wrestlers Teddy DiBiase and his younger brother Brett DiBiase — not regarding the Prevacus or volleyball projects. Davis has not been sentenced. 

Following the January 2019 meeting, Vanlandingham thanked Bryant and said that he was excited to be working with the agency and nonprofit directors. Once New began sending payments to Prevacus, Favre briefed Bryant, texting the governor, “We couldn’t be more happy about the funding from the State of MS.”

Bryant continued to consult with Vanlandingham and Favre about advancing Prevacus’ development through 2019 and after leaving office, at which point he promised to “get on it hard.”

New’s account that Bryant opted to wait until he left office to accept a company package in Prevacus is consistent with his own text messages. After Vanlandingham offered to bring Bryant on with ownership in early December of 2019, Bryant responded, “Cannot till January 15th,” Bryant wrote, referring to his first day out of office. 

“But would love to talk then,” Bryant added. “This is the type of thing I love to be a part of. Something that save lives…”

On Jan. 16, 2020, Vanlandingham texted Bryant, “Now that you’re unemployed I’d like to give you a company package for all your help,” to which Bryant responded, “Sounds good.”

Bryant told Mississippi Today in an April 2022 interview that he ended his business relationship with Prevacus on his own accord before the initial arrests. But his texts show he kept discussing when and where to meet with Vanlandingham all the way up until the day before the arrests and only discontinued the conversations after reading Prevacus’ name in the 2020 indictments. 

Since her arrest in 2020, New has mostly refrained from commenting publicly on the case or offering her side of the story, with the exception of material that appears in documents gathered through discovery. The personal accounts in New’s latest filing may reflect what she is prepared to offer in upcoming depositions or trials — such as the exchanges she witnessed that may not appear in written communication.

New has not been sentenced and is a cooperating witness in the ongoing federal criminal investigation. 

The post Former Gov. Phil Bryant boasted of Prevacus stock offer at Christmas party, court filing alleges appeared first on Mississippi Today.