The scheduled execution of death row inmate Thomas Edwin Loden Jr. will be allowed to proceed, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.
U.S. District Court Judge Henry Wingate denied a stay for Loden as part of a lawsuit challenging Missisisppi’s lethal injection protocol. Loden’s execution is set for Dec. 14 at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman.
“Loden contends that since he is a plaintiff in this underlying lawsuit challenging Mississippi’s lethal injection mode of execution, the same procedure Mississippi intends to use to put him to death, he should not be executed before a decision on the constitutionality is rendered,” Wingate wrote.
“Loden, however, cannot convincingly argue that his involvement in this 1983 lawsuit has somehow expanded his rights and provided him a shield against execution,” he wrote, adding that granting a stay would likely delay Loden’s execution for years.
Wingate ruled in a civil lawsuit brought by death row inmates Richard Jordan and Ricky Chase against Mississippi Department of Corrections officials that Loden and others have joined.
In his order, Wingate scheduled a hearing for Jan. 19, 2023, about whether to issue an indefinite stay of execution for the plaintiffs and other intervenors in the case.
Stacy Ferraro, one of Loden’s attorneys, argued against the state’s October request to set Loden’s execution by citing the pending lawsuit and saying Loden had not yet exhausted his appeals, according to court documents.
Loden, 58, has been a death row inmate for over 20 years. In 2000, the military recruiter kidnapped, raped and killed 16-year-old Leesa Marie Gray in Dorsey in Itawamba County.
The lawsuit before Wingate argues that the state’s three-drug cocktail for lethal injection is cruel and unusual punishment because the compounded or mixed drugs the state uses could be “counterfeit, expired, contaminated and/or sub-potent” and result in people being conscious during the execution, according to court documents.
Jim Craig of the MacArthur Center for Justice, who represents the plaintiffs Jordan and Chase, filed a temporary restraining order in October asking Wingate to withdraw the motion to set an execution date for Loden and not to execute him until the lawsuit is resolved.
The Attorney General’s Office has argued that a case challenging the execution process doesn’t prevent Loden’s execution from proceeding because it is not challenging his death sentence, just the method of execution, according to court documents.
In 2015, Wingate issued a preliminary injunction blocking the state from executing anyone using the three-drug combination, saying in a written order that the inmates were likely to successfully argue that “Mississippi’s failure to use a drug which qualifies as an ‘ultra short-acting barbiturate or other similar drug’ as required” by state law violates both that law and the U.S. Constitution’s due process guarantees. But the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overruled that decision less than a year later.
The court wrote that the federal court can’t force state officials to follow state law, and the plaintiffs weren’t able to show their due process rights were violated. This sent the case back to the district court.
The Mississippi Department of Corrections plans to put Loden to death by lethal injection.
Under a law that went into effect in July, prison officials can choose from four execution methods: lethal injection, electrocution, lethal gas and firing squad. Before Wingate’s ruling,department spokesman Leo Honeycutt confirmed lethal injection was the method Corrections Commissioner Burl Cain and two deputy commissioners selected.
In his order, Wingate mentioned the state could select another execution method, but that would “surely be attacked in a new lawsuit.”
That law updated a 2017 version that said if lethal injection was not possible due to a legal challenge or unavailability of drugs, an incarcerated person could be put to death by gas chamber. If that option wasn’t available, electrocution was the next available method followed by firing squad.
Lethal injection remains the state’s preferred form of execution, according to the legislation.
Republican Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann and other GOP Senate leaders want to use a huge revenue surplus to give Mississippi taxpayers one-time rebate checks.
Republicans Gov. Tate Reeves and House Speaker Philip Gunn still want to phase out the personal income tax, as a follow-on to the massive income tax cuts passed last year, which are still being implemented.
Each side says it wants to give back to taxpayers and its approach is the conservative, prudent thing to do. The issue is likely to bring heated internecine Republican debate in the new year, as it did last legislative session.
“Last year, we passed the largest tax cut in Mississippi history,” Hosemann said. “Phase-in for this $525 million cut begins this year and will result in a 4% flat income tax by 2026. This year, the Senate will propose a tax rebate. Both efforts will put significant tax dollars back into taxpayers’ pockets at a time when citizens are dealing with crippling inflation and an uncertain economy.”
But Gunn said, “No. We are not in favor of a tax rebate. We want permanent, long-term tax relief … My position has always been for elimination, or at the very minimum more tax elimination … (A rebate) is just a one-time payment.”
Reeves recently vowed to push for income tax elimination as long as he is governor, and hasn’t addressed the rebate proposal.
The state is entering its annual legislative session and budget setting with about $3.9 billion in unencumbered money, of which about $1 billion is recurring tax revenue. For scale, the state in fiscal 2022 collected $2.5 billion in personal income taxes. No percentages or amounts of potential rebate checks have been publicly discussed, but lawmakers could cut taxpayers some hefty checks.
Hosemann and Senate leaders say the national and state economies are in turbulent, inflationary times with recession possible, and that much of the state surplus is from unprecedented federal spending that isn’t likely to continue or recur. They warn that fully eliminating the income tax in such uncertain economic times is foolhardy. Many state business leaders, including the state’s chamber of commerce, shared this trepidation last legislative session.
Gunn and Reeves say Mississippi’s economy is on a roll that will continue, and that eliminating the personal income tax would help the state compete for economic development. Gunn points to nine states with no income tax, including Florida, Tennessee and Texas, as having thriving economies and growing population.
But no state has ever phased out an individual income tax. Alaska, the only state to eliminate an existing income tax, did so in one fell swoop. The states without income taxes typically have other taxes or excises on which to depend, such as oil in Alaska and Texas and tourism in Florida. Tennessee’s sales and excise taxes are more than 30% above the national average, and 7th highest in the country relative to personal income.
For Mississippi, the shift would be seismic: Individual income taxes generate about a third of the state’s tax revenue. Opponents of major cuts or elimination say the state has too many long-neglected needs in health care, education and infrastructure to upend the state’s tax structure, and it should be spending any windfall to address these.
Senate Appropriations Chairman Briggs Hopson, R-Vicksburg, said he will introduce a tax rebate bill in the 2023 session, as he did last session. Hopson and Senate Finance Chairman Josh Harkins, R-Flowood, said lawmakers need to monitor the economy and huge tax cuts already being implemented before making further sea changes to state tax structure.
“The ultimate objective for those of us who are conservatives is to ensure we put as much money back in people’s pockets as possible,” Hopson said. “However, there are certain services, certain levels of service citizens expect from government … We are looking at some short-term measures to put money back into taxpayers’ pockets to help them with the high cost of goods and inflation … We really haven’t even implemented the last cuts we passed. A tax rebate is more prudent.”
Harkins said major tax policy changes should be made cautiously and over time, but a rebate can be based on a “snapshot,” such as the current budget surplus.
But House Ways and Means Chairman Trey Lamar, R-Senatobia, said, “There’s no question which one is preferable between a multi-year, permanent tax cut versus a one-time slush fund payment. Ultimately, (elimination of the income tax) is better for the economy and ultimately better for working Mississippians. It’s really not even debatable which is better for hard-working Mississippians.”
The 2023 session comes in an election year. Typically, lawmakers try to avoid tackling major, contentious issues or policy during election-year sessions. It appears the tax elimination-rebate debate will be on tap, but some lawmakers and legislative leaders might not be as eager for the wrangling.
House Speaker Pro Tem Jason White, R-West, considered a likely successor for the speakership in 2024 with Gunn’s planned departure, said the state has many needs and demands for the “pile of money” collecting in state coffers. He noted the state faces federal intervention if improvements aren’t made in prisons, with state foster care and mental health and that hospitals across the state are struggling to stay afloat.
“We have a chance to fix some of that,” White said. “I’m not saying we’re not wanting to put more money in taxpayers’ pockets … The House has passed two bills to do that, and we have a four-year plan that has started a phase out of the income tax … We have got some things we should try to fix while we’ve got a surplus before we ask our Senate colleagues to take that next step.”
Deion Sanders has left the building, the Mississippi High School Football Championships are in the books and the holiday bowl schedule is set. The Cleveland boys recap the wild ride that was championship weekend and take a look at where Mississippi’s college teams are headed for bowl season.
Mississippi State Auditor Shad White announced his office’s annual report on the state’s federal spending Tuesday, with a special focus on the Mississippi Department of Education’s bidding process to secure computers for school children.
White said the department mishandled choosing a vendor, ultimately giving special treatment to the winning company. That critique, along with other missteps the report details, is something MDE has denied in a letter to the auditor’s office.
White called the 388-page report the most “important report in the state of Mississippi” on whether “federal money actually helped people.”
“From a small county to a big state agency, folks around the state need to know we’re watching these processes,” White said during a Tuesday phone call with reporters.
The annual audit spanned the largest amount of federal funds the office has ever examined in a fiscal year since the 2008 financial crisis. It covers the fiscal year ending June 30, 2021, including the $1.25 billion of Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act money allocated by the Legislature.
In 2020, the Legislature allocated $150 million of COVID relief money to purchase computers for remote learning at the beginning of the pandemic. The Department of Education was responsible for managing this process; school districts were required to contribute 20% of their own federal money for their computers, and the remaining 80% would be covered by the federal funds disbursed by the Legislature. The law also gave MDE the ability to select a vendor and make a bulk purchase for participating districts across the state.
The report says the Department of Education let the winning vendor — an Illinois company called CDW — have influence over the criteria for proposals before they were released, and gave the company multiple weeks advance notice of what the criteria would be.
“All vendors selected by MDE were allowed to provide input on the specifications,” MDE wrote in its response letter to the auditor’s office. “The scheduling of these meeting dates … were not solely driven by MDE but were set based on vendor availability. All meetings were scheduled as quickly and as often as practicable under the circumstances.”
MDE dubbed the plan Mississippi Connects. White chastised the agency in 2020 because he said the department required schools to purchase computers from a preferred vendor list to receive the 80/20 match, something MDE also disputed.
In his latest report, White also pointed out that CDW scored better on one section despite being more expensive than other bids. MDE said in its response letter, which was dated in October of this year, the company received more points because of CDW’s promise to deliver the computers by a Nov. 20, 2020 deadline.
White, however, says that all vendors had committed to delivering the devices by the deadline in their cost estimates.
The report also pointed out the Department of Education failed to properly monitor federal funds given to nonprofits that provides meals to hungry children and adults to ensure the money was, in fact, fulfilling that purpose. In their October letter, MDE also disputed this claim.
Separately, the report highlighted $453 million that was improperly administered through unemployment, and up to $69 million that may have gone to fraudulent Medicaid recipients.
The federal government will examine the state’s report — as it does every state’s annual audit report — to determine if any clawbacks for misspent funds are necessary.
Legislative leaders approved a starting budget proposal for the quickly approaching 2023 session that leaves the state with an unprecedented $3.9 billion in unencumbered money.
House Speaker Philip Gunn, who presides over the Legislative Budget Committee that approved the budget recommendation Tuesday, said a little more than $1 billion of the reserve funds are recurring. In other words, the funds will be available yearly for legislators to spend.
The overflowing state coffers are already spawning debate among legislative leaders about providing taxpayers with rebate checks or phasing out the personal income tax.
Overall, the state budget recommendation approved for the upcoming fiscal year, beginning July 1, is for $7 billion in state support funds or $2.04 billion less than what was appropriated for the current fiscal year.
The current budget includes one-time federal COVID-19 relief funds and other reserves. Most likely, the Legislature during the 2023 session will appropriate additional reserve funds for various building projects and for other primarily one-time expenses, significantly increasing the budget total for the upcoming fiscal year. The budget approved Tuesday by the 14-member Budget Committee, which includes both Gunn and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, is viewed as a starting point for the 174 members of the Legislature to use in developing a budget for the next fiscal year.
Despite the unprecedented revenue growth, though, legislative leaders continue to oppose expanding Medicaid, as 39 other states have done, to provide health care coverage for primarily the working poor. Or, on a lesser scale, to provide Medicaid coverage for mothers of newborns for one year instead of 60 days.
When asked about the state’s poor health outcomes, Gunn said, legislators are looking for solutions, but said, “I think we have to have some discussions about what role the government plays in that.”
Gunn reiterated his opposition to expanding Medicaid and said he would not consider proposals to extend postpartum care from 60 days to a year until the Division of Medicaid endorsed the plan. Medicaid Executive Director Drew Snyder has said the expansion of postpartum care would cost the state $7 million per year, but has refused to take a position on it.
The Senate voted last year to extend postpartum coverage, but it died in the House.
“I don’t see the advantage of doing the postpartum thing,” Gunn said.
The speaker did say he supported spending up to $70 million of the about $300 million the state has left in federal COVID-19 relief funds to help shore up the state’s rural hospitals that have been struggling financially with many in danger of closing.
Gunn said he doesn’t foresee lawmakers pumping more money into the Mississippi Adequate Education Program – the public school funding formula – beyond the money from the teacher pay raise passed last year that will transfer into MAEP. Gunn is critical of the MAEP formula as “unattainable,” and has in the past advocated scrapping it.
“Ask the teachers out there whether they would rather have $250 million in teacher pay raises, or $250 million just go into the formula,” Gunn said. “I think I know which they would rather see.”
The formula was more than $300 million short of full funding last year.
Gunn credited the large reserve to “conservative” budgeting.
“We have rejected the push to grow government over the last many years,” Gunn said.
Most states, whether conservative or liberal, are experiencing strong revenue growth thanks in large part to federal COVID-19 relief funds pumped into states. In addition, high inflation and wage growth also have contributed to increased tax collections.
Gunn said he continues to advocate for the complete elimination of the state income tax. Hosemann and many in the Senate have advocated for a large one-time rebate to taxpayers.
Gov. Tate Reeves, who released his budget proposal in November, also is advocating for the elimination of the income tax.
The proposal adopted Tuesday would fill the state’s “Rainy Day Fund” with $579 million.
Some other highlights of the proposal include:
Increased spending on:
State employee health insurance: $32 million.
Child Protection Services, foster care and adoption: $12.3 million.
Department of Public Safety, salary increases and forensics lab: $3 million.
Department of Revenue, full funding of homestead exemption: $1.4 million.
The budget proposal includes about $16.5 million in spending cuts, including deleting more than 2,000 vacant state government positions, reducing travel and contractual services, spending down agency cash balances and eliminating one-time expenditures.
The furniture company regularly got sums every few years — ranging from $200,000 to $1.3 million — in exchange for the promise to create jobs.
It was the largest employer in Monroe County. Now, its owner is missing and its former employees are filing lawsuits and hunting for new jobs.
“It’s a disgrace is what it is,” Jackson-based attorney Phil Hearn told Mississippi Today. Hearn is leading a class-action lawsuit on behalf of hundreds of workers.
United was an anchor of the furniture manufacturing hub of Northeast Mississippi — among the dozens of companies benefitting from decades of tax breaks to do business in-state. The companys buildings in Lee County were free from local and state property taxes, another incentive perk. It also likely saved massive amounts of money on its payroll taxes as part of a job creation rebate program and tax credits from a special program for upholstery companies.
When then-Gov. Phil Bryant announced that United would get more than $1.3 million to support an expansion in 2013, he called the manufacturer “a valued business partner for the State of Mississippi.”
In 2015, the company got $500,000 more with similar fanfare. Then, $200,000 the next year and another promise of 100 new jobs. Both the most recent grants were awarded through the state’s “ACE” program – commonly referred to as “deal closing funds” when competition is fierce.
Every celebrated announcement touted jobs, partnerships and keeping Mississippians at work in the furniture industry.
But with one email to 2,700 employees overnight a few days before Thanksgiving, that long-standing partnership shattered. The company wasn’t just closing – it was already closed. No federally-mandated warning to employees that layoffs were coming. No announcement of a sale. No filing for bankruptcy.
Just closed.
Hearn said in his three decades as an attorney handling employee rights cases, he’s never seen anything like this: a total disregard for labor laws, no planning, and limited information available to workers.
“I’ve been with the company through several owners and names,” line worker Jeff Jones told the Daily Journal. “We’ve always bounced back. In the email they made it perfectly clear there’s no bouncing back from this.”
Jones worked for United Furniture for more than 30 years.
Hearn said the state’s history of supporting the company gave employees a sense of security that made the sudden collapse even more shocking.
“It can be difficult to evaluate some of these incentive programs for various reasons,” said State Economist Corey Miller. “A number of companies that get them get more than one incentive, and it’s difficult to untangle the impact of each one.”
Miller said in the case of United, the company’s sudden fall doesn’t mean the millions the state put up to support the company were for nothing.
“I don’t think they necessarily weren’t worth doing,” Miller said. “I haven’t evaluated the whole situation, but it’s possible because they were around for a while, people had jobs, that the state got some return on investment.”
United Furniture was created after a merger between three companies in 2000: Comfort Furniture, Parkhill Furniture and United Chair. Comfort Furniture, the leading of the three, was founded in Mississippi in 1983.
Over the 2010s, the company regularly received state-funded support in grants through the Mississippi Development Authority. In addition to grants, the company was also certified to participate in the state’s Advantage Jobs Incentive Program, which allows companies to have up to 90% of payroll taxes withheld for up to a decade dependent upon the number of jobs it created.
In 2020, the revenue department projected the total cost of the program would be about $18 million and covered a dozen companies in 10 counties – including in counties that were home to United facilities.
Another tax credit program, specific for upholstery companies such as United, allows them up to $2,000 job tax credit per position created since 2010 and covers up to 100% of their income tax liability.
But any details about if United – or any one company – took advantage of either programs and to what extent isn’t public, according to the state Department of Revenue.
By 2017, United had about 3,500 employees and facilities in Nettleton, Tupelo, Okolona, Sherman, Vardaman, Amory and out-of-state facilities in North Carolina and California. The company took over a Belden factory that belonged to a competitor, buying out the Lane brand for an undisclosed amount.
But in July of this year, United announced it was laying off 300 people and closed its Amory plant because it was turning the facility into a distribution warehouse. After the layoffs, the company still had 17 facilities (including one in Vietnam) and about 2,700 employees.
“Our team is committed to the long-term success of our company,” then-Chief Executive Officer Todd Evans said in a statement at the time. “That commitment requires right-sizing at the present time. We are confident that the product, sales, and operational plans that we have established will provide for a successful future.’’
But that success didn’t come.
Miller, the state economist, said the United situation seems like more of an outlier — not an indication Northeast Mississippi’s furniture industry as a whole is in danger.
There has been some slow down industry-wide, Miller said. Companies aren’t seeing the same high demands for home furnishings they were during the pandemic. But most companies aren’t at a crisis level.
The larger economic impacts to the Monroe and Lee counties will depend upon how quickly workers are in new jobs, Miller said.
Nettleton-based furniture manufacturing company Homestretch Furniture hired 15 former United workers at a recent job fair. Ashley Furniture, another company with local manufacturing, has also recruited workers.
MDA declined to make any comments specific to United or its past grants, but Deputy Director Laura Hipp said in a statement that the state agency will “work with local economic development partners on how the needs of the area can be supported.”
Hearn, the attorney, said he’s seen entire families devastated: five brothers who all worked for United, a mother and two daughters – one pregnant – now without health insurance.
His clients largely fall into two categories: eager for another furniture job because it’s all they know, or eager for a change because they’re terrified the same thing will happen at another plant.
His clients range from executive-suite workers to line workers and truck drivers.
“They all have one thing in common,” he said. “They’re scared to death.”
Had United followed Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) laws, it would have given employees 60 days notice before the massive layoffs.
The decision to shutter the company came from Stage Capital LLC, the company’s owners. Head of Stage Capital, David Belford, has been missing since the email closing the company went out.
Hearn said he’s heard company rumors the millionaire – or possible billionaire – ran off to Paris.
United is now facing three class-action lawsuits – which a judge could roll into one case – that accuses the company of failing to follow the WARN Act and still owing workers their last week’s paycheck.
“I’ve never seen anything so callous,” Hearn said.
Mississippi — the world’s leader in imprisoning people — will soon skyrocket past its capacity to hold them all.
In just 10 months, the state’s prison population has exploded, rising almost twice as fast as inflation. If this rate persists, the Mississippi Department of Corrections would exceed its listed capacity of 20,443 over the next several months.
Eldon Vail, an inspector of Mississippi prisons in recent years, called the alarming rate “pouring gasoline on a top of a fire that is already raging.”
Between 1993 and 2013, the state’s prison population more than quadrupled, thanks largely to mandatory minimum sentences, with the population peaking in the past decade at more than 23,000. That prompted a push for reforms that included House Bill 585, which then Republican Gov. Phil Bryant signed into law in 2014.
In the years since, reforms and an aggressive Parole Board reduced the number of inmates. By 2016, Mississippi had fallen into third place in per capita imprisonment, trailing Louisiana and Oklahoma.
Five years later, additional reform took place with the passage of the Mississippi Earned Parole Eligibility Act, which gave thousands more inmates the opportunity to go before the Parole Board. By Feb. 7, the prison population had fallen to 16,499, the lowest level in two decades.
That fall mirrored the nation, which saw the prison population decline more than 16% in all states but one between 2019 and 2021, according to the Vera Institute of Justice. (The lone holdout? Alaska, which rose 3.6%.)
But under the leadership of new Parole Board Chairman Jeffrey Belk, that trend has reversed itself.
Ten months later, Mississippi’s prison population now exceeds 19,000 in what the Corrections and Criminal Justice Oversight Task Force calls “unprecedented growth.” If this growth continues at the same rate through 2023, that population would surpass 22,500 for the first time since 2010.
Credit: Mississippi Corrections and Criminal Oversight Task Force
If Mississippi hits that number, taxpayers would be forced to pay $111 million more a year than they were paying in 2020 before the population hike, based on the per-day cost figured by the state’s legislative watchdog, Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review. That’s more than enough to fund the state Department of Health, the governor’s office and a dozen other state agencies.
“While other states are reducing their prison populations, Mississippi is backsliding, thanks in large part to the actions of the Parole Board,” said Cliff Johnson, director of the MacArthur Justice Center at the University of Mississippi School of Law. “It’s demoralizing. It’s infuriating. And it’s terrible corrections policy.”
The population increase has come, despite the decline in Mississippians sentenced to prison, going from 4,270 in 2018 to 3,189 over the past year, according to the task force’s report.
In an interview, Belk told MCIR that the Parole Board is “not a numbers-driven board.”
Some people want the board to “just blindly parole people and not care if they come back,” he said. “We’re not going to do that.”
For his part, Corrections Commissioner Burl Cain said he isn’t worried about MDOC surpassing capacity, because his agency is creating 660 new spaces inside Mississippi prisons. That includes a move of all female inmates from Central Mississippi Correctional Facility in Pearl to the Delta Correctional Facility in Greenwood.
To curb the rise in prison population, he’s banking on better drug rehabilitation and job training programs to reduce recidivism.
About three-fourths of those behind bars in Mississippi battle drug or alcohol problems or both. Cain said a robust rehabilitation program is now available to 2,700 different inmates.
Credit: Mississippi Corrections and Criminal Oversight Task Force
While serving as superintendent of the Louisiana Penitentiary at Angola, he established a job training program that resulted in a three-year recidivism rate of 9.4% for those who finished the program compared with 34% for the average inmate, according to the Louisiana Commission on Law Enforcement.
He hopes to replicate that success in Mississippi, where the three-year recidivism rate is about 33% and the five-year rate is 77%, according to the 2022 World Population Review.
So far, “we have about 170 inmates in the program,” with more to come, he said.
Most of the instructors, who are inmates, earn 25 to 30 cents an hour, or about $52 a month, he said. “It gives them a little bit of independence, and it’s really good for morale.”
MDOC’s work release program plays a companion role in this. “We have 23 out of 25 inmates in jobs making $15 an hour,” he said. “They’re not going to come back.”
Senior U.S. District Judge Keith Starrett of Hattiesburg, who chairs Mississippi’s Reentry Council, praised Cain for providing job training, moral training and job certification. “Reducing recidivism saves lives, money, families and communities,” he said.
House Bill 585 sought to reduce prison overcrowding, which the Pew Foundation estimated would save Mississippi $266 million over a decade.
But the lawmakers’ promise to use those savings for corrections programming never took place, Starrett said. “The Legislature looks out for a lot of folks, but prisons and programs that reduce recidivism are way down on their list of priorities.”
The weak link is the follow-up in programming for those leaving prison, he said. “Let’s say somebody is successful in getting drug treatment, getting a GED and getting a job, but the first week on the job, they cuss at their boss and get fired.”
Now the work goes away, “and they get discouraged and start stealing or selling drugs,” he said. “You’ve got to have support, supervision and encouragement.”
The ultimate goal of both law enforcement and corrections is community safety, and the way to make the community safer is to reduce recidivism, he said. “Of those in prison, 98% are coming back into the community. What’s important is what kind of people they are when they come back. You don’t want them coming home and breaking in your mama’s house.”
Hinds County District Attorney Jody Owens II — who worked with the then-governor and lawmakers of both parties to help pass House Bill 585 — questioned the rise in inmates. “Are we safer because we are incarcerating more people?” he asked.
Former Chairman Steve Pickett said his Parole Board had a parole rate of about 60%. That is, six out of 10 inmates eligible for parole were able to go free. Belk puts his board’s rate at about 40%.
In contrast to the past board, the current one regularly sets off parole hearings for inmates for years, sometimes as much as seven years before they’re eligible again.
Belk cited the case of 80-year-old woman Evelun Smith, who has been in prison 31 years. He said she had come up for a parole hearing every six months. This time, the Parole Board set her off five years.
“She was not ‘parole-able,’” Belk said. “She didn’t know the heinousness of her crime.”
In 1991, Smith and her boyfriend, Phillip Beard, were given life sentences for their roles in stabbing to death a 28-year-old woman, Dedra McGill of Brookhaven, who had “snitched” on Beard, according to the McComb Enterprise-Journal. Smith testified that Beard had been plotting to kill McGill before she spoke to a grand jury investigating Beard’s drug dealings.
Smith is also serving a 20-year sentence for armed robbery for the couple using McGill’s car to drive them to Louisiana to dump McGill’s mutilated and burned body.
In addition to the current board granting fewer paroles, Mississippi judges are giving longer sentences, according to the task force report. The average sentence in 2018 was 7.7 years; now it’s 8.9 years. The number of those imprisoned for drug offenses has risen from 38.8% in 2018 to 47.3% over the past six months.
State Public Defender André de Gruy said he doesn’t think anyone, including the Parole Board, “knows what they are doing regarding case plans or presumptive parole. They have never followed 585 on presumptive parole.”
The state’s presumptive parole law allows MDOC to release inmates without a parole hearing if they satisfy their case plans.
“Under this program, we tell people exactly what is expected of them when they enter prison, and we reward them when they meet those expectations,” Johnson said. “Our Republican-led Legislature wisely passed the law almost a decade ago, and it has never worked like it is supposed to.”
In a 2021 report, PEER, the state lawmakers’ watchdog, concluded that the Parole Board conducted 274 unnecessary hearings for offenders who qualified for this presumptive parole.
Belk said that was PEER’s “nice way of saying they [the Parole Board and MDOC] weren’t doing it.”
He and Cain are now working to make presumptive parole a reality. That will start with creating a case plan, which will capture education levels, job skills and needs, such as alcohol or drug addictions, when an inmate enters prison, Belk said.
That plan will detail programs for the inmate to take part in, such as getting a GED, developing job skills or taking part in a recovery program, he said. If inmates complete those plans, “there’s no reason why the majority of those can’t be paroled,” he said.
If an inmate rejects chances to improve, it’s better for that inmate to wait, Belk said. “Call it tough love. Sometimes the best thing to do is not parole.”
In fact, he said, some inmates have asked the board to revoke their parole so that they could get six months of intensive drug and alcohol treatment at Walnut Grove Correctional Facility.
Ashley Lukens, president of Mississippi Dreams Prisoner Advocacy, said one major problem is inmates often can’t take classes and programs because of shortages in both correctional officers and case managers.
Since Belk took over as chairman, the Parole Board has increased the number of parole revocations from 1,949 in 2018 to an estimated 2,496 for 2022; the percentage of time served by inmates has risen from 53.5% in 2021 to 60.1% in the last quarter.
To stem this tide, de Gruy suggested the board and judges better utilize Technical Violation Centers. “A lot of people are going to prison for failure to pay fines, fees and assessments. It’s unconstitutional to send someone to prison who can’t pay.”
There needs to be reinvestment, including housing, transportation to jobs for those paroled and improvements in mental health, he said. “We need to relieve the financial burdens because 80% of people entering at arrest can’t afford a lawyer. We then add more and more financial burdens at every step of the process.”
Beyond these issues, there is the question of how many more inmates the Mississippi Department of Corrections can handle.
At the State Penitentiary at Parchman, the department has had to add bunks in order to have enough beds for inmates to sleep. Inmates in Unit 30 told MCIR they now have 104 people, but only three showers, six urinals, five toilets and five sinks.
All this is happening at the same time the department is struggling to hire and retain correctional officers, despite pay raises in recent years. MDOC officials say one of the biggest problems has been retention.
In 2014, the department had 1,591 correctional officers, according to the state Personnel Board. Today, that number is less than 1,000, even though the state is now operating two additional prisons: Walnut Grove Correctional Facility and Marshall County Correctional Facility.
Pickett, who chaired the Parole Board between 2013 and 2021, called the current correctional officer-to-inmate ratio “dangerously low.” So are the case manager numbers, he said.
“We have to accept our failure to invest in good criminal justice public policy,” he said. “We can’t keep pushing the failures back onto local police and county jails and expecting a different outcome.”
Cain said he hopes to solve this shortage through a pay raise for starting correctional officers, beginning Jan. 1. It’s a raise the Personnel Board has already approved.
Will the new pay raise succeed where the old ones failed? For years, starting officers earned $24,900 before the pay rose to $27,149. After Cain arrived in 2020, he convinced lawmakers to boost the starting salary, which is now $36,720. Despite that, MDOC continues to struggle with retaining workers. Cain hopes the newest raise to $40,248 does the trick.
Vail said in recent years, he has witnessed staffing levels so low inside Parchman and East Mississippi Correctional Facility that there wasn’t even a single officer to watch units holding prisoners of 100 or more.
“When that is the case, the vacuum of power and control is ceded to the prisoner population in the form of gangs,” said Vail, who served as corrections secretary for the state of Washington.
In an April report, Justice Department officials criticized “gross understaffing” at Parchman and “uncontrolled gang activity,” which leads to “an environment rife with weapons, drugs, gang violence and extortion. … MDOC officials have long known about these unsafe prison conditions, but have continually failed to correct the conditions.”
In recent months, Parchman has seen a new wave of violence.
On Sept. 26, inmate Richard Weems, who was serving 25 years for armed robbery and 25 years for kidnapping out of Madison County, was killed by blunt force trauma to his head.
Two weeks later, inmate Markeith Williams, who was serving a 25-year sentence for armed robbery out of Grenada County, was stabbed to death in Parchman’s Unit 29, which has a long history of violence, including the killings of three inmates in a 2019-2020 riot.
Despite having the highest incarceration rate in the nation, Mississippi spends less per inmate than any other state.
“Lack of adequate funding is the primary reason for the extraordinary levels of violence and death in the Mississippi Department of Corrections,” Vail said.
Whatever momentum there might have been to parole more people from prison may have been undone by the case of Frederick Bell, whom the Parole Board voted to release under supervision after he served 31 years behind bars for the 1991 killing of a 21-year-old clerk during a store robbery. He also pleaded guilty to killing a 20-year-old man in Memphis.
Bell committed the crimes when he was 19, and now he serves as a mentor, teacher and pastor behind bars.
In August, the Parole Board concluded that he had been rehabilitated and voted to free him, but when criticism followed, the board reversed its decision — just hours before he was slated to walk out the doors of Parchman prison.
Brandon Jones, director of political campaigns for the Southern Poverty Law Center, criticized Mississippi’s “terrible thicket of sentencing laws,” which include “one of the most unforgiving habitual offender arrangements in the world.”
This means thousands of Mississippians held behind bars have “no path to parole at all,” he said. “There needs to be more reasonable paths to parole and a Parole Board that sees the value in second chances.”
This story was produced by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization that is exposing wrongdoing, educating and empowering Mississippians, and raising up the next generation of investigative reporters. Sign up for our newsletter.
My friend Scott once gave me some excellent advice: “When something bad happens, take a day or two to be mad and then shake-it-off and get busy.” I hope Jackson State can take the momentum created by Deion Sanders, hire a great new coach and keep that it going.
