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Incarcerated women are being moved from the state’s designated women’s prison in central Mississippi to a formerly decommissioned prison in the Delta more than a hundred miles away. 

Nearly 300 women at Central Mississippi Correctional Facility in Pearl have been relocated to the Delta Correctional Facility in Greenwood. The Mississippi Department of Corrections plans to move all the women to Delta Correctional by March 1. 

Mississippi Corrections Commissioner Burl Cain said the goal is to get them into a better environment with school, skills training and treatment. 

“We were running short of beds for women,” he told Mississippi Today. “So by moving 300 to Delta, it helped expand the population. It’s about beds and how we use beds.”

The relocation comes months after the women were told about MDOC’s plans to move them from their longtime housing in the 1A Yard at CMCF to 720, a men’s unit near the back of the prison. Some objected to the decision and wrote letters circulated in the prison and delivered to state senators with the help of their families.

Another reason for the move to Delta Correctional was to keep women and men separate at CMCF. 

Some advocates see the move to the Delta as harmful for women and their families. 

Pauline Rogers, president of religious reentry nonprofit the RECH Foundation, said she started receiving phone calls before Thanksgiving from women who were moved to Delta Correctional. 

Family members of the incarcerated women she has spoken with aren’t happy about the move either. 

“It’s pushing families far away and women far away from their children,” Rogers said. 

For those who are upset about the change, Cain said there is going to be an adjustment period. To those who have called in, he said MDOC has explained how the move is for the women’s benefit and plans for programs and education at Delta Correctional. 

When he visited the Delta prison this week, Cain said the women can see that MDOC cares about teaching them skills and trades to help when they leave prison. He also said he spoke with women still at CMCF and they seem ready for the move. 

“I think there’s pride in them having their prison and own place,” Cain said. 

Family members have also said their incarcerated loved ones have had items such as personal hygiene taken away, Rogers said. 

Cain said as long as the items were on the list of allowable items, they could be taken to Delta Correctional. The canteen will be available to supply any other goods if needed, he said. 

All MDOC prisons have a medical provider on site, but if someone needed to be transported to a hospital, the closest would be Greenwood Leflore Hospital – which is on the brink of closing. 

Cain said the women’s medical access would be the same as the residents of Greenwood. About 50 women with medical issues that the prison medical services couldn’t handle were moved back to CMCF, he said. 

Delta Correctional closed in 2012 after operating as a private prison. It reopened as a community work center to house probationers and parolees who violate supervision terms under an alternative sanction program, according to an MDOC press release from 2018. 

The restitution and work center services will be relocated elsewhere, Cain said. Staff from the center now work at the prison, and he hopes to hire people from the Greenwood area, including people who can supervise prison programming.  

Cain has plans for Delta Correctional.

“It’s going to be focused on reentry, skills and trade and they are going to be busy as they can be going to school,” he said. 

Culinary arts and landscaping programs, cleaning service training and a greenhouse are expected to come to Delta Correctional along with alcohol and drug treatment, clubs and services such as a hair salon. 

There will also be air conditioning, which Cain said isn’t yet available at CMCF. The Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman was the first prison to have air conditioning installed this past summer. 

Before the women arrived, the roof at Delta Correctional was repaired and the kitchen and showers received updates, Cain said. 

Despite plans for what MDOC plans to do at the prison, Rogers worries that putting women in a distressed environment like the Delta will move them away from resources like programming, activities and treatment programs and access to those resources. 

“It’s hard to move a population with nothing,” she said. “You’re moving them from everything to nothing.” 

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The 13 Black farm workers who sued two Delta Farms — accusing the farm operators of racists hiring practices and paying white visa workers from South Africa more per hour — have reached a settlement outside of court, their attorneys announced this week. 

The terms of the agreement forbid the parties from disclosing the settlements’ dollar amounts. 

“But it was a significant amount of money,” said Mississippi Center for Justice Attorney Rob McDuff, who represented the workers.  “I think the settlements demonstrate it’s far better for these companies and these farms to pay people properly than to ignore the law.” 

Both Sunflower County farms — Pitts Farms and Harris Russell Farms — were featured in a Mississippi Today investigation that found a pattern of misuse of the H-2A visa program in the Delta. 

READ MORE: White Delta farm owners are underpaying and pushing out Black workers

Pitts, a soybean, corn, and cotton farm, and Harris Russell, a catfish farm, brought in white South Africans through the visa program, which is intended to only be used when farms cannot find enough local workers. 

The program requires farm owners to pay both local workers and foreign workers the same wage, but years of paystubs obtained by Mississippi Today showed Black workers made mostly the federal minimum wage of $7.25 while getting fewer and fewer hours each season. The H-2A workers took home upwards of $11 an hour. 

Eventually, the local workers said they were told they no longer had jobs, according to the lawsuits and interviews Mississippi Today had with former workers. 

Ty Pinkins, a former attorney on the case, said the result of the lawsuits has pressured other farms with visa workers into following federal mandates over pay for their local employees. 

“Many of the Black workers have expressed excitement and they’re happy that having the courage to come forward has caused a lot of farmworkers to receive a pay rate to the degree they were supposed to get in the first place,” Pinkins said. 

Mississippi Today’s investigation found Pitts Farms had already been fined for paying its local workers less money than visa workers and not properly offering jobs back to local workers by the Department of Labor. But the DOL only audited the farm’s paychecks and bank statements for a two-year period — the standard for its investigations.

That meant most of the men in the Pitts Farms lawsuit, filed in 2021, didn’t receive any of the federally mandated backwages the farm had to pay. They had stopped working for Pitts before the audit period. 

Harris Russell was investigated by the federal labor department after the lawsuit was filed and Mississippi Today’s investigation was published. The catfish farm, along with 10 other farms, were fined a collective $122,610. The string of investigations recovered wages for 45 workers totaling $134,532. 

Neither Pitts or Harris Russell farms responded to a request for comment.

In June, Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh visited the Delta and met with some of the men in the lawsuits. Two months later, the labor department began its investigations of the 11 other farms that were recently fined. 

McDuff said he and his colleagues at the Mississippi Center for Justice and Southern Migrant Legal Services plan to file more lawsuits against other farms with pay discrepancies between Black local workers and white South African workers. 

“Many other Delta farms are engaging in these unlawful practices and more suits will be coming against those who do not pay fair wages to the local workers,” said Amal Bouhabib, another one of the workers’ attorneys. 

Editor’s note: The Mississippi Center For Justice President and CEO Vangela Wade serves on Mississippi Today’s board of trustees.

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Jim Carmody, a renowned defensive football mastermind and a prominent figure in the football histories of Southern Miss, Ole Miss and Mississippi State, died Thursday after a brief illness. Carmody, a Madison resident, was 89.

“Big Nasty” was Carmody’s nickname given to him by his defensive players at Southern Miss, but the moniker had more to do with the way his defenses played. They swarmed to the football and hit hard, whether he was coaching at State, Ole Miss or Southern Miss — or in the NFL. At Southern Miss, where he was first the defensive coordinator (1978-1980) and then the head coach (1982-87), his defenses were called “The Nasty Bunch” — a nickname that endures to this day.

Carmody served two different stints at all three of the state’s largest universities — and he was part of monumental victories at each. Perhaps the most memorable of all was in October of 1982 when he was the head coach of a Southern Miss team that defeated Alabama and the legendary Bear Bryant 38-29 at Tuscaloosa, thus ending Bryant’s 59-game home winning streak. It was the first time a visiting team had won at Alabama in 19 seasons.

Reggie Collier was the star quarterback of that USM team. “Coach Carmody demanded a lot of you, expected a lot out of you,” Collier said Thursday afternoon, shortly after learning of Carmody’s death. “He was very up front with his players. You knew where you stood. You wanted to do anything you could to please him. I loved the man. I loved playing for him.”

Southern Miss had winning seasons in five of Carmody’s six years as head coach, playing most of the more difficult games on the road. He was also part of program-defining victories at Ole Miss and State. A sampling follows: 

• In 1977, when he was the defensive coordinator at Ole Miss, the Rebels knocked off eventual national champion Notre Dame 20-13 at Mississippi Veterans Memorial Stadium. Carmody was the architect of a defensive game plan that stymied the heavily favored Fighting Irish in one of the signature football victories in Ole Miss history.
• In 1989, two years after leaving Southern Miss, Carmody was the coordinator of a Mississippi State team that knocked off nationally ranked Southern Miss and Brett Favre 26-23 before a standing room only crowd at Hattiesburg. Southern Miss had defeated Florida State the week before and had defeated Mississippi State eight consecutive times. Said Rockey Felker, the head coach of that State team, “We were the tougher team that night in Hattiesburg and it was because of Jim Carmody. He taught toughness. He instilled toughness.” While Carmody was at Southern Miss, the Golden Eagles won eight of 10 games against State. When Carmody moved to State, the Bulldogs were 2-0 against USM.
• In 1992, still later in his career, Carmody came back to haunt State, this time at Ole Miss. The Rebels won that Egg Bowl 17-10 when Carmody’s defensive front held State out of the end zone on three consecutive goal line stands, 11 plays, all from inside the 10-yard-line. “That was unbelievable, really,” Carmody once told me. “I have never seen anything quite like that sequence before then or since.”

Carmody was part of Mississippi sports history in other ways. In 1987, Carmody’s USM team was the first historically white university to play against one of state’s historically black universities. Southern Miss defeated W.C. Gorden-coached Jackson State 17-7 before an overflow crowd in Hattiesburg. Carmody had pushed for the game to be played and afterward had nothing but praise for the JSU Tigers, whom he said, “were well-coached and talented and could beat a lot of the better teams on our schedule.”

Early in his career, Carmody coached on Paul Davis’s staff at Mississippi State (1964-66) and helped the Bulldogs to their first victory over a John Vaught-coached Ole Miss team 20-17 at Oxford in 1964, “Man, that was a big deal back then,” Carmody once told me. “It was on national TV and Coach Vaught had just dominated State for years and years. I remember they let classes out at State the following Monday.”

As it happens, Paul Davis was on Bear Bryant’s last staff at Alabama. In the photo that accompanies this column, you can see Steve Carmody shaking hands with Davis in the background, while Jim Carmody and Bear Bryant shake hands in the foreground.

Jim Carmody coached the late, great Ben Williams both at Ole Miss and then with the Buffalo Bills of the NFL. “Jim came to Ole Miss in my junior year (1974) and we got better real fast,” Williams once told me. “He knew how to motivate and he knew so much about technique. He made me a better player.”

Years later, when Williams was playing for the Bills, the team had an opening for a defensive coach. Williams said he told Buffalo head coach Chuck Knox, “You hire Jim Carmody and we will win our division next season.”

Knox hired Carmody away from Southern Miss. And the Bills led the league in defense and sacks and won their division. Ben Williams made All-Pro.

Jackson lawyer Steve Carmody (the oldest of Jim and Noonie Carmody’s four sons) was a fine center on the Southern Miss team that knocked off Bear Bryant and Alabama.

“He was tough, but fair. He treated me the way he treated all his players,” Steve Carmody once said of his father. “It was really neat to see your dad at work every day. Not everybody gets a chance to do that. I thought he was so successful for two reasons. One, he was so smart. And, two, he always was so thoroughly prepared. Nobody was going to out-work my dad.”

Jim Carmody was once asked about his working two different times at the three Mississippi universities, surely something nobody else has ever done. Carmody laughed before answering, “I guess that says that I didn’t burn any bridges.”

•••

A memorial service for Jim Carmody will be held Jan. 12 at 3 p.m. at the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame and Museum in Jackson. In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations be made to the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame or the Jim Carmody Scholarship Fund at Southern Miss.

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Jackson and Hinds County law enforcement agencies are partnering with the U.S. Marshals Service to address violent crime in the city. 

Marshals Service Director Ronald Davis visited Jackson on Thursday and, during a forum, asked the mayor, local law enforcement and community members what kind of resources and support they need. 

“We will partner with our local partners and be very strategic,” he said. “I think a lot of this, for me. is that I never took it that we’re here to solve problems, but better understand the challenges you’re facing because you’re facing it, and I think many communities across the country are facing the same.”

Jackson reached a record-high 153 homicides in 2021, and had 130 homicides in 2022.

Davis, a former police chief and head of the federal Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, wants to take a holistic approach to addressing crime that is driven by community input and built on trust. 

He said he doesn’t want to bring in Marshals Service deputies as a new police force that patrols the streets and acts like it knows the community’s needs. 

Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba said multiple parts of the criminal justice system are overworked, which is seen in policing and investigations and a backlog in the state crime lab to process evidence for cases. 

Hinds County District Attorney Jody Owens said he would like to see more collaboration to help with prosecution and investigations. 

“We’re having far too many individuals we have in custody in our jail that we’re not able to move their cases fast enough,” he said. 

Forum participants said they want to see root causes of crime such as socioeconomic challenges, trauma and mental health addressed and for incarceration not to be the answer. 

Lumumba said the city will launch an office focused on violence prevention and mental health. 

Community members also want to be part of violence interruption. Terun Moore of Strong Arms of Jackson asked for financial support to continue the work of going into the community and working with people impacted by violence, including young people. 

Police, judges and city officials in attendance highlighted juvenile violent crime as an issue.

In 2021, Jackson police arrested a group of young men for several violent crimes around the city. One of them, a then-17-year-old Joseph Brown was linked up to several homicides, including the death of a pregnant woman. 

As a Hinds County Youth Court judge, Carlyn Hicks hears cases for offenses juveniles commit, but not cases such as homicide when they are charged as adults. 

She wondered what kind of impact addressing underlying trauma and earlier intervention can have in the life of a child like Brown and prevent youth from going on to commit violent crimes and go into the adult criminal justice system. 

Through Youth Court, Hicks has implemented diversion programs and support for children and families, but she wants to see gaps in support sustained. 

“We have to have some sustainability across our systems,” she said “Otherwise I’m putting Band-Aids on fire hydrants.” 

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Update: On Thursday afternoon Jackson officials lifted the boil water notice for residents in the following zip codes: 39206, 39202, 39201, and 39213.

For decades, Jackson’s drinking water system has slowly crumbled as elected officials failed to put the proper resources into maintaining the complex infrastructure that over 170,000 people depend on. The infrastructure’s decline mirrors a decrease in federal investment towards local water systems that took place from the 1980s until just this past year.

But now, months after the plight of Jackson’s water found international attention, the federal government is shouldering the city’s infrastructure burden as much as ever.

Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba detailed Thursday morning that Jackson is set to receive $795 million in grants and direct appropriations for water system improvements. Most of that money — $600 million provided through Congress’ latest resolution to keep the government funded — will go to the city through reimbursements for capital projects and technical assistance.

The mayor said he visited Washington D.C. in November to meet with members of Congress and ask for supplemental funding.

“I am thankful for the federal government’s faith in Jackson’s recovery plan,” Lumumba said. “They now understand what I’ve been saying for the past six years: It’s not a matter of if our system would fail, but when it would fail.

“Through (Congress’) direct investments, we will emerge stronger than ever before.”

All of the $600 million will go towards the drinking water system, Lumumba explained at a press conference Thursday, as some in the south part of Jackson still lacked any water pressure because of a winter freeze that paralyzed the city’s pipes Christmas morning.

Most of Jackson is still under a boil water advisory, but other than the handful of homes in south Jackson, almost everyone else should be seeing normal pressure again, the city’s third-party manager Ted Henifin said.

As of Thursday morning, only residents in the 39211 zip code were no longer under the advisory, but Henifin said he expects a few more parts of the city would be lifted from the boil water notice that afternoon as officials await the bacteria test results for those neighborhoods.

Thursday afternoon the precautionary boil water notice was lifted for residents living in the following zip codes:
39206
39202
39201
39213

The rest of the $795 million comes from the different federal funding avenues: $100 million from the 2022 Water Resources Development Act, which can go towards both drinking water and wastewater projects; $20 million Congress appropriated in September from the 2007 Water Resources Development Act; $4 million in state and tribal assistance funds from the Environmental Protection Agency; and $71 million that Jackson is set to receive from the American Rescue Plant Act.

Lumumba reiterated that the cost to fully fix the drinking water and wastewater systems in Jackson would cost around $2 billion, and that even with this historic investment he plans to apply for more funding in the future.

When asked by a reporter how long he would stay in his role as third-party manager, Henifin clarified that the Department of Justice’s order with Jackson has no end date. While the agreement only includes a budget for one year, the DOJ order won’t end until “the (federal) judge is satisfied that we’ve put Jackson on a sustainable path forward” without needing a third-party manager.

As part of the DOJ agreement, Henifin is in charge of making sure the new funding goes to prioritized projects. The order tasks Henfin’s team with taking on 13 projects that address a wide array of water system issues:

1. Operations and management contract
2. Winterization of both treatment plants
3. Corrosion control
4. Implementation of an alternative water source plan
5. Distribution system study, analysis and implementation, including replacing water lines, prioritizing any lead lines found
6. System stabilization plan, including a sustainable revenue model
7. SCADA system improvements, including sensors, actuators
8. Assessment and repair of chemical systems at plants and wells
9. Chlorine system improvements at O.B. Curtis
10. Intake structure repairs
11. Restoration of redundancy at treatment facilities, including pumps
12. Sludge assessment and removal at water storage facilities
13. Assessment of power vulnerability

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If you come for the King, you best not miss.

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Delbert Hosemann filed qualifying papers Thursday at the state Republican Party headquarters to seek a second term as lieutenant governor.

Hosemann announced his reelection bid before an overflow crowd in the party headquarters conference room. The entryway to the headquarters building also was elbow to elbow with people who could not get into the conference room.

“It is a real honor to be here,” said Hosemann, who added he “was mesmerized” to see the eagle on top of the Capitol building every day and still could not believe he had an office in the building.

Hosemann will be making stops throughout the state in the coming days to tout his accomplishments and his reelection bid.

The large crowd at the party headquarters could be conceived as a show of force by Hosemann. State Sen. Chris McDaniel, R-Ellisville, who lost a close Republican Party primary for the U.S. Senate in 2014 against incumbent Thad Cochran, has indicated that he might challenge Hosemann.

At Thursday’s announcement about 15 Republican senators flanked Hosemann. A large number of senators also was in in the entryway, unable to get into the room where the announcement was made.

Echoing the comments of Gov. Tate Reeves, who qualified to seek re-election earlier this week, Hosemann said the state “was in the best financial shape we have ever been in.” He said a lot of Republican politicians worked to put the state on sound financial footing. Like Reeves, he did not mention the billions of federal COVID-19 relief funds that have spurred the Mississippi economy.

Hosemann was introduced by his son, Mark, who said his father was a doer, not a talker.

“Dad focuses on the positive. He focuses on the potential,” he said.

Shane Quick, who garnered 15% of the vote against Hosemann in the 2019 Republican primary for lieutenant governor, has qualified to run again this year.

Hosemann served three terms as secretary of state before running and winning the office of lieutenant governor.

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Legislative leaders want to override several of Governor Reeves’ vetoes. It’s good to be back.

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An effort by the Republican legislative leadership to override Gov. Tate Reeves’ line item vetoes of a handful of earmarked 2022 projects fizzled Thursday after the Senate couldn’t muster enough votes.

“We had the votes to override,” House Speaker Philip Gunn said Thursday after the House took a long recess waiting to hear if Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann could garner two-thirds support in the Senate. “The Senate tells us they don’t have the votes.”

Gunn and Hosemann had said Reeves’ vetoes were an overreach of executive power into purse-string duties constitutionally reserved for the Legislature.

“This wasn’t about the projects,” Gunn said. “This is about does a governor have the authority to line-item veto in a general bill? … There is no provision under the constitution for that.”

READ MORE: Gov. Tate Reeves blocks state funding for major Jackson park improvement, planetarium

Reeves last year vetoed 10 projects, about $27 million worth, out of scores of projects lawmakers approved statewide in a $223 million capital projects bill. The state constitution says a governor has line-item veto power on appropriations bills, and the state Supreme Court recently expanded those powers with a ruling in Reeves’ favor in 2020. But the state constitution does not give the chief executive line-item veto power on general bills. They can either veto the whole bill or let it pass into law.

READ MORE: Legislative leaders want to override several of Gov. Tate Reeves’ vetoes

House Bill 1353 last year, although it funded projects, was a “transfer” bill shifting money from one fund to another — a general bill, not an appropriations bill. Lawmakers say allowing a governor line-item veto authority over general bills would be a huge power shift in a state where the governor is, by design, “constitutionally weak” particularly in spending matters.

Reeves, when he issued his veto last year, called the projects “wasteful” spending. But his vetoes appeared selective, and the city of Jackson bore the brunt, with four projects nixed by the governor. These included rejuvenating a golf course and building a nature trail at LeFleur’s Bluff State Park and upgrades to the city’s planetarium and convention center parking lot.

Reeves said Jackson has too many problems such as crumbling water infrastructure and crime to be spending money on parks and planetariums.

Hosemann, who had been a proponent of the LeFleur’s Bluff project, early this week said the vetoes were improper and he wanted to discuss overriding them with the House.

But Hosemann and other Senate leaders were tight-lipped Thursday on override efforts. Hosemann shrugged and walked away when asked for an update on whether the Senate would have the votes.

Overriding a governor’s veto requires a two-thirds vote of both chambers, and is a rare occurrence. Lawmakers overrode a Reeves veto of education spending in 2020. Before that, no governor’s veto had been overturned since 2002, with then-Gov. Ronnie Musgrove.

READ MORE: Latest Reeves vetoes could again expand governor’s power

Besides the high hurdle of a two-thirds vote and rarity of attempted overrides by lawmakers, the effort to override Reeves’ line-item vetoes faced some political optics issues. The capital projects measure from last year was something of a “Christmas tree” bill with pet projects earmarked across the state, including another public golf course and $7 million in handouts to three private companies that Reeves said bypassed normal state vetting of economic development projects.

At the time, Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba was also critical of lawmakers spending $13 million on a golf course and not providing more for water system work.

But opponents of Reeves’ vetoes said they appeared selective, noting he approved most of the scores of projects in the bill, including for museums and greenspace around some courthouses and other public buildings — but not others.

One of the projects vetoed by Reeves was $500,000 to place a green area around the federal courthouse in Greenville.

Sen. Derrick Simmons, the chamber’s Democratic leader who lives in Greenville, said the courthouse project in his district was supported by the federal judiciary; U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker, a Tupelo Republican; and U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Bolton Democrat.

“It was my hope that I would be given the opportunity to vote to override the governor’s veto of the project in my district and all the other projects in the state that were deemed worthy by the Legislature but vetoed by the governor,” Simmons said.

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