Reporters for Mississippi Today worked in partnership with The New York Times Local Investigations Fellowship.

The Mississippi State Auditor’s office on Friday said it had launched an investigation into allegations that Rankin County Sheriff Bryan Bailey had staffed his mother’s commercial chicken farm with jail inmates who were in his custody.

The investigation follows an article published Thursday by Mississippi Today and The New York Times in which former inmates and a former deputy described working on the farm and using equipment and supplies bought with taxpayer money.

“We’re all aware of the reporting,” said Jacob Walters, communications director for State Auditor Shad White. “We read the article, and Auditor White has ordered an investigation to begin yesterday morning, when we became aware of the story.”

White’s office can investigate potential misuse of government resources and file lawsuits to recoup taxpayer money. It does not have the authority to file criminal charges, but Walters said the office had alerted federal prosecutors to the allegations.

Sheriff Bailey did not respond on Friday to requests for comment.

In a statement issued late Thursday to some local media outlets, officials at the sheriff’s department acknowledged that Sheriff Bailey had sent inmates from the Rankin County jail to work at his mother’s farm, but said the inmates were always paid.

The department did not share the statement with Mississippi Today or The Times. Several other news organizations published it, reporting that it had come from Jason Dare, the attorney for the sheriff’s department. The statement said that the article by The Times and Mississippi Today had “maliciously used unreliable sources and/or false allegations in an attempt to tarnish” Sheriff Bailey’s reputation.

Over six months, reporters from Mississippi Today interviewed more than 20 former inmates of the Rankin County jail and three former deputies. They also reviewed more than 1,000 pages of county records. The reporting showed that for years, inmates with special privileges, known as trusties, had been brought to the farm to perform a variety of jobs, including cleaning tons of chicken feces and used bedding from chicken houses.

Dare’s statement did not directly address many of the details described by former trusties and by Christian Dedmon, a former Rankin County deputy who is serving a federal prison sentence for his part in torturing two Black men in 2023.

For example, Dedmon said Sheriff Bailey and others had used a $97,000 skid steer, bought in 2019 with department funds, to mulch, till soil and spread gravel at the farm. The statement did not address whether that was true.

Instead, the statement noted that the sheriff “owns a skid steer that is all-but identical to and commonly confused for the one owned by Rankin County.” In interviews before the article’s publication, Dedmon said the sheriff had used the county’s skid steer on the farm for years before purchasing his own skid steer and attachments.

Dedmon also said that Sheriff Bailey had instructed him to take truckloads of gravel from a Rankin County government storage yard and deliver the gravel to Sheriff Bailey’s family farm to be spread on dirt roads. Dedmon and a former trusty said they would sneak into the yard at night, using magnets to cover the department seal on the vehicle they used.

Dare’s statement did not address those details. It said that Sheriff Bailey had covered roads on the farm with gravel and crushed concrete purchased or donated from local businesses.

“I’m sure he’s purchased gravel at some point in his life, but I also know we took a lot, too,” Dedmon wrote in an email to Mississippi Today on Friday.

Mississippi Today reported that the department had spent about $600 on a brooder house, chicken netting and heat lamps that are designed to keep chicks warm. Those purchases were for a chicken coop at the jail that is used by inmates to get fresh eggs, the statement said.

Dare did not respond to calls or emails from Mississippi Today reporters seeking clarification about the statement.

Over the past few months, the reporters repeatedly asked department officials about work done by trusties, and about department purchases related to chicken farming; Dare declined to explain the purchases and said that Rankin County government officials would not provide comment for the article.

In recent days, local news outlets have been inundated with hundreds of comments about Sheriff Bailey, though elected officials in Rankin County have largely avoided comment.

Some local residents remained supportive of the sheriff, despite a series of revelations over the past two years that have clouded his time in office. In 2024, five Rankin deputies, including Dedmon, were sentenced to decades in federal prison for their role in the torture of two Black men. An investigation by Mississippi Today and The Times revealed a decades long reign of terror by sheriff’s deputies who called themselves the Goon Squad.

Grant Callen, the founder and chief executive of Empower Mississippi, a conservative nonprofit advocacy group that works on criminal justice issues, said the allegations were “just the latest in a string of appalling and inexcusable behavior.”

“Individuals are innocent until proven guilty,” Callen said, “but leadership matters.”

Steph Quinn is a Roy Howard Fellow at Mississippi Today.

This story was published with the support of a grant from Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights, in conjunction with Arnold Ventures, a nonprofit research foundation that supports journalism.

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