The winter storm that pushed through the state Saturday and Sunday temporarily knocked out power at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman and Delta Correctional Facility in Greenwood, even as temperatures plunged below freezing.

“At Parchman, we had a limb fall on a line,” Corrections Commissioner Burl Cain told Mississippi Today on Sunday afternoon. “The power is coming back on.”

He said during the afternoon that Entergy workers spent about three hours fixing the problem, but during another call later in the day, Cain said the crew had continued its work. That brought the work to about six hours and delayed the full restoration of power beyond what Cain had originally said.

Parchman is in rural Sunflower County near Tutwiler and has about 1,900 inmates. Delta Correctional is in Greenwood and houses about 300 women. Both are in areas that received snow and ice.

Generators were supplying power Sunday at Delta Correctional, Cain said. “The only place we’ve had a problem is at Parchman.”

“I just had a mama tell me that the inmates were banging on the wall all night, that they were cold and hungry,” Cain said. “All that’s bullshit.”

Inmates had sack lunches Sunday, Cain said, “and we should be able to cook supper. We have water and everything.”

House Corrections Committee Chairwoman Becky Currie said Sunday that she asked prison officials if they had checked generators at Parchman before the ice storm.

“They said no,” Currie said. “I’m raising hell, but it is an emergency. This is another major mistake for the Department of Corrections.”

Currie told Mississippi Today that she spoke to a staff member at Delta Correctional on Sunday afternoon who told her the generator was working but was only keeping some lights on. It was not sufficiently heating the building, the staff member told her.

“I can’t imagine being in a tin can with no heat,” Currie said. “We all plan for storms in Mississippi. That’s why there is not a loaf of bread on the shelf (in the grocery store). They are responsible for thousands of lives. There are hospice patients, dialysis patients. And they can’t make sure the generators are going to work in time of need?”

Temperatures at Parchman fell to 19 degrees Sunday.

An inmate in Parchman’s Unit 29, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution, said he awoke at 1 a.m. Sunday to the lights flickering on and off. He said that at 3 a.m., a fire was set down the hall from his cell. He said inmates were trying to get the attention of correctional officers after the power went out, and the temperature inside the block got “too damn cold.”

The only light visible was coming through the windows, he said. “The officers aren’t doing anything, they’re not checking to see if inmates are cold or anything.”

Inmates were hollering for warmer clothes after the temperature dropped, he said. A warden later announced to inmates that “nothing could be done,” he said.

Mississippi Today was able to review photos of both the inmate’s icy window and the fire that was set in his block. Dark cells and hallways can be seen in an additional photograph obtained. Parchman’s fields are blanketed with white snow in another.

At around noon Sunday, the inmate said he was given a cold breakfast. It’s unclear, he said, when the next meal could be served. Security checks that usually happen every half hour had ceased since early Sunday morning, he added. Besides breakfast at noon and a nurse making a medication drop at a nearby cell, he said no guard or other person had come by his cell Sunday.

Stephen C. McCraney, director of the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency, said Sunday he received a phone call about three to four days ago that three generators at the Delta Correctional Facility were “iffy.” He said he sent three extra generators to the prison.

Parchman is a new problem, he said. When power went out there, it became a priority, he said.

“Sometimes things break in the middle of the night. Those customers within those facilities, they can’t go home for the weekend, they can’t go to the neighbor’s house and we realize that,” McCraney said of the prisoners in Parchman and Delta Correctional.

Mississippi Today obtained text messages from a Parchman guard, who wrote: “Most of their stuff doesn’t work. What does work is rigged up. They don’t have a maintenance team that actually knows what they are doing.

“And our heaters work well,” the guard wrote. “They just aren’t turned all the way up because we don’t want to burn them up and then be without them all together. They are set at 65 or 68 I can’t remember. So inmates probably still want a blanket to keep comfortable but they definitely are not freezing.”

At a Sunday news conference, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves said he was “aware” of the prison problems. “I’m confident that we will get that back online via a generator if not already, then very soon,” Reeves said.

Facebook entries by people concerned about prison conditions alleged that Parchman inmates were suffering without heat or food. 

When someone made a joke on Facebook about inmates freezing to death, Drea LaSha responded that they are “still human beings that breathe the same air we do. They are not dead but will be in such conditions and you joke about it … Could be you.”

Terell Harris added, “These are humans and not animals, and let’s be honest, the animals get protected in these conditions. Everyone in prison don’t deserve to be there, and some are actually innocent. Either way, these are humans, and we all have family that has been to prison.”

Update, 1/25/2026: This story has been updated to show an Entergy crew worked longer than Commissioner Burl Cain had originally said.