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<font size="1"><a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/02/01/mississippi-state-prisons-parchman-incarceration-deaths/">https://theintercept.com/2020/02/01/mississippi-state-prisons-parchman-incarceration-deaths/</a>
</font><h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Death Toll Increases as Mississippi Stays in Prison Limbo</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Liliana Segura - February 1, 2020</div></div>
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<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-line-height4 gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div><div><p><u>Hundreds of people</u>
stood in front of a stage in downtown Jackson, Mississippi, waiting for
the rally to start, when a woman’s voice rang through the crowd. “What
we gonna do?” she shouted. <em>“SHUT IT DOWN!”</em> the crowd yelled back.</p>
<p>“What we gonna do?”</p>
<p><em>“SHUT IT DOWN!”</em></p>
<p>“What we gonna do?”</p>
<p><em>“SHUT IT DOWN!”</em></p>
<p>The protesters had gathered at the intersection of Mississippi and
North Congress, in the shadow of the state Capitol. Hip-hop blared from
the speakers, activists circulated leaflets, and posters carried
messages for the news cameras clustered on a nearby platform. One read:
“Somebody’s hurting our people and we won’t be silent anymore.”</p>
<p>Just before noon, activist Sharon Brown took the mic. A member of the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/MsPRC" target="_blank">Mississippi Prison Reform Coalition</a> —
and leader in the recent push to change the state flag — she traced the
crisis across the state’s prisons to its legacy of slavery, brutally
embodied by the Mississippi State Penitentiary, known as Parchman Farm.
For more than 100 years, Parchman has been the site of forced labor, a
plantation where incarcerated men still work in the fields. In recent
weeks, photos and videos from contraband phones had exposed rat-infested
cells, unusable toilets, and graphic evidence of medical neglect. As
the images went viral, an outbreak of violence and a slew of deaths
between December and mid-January thrust Mississippi prisons into the
national spotlight.</p></div><div><p><span>Protesters
rally against the conditions at Parchman State Penitentiary in front of
the Mississippi State Capitol building on Jan. 24, 2020. At the rally,
Eva Scott, left/top, displayed a photograph of her nephew, Antonio
Taylor, who was incarcerated at Parchman and was found dead in his cell
in December of 2019.</span><span>Photos: Andrea Morales</span></p></div><div><p>“I
wanna thank those brothers behind the walls that had the courage to let
the world know of the injustices,” Brown said. “To let the world know
that they are beaten, broken, tired.” The latest death had been reported
just two days earlier, on Wednesday, January 22. According to the <a href="https://www.mdoc.ms.gov/Pages/Parchman-Inmate-Found-Dead-Wednesday-Morning-Identified.aspx" target="_blank">Mississippi Department of Corrections</a>,
49-year-old Thomas Lee was found hanging in his cell that morning,
inside Parchman’s Unit 29. This brought the death tally to 10 in less
than a month. In the meantime, many families had not heard from their
loved ones since the upheaval began.</p>
<p>Sallye House stood in the front row, in gloves, a winter hat, and a
T-shirt reading “FIX YOUR PRISONS.” She had made the two-hour drive to
Jackson from Batesville, with her daughter and son-in-law. It was her
second protest in two weeks. At a <a href="https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=729870520874853">vigil</a>
outside Parchman on January 11, she described how the toilet in her
son’s cell had been broken for months, forcing him to urinate and
defecate in plastic bags.</p>
<p>House carried a red folder containing copies of letters she had
written to local officials over the years, begging for help for her
38-year-old son, Alchello. “My sole reason for reaching out to you is my
son’s HEALTH and WELFARE,” House wrote in one letter from July 2016.
Alchello had been transferred to Parchman after being violently attacked
at a different prison. House had begged for him to be moved but was
horrified when he was sent to Parchman, where he had been stabbed by a
gang member years before. It was also Parchman where Alchello had
contracted sarcoidosis, an inflammatory disease affecting the lungs and
other organs — and where he was now being denied adequate medical care.
“Please send someone to his cell and take a look at his appearance,”
House wrote. “His face is skin and bones. His neck and chest bones are
sticking out.”</p></div><div><div><p><img src="https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2020/01/sallye-house-1580417469.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90" alt="sallye-house-1580417469"></p><p class="gmail-caption">Sallye
House, left, at the march in Jackson on Jan. 24, 2020. She carried a
photo of her son, Alchello House, who is incarcerated at Parchman.</p>
<p class="gmail-caption">
Photos: Liliana Segura/The Intercept</p></div></div><div><p>Her
next letters sounded even more urgent. “Dear Sir or Madam, I need your
help desperately!” House wrote in January 2017. For almost six months,
she said, her son’s unit had constantly been on lockdown, meaning he
could not buy food from the prison canteen, which he relied upon to
supplement the meager portions provided by MDOC. She included pictures —
“it is a matter of life and death.” The last letter, from January 2018,
revealed Achello had thyroid cancer. “If he dies while suffering in
these conditions there will be NOTHING done about it. That is why I am
asking to move him BEFORE something happens to him.” Yet two years
later, Alchello remained in Unit 29.</p>
<p>The rally lasted three hours. The speeches were brief and raw,
testimony steeped in trauma and righteous anger. There were demands for
accountability and calls for action — to contact legislators, to vote,
to demand that Parchman be closed. But there was also an overwhelming
sense of a deeper problem, too vast for words like “reform.” There were
too many familiar stories, too many mothers like House, exhausted from
years spent screaming into the void. “I’m just really emotional,” said
Ann Adams from the stage. Her son was healthy when he went to prison in
2012, she said, but now he had seizures and suffered from malnutrition.
She had not seen him in nine years.</p>
<p>Vera Young nodded in recognition throughout the rally. “That’s what’s
happening to my son,” she said. She had come downtown in blue hospital
scrubs, ready for her work shift later that day. As the rally wound
down, she told me that her son is also housed in Unit 29. A case manager
had said that he was OK, but she had not heard from him in weeks. “He’s
always told me, from the time he’s been at Parchman, ‘Mama, if you
don’t hear from me, there’s something wrong with me.’”</p></div><div><div><p><img src="https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2020/01/h_14231277-1580418311.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90" alt="A solitary cell in Unit 32 of the Mississippi State Penitentiary, the state's super-maximum-security prison, in Parchman, Miss., Feb. 27, 2012. A growing number of states are rethinking the use of long-term isolation for inmates after the conditions at Unit 32 prompted a lawsuit that led to the unit's closing. (Josh Anderson/The New York Times)"></p><p class="gmail-caption">A
solitary cell in Unit 32 of the Mississippi State Penitentiary, the
state’s super-maximum security prison, in Parchman, Miss., on Feb. 27,
2012.</p>
<p class="gmail-caption">
Photo: Josh Anderson/The New York Times via Redux</p></div></div><div><h3>An Escalating Crisis</h3>
<p>It was not long ago that Mississippi’s criminal justice system was
hailed as a burgeoning success story: a state that went from decades of
federal prison monitoring to a <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-hailed-mississippi-prison-reforms-national-model-but-the-numbers-reflect-grim-reality" target="_blank">model</a> for reform. In 2010, following years of litigation by the American Civil Liberties Union, MDOC finally <a href="https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-strikes-deal-shutter-notorious-unit-32-mississippi-state-penitentiary" target="_blank">shut down</a>
Parchman’s Unit 32, where men had been held in punishing isolation for
23 hours a day. Corrections Commissioner Christopher Epps was lauded for
reducing the number of people in solitary confinement across the state,
“saving money, lives, and sanity,” as the New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/us/rethinking-solitary-confinement.html" target="_blank">wrote</a>
in 2012. Then, in 2013, Mississippi legislators voted to create the
bipartisan Corrections and Criminal Justice Oversight Task Force, whose
policy recommendations would save millions in taxpayer money by reducing
recidivism — and forestalling a ballooning prison population that had <a href="https://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/assets/2014/09/pspp_mississippi_2014_corrections_justice_reform.pdf" target="_blank">grown</a> by 300 percent over 30 years.</p>
<p>But the promised changes never took root. Epps was <a href="https://www.jacksonfreepress.com/news/2014/nov/06/chris-epps-ex-prison-boss-pleads-not-guilty-corrup/" target="_blank">arrested</a>
on corruption charges in 2014. And the state’s nascent criminal justice
reforms unraveled before they had even begun. Last year, an
investigative <a href="https://www.propublica.org/series/locked-down" target="_blank">series</a> by ProPublica and the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/09/mississippi-prison-reform-failed-first-step-act" target="_blank">revealed</a>
that the millions that were supposed to be reinvested to improve
reentry had instead been used to cover corporate tax breaks. “Meanwhile
the number of prisoners is creeping back up, and the lack of funding and
staff is contributing to worsening conditions.”</p>
<p>Today, one of the biggest problems plaguing Mississippi’s prisons —
cited by families and officials alike — is a dangerous lack of qualified
staff. The number of guards has gone down from almost 1,600 in 2014 to
731, according to the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting.
Starting salaries are the lowest in the country, creating further
incentive to smuggle and sell contraband cell phones.</p></div><div><div><p><img src="https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2020/01/h_14231275-1580418407.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90&w=683&h=1024" alt="A shield used by guards next to a cell door in Unit 32 of the Mississippi State Penitentiary, the state's super-maximum-security prison, in Parchman, Miss., Feb. 27, 2012. A growing number of states are rethinking the use of long-term isolation for inmates after the conditions at Unit 32 prompted a lawsuit that led to the unit's closing. (Josh Anderson/The New York Times)"></p><p class="gmail-caption">A shield used by guards is propped next to a cell door in Unit 32 of Parchman on Feb. 27, 2012.</p>
<p class="gmail-caption">
Photo: Josh Anderson/The New York Times via Redux</p></div></div><div><p>But
while officials have long decried the phones as enabling criminality —
particularly by prison gangs — it’s no secret that the phones are a
crucial lifeline for those on both sides of the walls. Phone calls can
be prohibitively expensive — and families describe a constant lack of
information from official channels. It was only because of cell phones
that the public learned of a disturbing development in early January:
The MDOC had quietly <a href="https://mississippitoday.org/2020/01/07/following-days-of-violence-mdoc-moves-prisoners-to-once-shuttered-supermax-unit-at-parchman/" target="_blank">reopened</a>
Parchman’s Unit 32. A photo had gone viral on social media, showing
five men in striped prison jumpsuits lying on the ground in a filthy
cell. Lawyers later confirmed that the images came from the
long-shuttered housing unit, where clients said they were being forced
to sleep on the concrete floor and denied showers, food, and running
water.</p>
<p>The escalating crisis was made even worse by a lack of leadership
among state officials. The upheaval began with a spate of violent
incidents in the last days of 2019, before Mississippi’s newly elected
governor, Tate Reeves, was sworn into office. Three deaths at three
different prisons led to a statewide lockdown on New Year’s Eve. That
same day, MDOC Commissioner Pelicia Hall <a href="https://www.mdoc.ms.gov/News/PressReleases/MDOC%20Commissioner%20Hall%20Announces%20Resignation.pdf" target="_blank">announced</a> she
would resign. As the lockdown continued, hundreds of men were moved
from Parchman to a facility in Tutwiler, run by private prison giant
CoreCivic. “During the entire process, the inmates’ needs have been
met,” the MDOC said in a press release.</p>
<p>On January 17, activists and community members packed a room inside
the state Supreme Court for a regularly scheduled meeting of the
Corrections and Criminal Justice Oversight Task Force. The death toll
inside the prisons stood at five. The lockdown had been lifted at all
prisons except Parchman, where hundreds of men were still awaiting a
transfer, <a href="https://www.mdoc.ms.gov/News/PressReleases/Housing%20Needs%20Pending%20for%20Remaining%20Unit%2029%20Inmates.pdf" target="_blank">according</a> to MDOC. In the meantime, a high-profile lawsuit had been <a href="https://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/2020/01/14/jay-z-yo-gotti-sue-mississippi-prison-official-behalf-inmates/4469555002/" target="_blank">filed</a> in federal court, while a second prison official <a href="https://www.mdoc.ms.gov/News/PressReleases/MDOC%20No.%202%20Official%20Announces%20His%20Retirement.pdf" target="_blank">announced</a> his retirement.</p>
<p>“At least a few of the task force members appeared to be caught off guard by the public’s interest in their meeting,” <a href="https://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/2020/01/17/mississippi-prisons-activists-demand-reform-after-deaths-violence/4502586002/" target="_blank">wrote</a> the
Clarion Ledger. Judge Prentiss Harrell stressed the progress in the
state since its policies became law in 2014, including a savings of
almost $50 million. While unfortunately the money had not yet gone to
increased wages of prison staff or improvements in the facilities,
Harrell said, he thought the legislature would be open to such things in
the coming session. “We do believe the pendulum is swinging.”</p>
</div><div><p>Yet the focus on funding tends to
eclipse an obvious factor that has driven the crisis in Mississippi’s
prisons: too many people in prison for too long. Activists had long
pushed for meaningful sentencing and parole reforms in Mississippi,
including revising the state’s <a href="https://theappeal.org/for-many-prisoners-mississippis-habitual-offender-laws-are-like-death-sentences/" target="_blank">habitual offender</a>
law and making it easier to grant early release to “geriatric inmates.”
Although the task force seemed open to such ideas, it was unclear
whether lawmakers would heed the call. The crisis had inspired
no-nonsense rhetoric, including from former governor Phil Bryant.
“Someone asked earlier ‘Who’s responsible for what’s happening at
Parchman?’” he <a href="https://www.wdam.com/2020/01/07/gov-bryant-says-blame-falls-inmates-violence-state-prisons-not-his-administration/" target="_blank">told</a>
reporters in early January. “The inmates. The inmates are the ones that
take each other’s lives. The inmates are the ones that fashion weapons
out of metal. The inmates are the ones that do the damage to the very
rooms that they’re living in.”</p>
<p>On January 23, the day after the Mississippi Prison Reform Coalition announced the rally in Jackson, Gov. Tate Reeves held a <a href="https://www.clarionledger.com/get-access/?return=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.clarionledger.com%2Fstory%2Fnews%2Fpolitics%2F2020%2F01%2F23%2Fgov-reeves-announces-changes-stop-bleeding-ms-prisons%2F4552702002%2F" target="_blank">news conference</a>
at the state Capitol. In glasses and a dark windbreaker emblazoned with
the Mississippi state seal, Reeves read from a prepared statement,
announcing that he had visited two of the state prisons in the past 24
hours. One was Parchman; the other was Walnut Grove Correctional
Facility, which has stood empty since 2016. The governor was considering
transferring men out of Parchman and into Walnut Grove, which would be
privately run. “The majority of the prison can hold inmates as early as
tomorrow,” he said.</p>
<p>But like reopening Unit 32, moving people to a private prison seemed
like an obvious step in the wrong direction. The former juvenile
facility run by GEO Group had closed after a federal investigation
exposed harrowing conditions, including sexual misconduct by staff
described as “among the worst that we have seen in any facility anywhere
in the nation.” One judge famously <a href="https://www.aclu.org/legal-document/cb-et-al-v-walnut-grove-correctional-authority-et-al-order-approving-consent-decree?redirect=prisoners-rights/cb-et-al-v-walnut-grove-correctional-authority-et-al-order-approving-consent-decree">wrote</a> that Walnut Grove “paints a picture of such horror as should be unrealized anywhere in the civilized world.”</p>
<p>Reeves acknowledged that there had been problems at the facility in
the past. But he gave a practical explanation for the idea. The cell
walls at Walnut Grove were made of poured concrete rather than cinder
blocks, he said, which would make it harder to pass contraband.</p>
<p>“A lot of these things will seem like common sense,” he said. “That’s because they are.”</p></div><div><div><p><img src="https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2020/01/h_14502093-1580417910.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90" alt="The Mississippi State Penitentiary, where Eddie Lee Howard Jr. has been on death row for two decades for the murder and rape of an 84-year-old woman, in Parchman, Miss., Sept. 10, 2014. A disputed bite-mark identification is at the center of Howard?s appeal, which cites that the method used in the obscure field of forensic dentistry is unreliable, due to be filed on Monday with the Mississippi Supreme Court. (Andrea Morales/The New York Times)"></p><p class="gmail-caption">The Mississippi State Penitentiary, known as Parchman Farm, in Parchman, Miss., on Sept. 10, 2014.</p>
<p class="gmail-caption">
Photo: Andrea Morales/The New York Times via Redux</p></div></div><div><h3>Worsening Conditions</h3>
<p>I last visited Parchman in 2016, as part of a tour organized through
an academic conference at Ole Miss. The prison offers tours to schools,
churches, and other groups, and the visit was carefully curated. Prison
personnel welcomed our group into a visitor’s center containing rocking
chairs and vases of fake flowers, along with a display of contraband
collected over the years — shanks made from pens, spoons, and other
materials. “They make ’em out of anything,” the guide said.</p>
<p>A tour bus drove our group across the prison’s sprawling grounds,
passing fields where men harvest crops. The fieldwork is supposed to
address “inmate idleness,” according to MDOC, as well as providing
healthy food. “They do squash, broccoli, greens,” the guide said. After
providing a hearty lunch — grilled shrimp, teriyaki green beans, and
pecan cobbler — the food services director shared a story of a man who
trained under him while incarcerated at Parchman. “He’s been released
and is cooking in Memphis,” he said proudly.</p>
<p>There was at least one moment of blunt honesty during the tour. It
came from a man 40 years into a life sentence, who spoke to the group
about the need for education programs. “There is no rehabilitation in
Mississippi,” he said. “Don’t kid yourself.” In the decades he had been
at Parchman, sentences had gotten harsher — in Mississippi and across
the country — while program after program had been stripped away. There
used to be a choir, a radio station, a print shop, he said. “All of
that’s gone.”</p>
<p>One woman on the tour became emotional remembering her childhood
trips to Parchman, where she would see her father in what was known as
extended visitation — weekendlong visits where incarcerated men could
spend more time with their families. Mississippi ended the practice in
2012. Then, in 2014, MDOC put an end to conjugal visits. The risk of
pregnancies was a concern, our guide explained. “Who’s going to take
care of that child?”</p>
<p>In a state that claims to want to reduce recidivism, however,
eliminating such programs has undoubtedly done more harm than good.
Studies have long shown that stronger ties to family increase the
likelihood of success after prison. And those previously incarcerated in
Mississippi say that curtailing visitation and other programs have
made a dehumanizing experience even worse. Al Coleman was at Parchman in
the 1990s, during the time that many states began to eliminate
educational opportunities inside prisons. He worked in the fields,
picking cotton, potatoes, and okra. Such labor was supposed to keep
violence at bay, but Coleman saw rapes and killings during his time
there.</p>
<p>“Prison has always been violent,” he said. “It’s like walking into a
zone with a bunch of time bombs waiting to explode. … If you’re being
treated like you’re nothing, like you’re a dog, an animal, and you’re
not getting the right amount of food, water, you don’t have no way to
use the restroom, the frustration constantly builds.” The main
difference he sees now is that people on the outside can see the
evidence for themselves.</p></div><div><div><p><img src="https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2020/01/cedric-young-1580418199.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90" alt="cedric-young-1580418199"></p><p class="gmail-caption">Jessica Young, left, and her mother, Kathy King Roberson, at the march in Jackson, Mississippi, on Jan. 24, 2020.</p>
<p class="gmail-caption">
Photo: Liliana Segura/The Intercept</p></div></div><div><p>On
the day after the rally in Jackson, Jessica Young went to visit her
brother, Cedric, at Marshall County Correctional Facility, a private
prison run by the Utah-based Management and Training Corporation. He’d
been transferred to MCCF from Parchman months earlier, but the
conditions were not much better. The visitation room was freezing; her
brother said it was much colder in the housing units.</p>
<p>Cedric was convicted in 2017 for a crime he swore he did not commit.
When he first got to prison, he was not given a change of clothes for
months. Photos revealed disgusting meal trays, dull-colored clumps of
food impossible to identify. “We were scared to post them because we
didn’t want anything to happen to him,” Young said. But now that the
images are out in the open. They are less afraid.</p>
<p>The visit lasted from 11 until around 2:30. Later that night, she
heard from her brother again. He told her that he had returned to his
unit to find out that a man had died at the prison that day. “The whole
time we were in visitation with him, there was an inmate in the back,
dead,” Young said. A cell phone video captured the scene; men calling
out for attention while the lifeless body laid there. Guards are
supposed to do routine checks of each housing units, but there was
nobody answering. “It’s devastating,” Young said. The problems were much
bigger than Parchman, much bigger than Unit 29. “The entire MDOC as a
whole is hitting rock-bottom.”</p>
<p>The man who died was later identified as 38-year-old Jermaine
Tyler. The next day, another death was reported at Parchman: 26-year-old
Joshua Norman, a man from Young’s hometown. Then, <a href="https://www.mdoc.ms.gov/News/PressReleases/Inmate%20Collapses%20and%20Dies%20at%20Kemper-Neshoba%20RF.pdf" target="_blank">two</a> <a href="https://wreg.com/2020/01/30/officials-investigating-inmates-death-at-marshall-county-prison/" target="_blank">more</a> deaths, at two different prisons across the state: 28-year-old Limarion Reaves<em> </em>on
January 29, followed by 52-year-old Nora Ducksworth at MCCF, on the
30th. In total, 14 men died in Mississippi prisons since December 29.</p>
<p>In the meantime, the governor gave his <a href="https://www.clarionledger.com/get-access/?return=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.clarionledger.com%2Fstory%2Fnews%2Fpolitics%2F2020%2F01%2F27%2Fms-gov-tate-reeves-state-of-the-state-watch-here-live-updates%2F4588076002%2F" target="_blank">first</a>
State of the State address at the state Capitol. He had a big
announcement. “I have instructed the Mississippi Department of
Corrections to begin the necessary work to start closing Parchman’s most
notorious unit, Unit 29,” he said. Although logistical questions
remained, he said, “I have seen enough. We have to turn the page.”</p></div></div></div></div>
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