Locked Down: Life inside Mississippi prison where inmates set each other on fire, gangs control power
Published 1:01 pm Monday, August 19, 2019
Jeffery Wilemon was so severely beaten at South Mississippi Correctional Institution that he had to be airlifted to Forrest General Hospital in Hattiesburg. Mississippi Department of Corrections
Henry Armstead, pictured here with his daughter, was severely beaten and burned while incarcerated at South Mississippi Correctional Institution, according to an incident report. Now transferred to the hospital at the State Penitentiary at Parchman, he’s still on a feeding tube. Photo courtesy of Demetrius Armstead family
Russell Turner, editor of the weekly Greene County Herald newspaper, had been a champion of the 516-bed South Mississippi Correctional Institution. After touring the prison, he now calls it “a ticking time bomb.” Owen Hornstein/InvestigateTV
Demetrius Armstead said she didn’t learn that her son, Henry Armstrong, had been beaten and burned at South Mississippi Correctional Institution until six days later, when the prison chaplain told her to head to a Hattiesburg hospital. She found her son on life support. “Everything in the whole of my body just went to the gut of my stomach,” she said. “It just tore me up on the inside.” Owen Hornstein/InvestigateTV
Drone photo shows the campus of South Mississippi Correctional Institution in Leakesville. Tammie Mills & Jon Turnipseed/InvestigateTV
South Mississippi Correctional Institution, known as SMCI, now has an inmate-to-correctional officer ratio of 23 to 1, far higher than that of other states or the federal prison system.
“This is not a sustainable situation,” said David Fathi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union National Prison Project. He called the inmate-to-guard ratio “among the highest I’ve ever seen.”
Just last month, 35-year-old inmate Elijah Anderson, imprisoned for meth possession, had his head slammed against concrete in his bunk and was knocked unconscious, his sister, Keneshia Lee, said. Correctional officers didn’t find him for hours, she said.
“It’s like he’s almost in a vegetative state,” she said. “He can hear us, but he cannot speak to us, and they said he had bleeding in his brain.”
Cliff Johnson, director of the MacArthur Justice Center at the University of Mississippi, which represents incarcerated individuals, said, “We regularly have clients begging to be kept out of SMCI because of the violence. They’re scared for their lives.”
Mississippi Department of Corrections officials say they can’t discuss the incidents involving Wilemon or Anderson because they are being criminally investigated. So far, no charges have been filed. Official reports confirm that incidents involving the two men took place, though details are redacted.
Mississippi Corrections Commissioner Pelicia Hall acknowledged a staffing shortage hinders her agency’s ability to run the state’s prisons. She said she has tried to get the Legislature to approve raises for guards and has worked to do what she can with what she has.
Fathi said the “horrific” attacks on Wilemon and another prisoner just days apart leave “no doubt that SMCI is unsafe.”
And if a prison isn’t safe for inmates, it isn’t safe for staff, he said.
‘A Ticking Time Bomb’
The pages of the Greene County Herald, a weekly newspaper here, track the evolution of SMCI from a valued partner to an unstable tempest.
When it opened in 1990, the 516-bed, minimum-security SMCI seemed like a godsend for job-starved Leakesville, a town of less than 1,000 residents halfway between Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and Mobile, Alabama.
