Locked Down: Life inside Mississippi prison where inmates set each other on fire, gangs control power

Published 1:01 pm Monday, August 19, 2019

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.

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“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.