Foretold ‘uprising’ hits cash-starved Mississippi prisons

JACKSON, Miss. — The leader of Mississippi’s underfunded prison system was pleading with lawmakers for money to hire more guards and pay them better in 2012 when he warned, “I see trouble down the road.”

Christopher Epps, a longtime Mississippi Department of Corrections employee, would later go to prison himself for collecting $1.4 million in bribes. But during budget hearings in October 2012, he said keeping salaries for guards the lowest in the nation would only work “as long as we don’t have an uprising.”

The uprising arrived last week when five inmates died at the hands of fellow prisoners and two of the state’s largest prisons were rocked by what corrections officials called “major disturbances” between gangs.

The officials have not said how many inmates were injured.

Now, with a new governor’s inauguration looming and a new prison chief to be selected, Mississippi leaders face choices. They could pump tens of millions more dollars into a prison budget that already strains finances in the nation’s poorest state. They could try to resume stalled progress toward letting people out of prison in a state with one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. Or they could try to put a Band-Aid on the current crisis and keep locking people up without spending more money.

Phil Bryant, Mississippi’s outgoing governor, on Monday blamed gangs operating inside the prison system, saying prisons are difficult to manage “under the best of circumstances.” Bryant spoke specifically about the infamous Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman.

“Someone asked earlier, who’s responsible for what’s happening at Parchman? The inmates,” Bryant told reporters. “The inmates are the ones that take each other’s lives. The inmates are the ones that fashion weapons out of metal … So, I would say look to the inmates.”

But others say it’s the state’s responsibility to keep prisoners safe.

“The Mississippi Department of Corrections needs to be responsible for this massacre,” said Malaika Canada, a prisoner advocate whose son is incarcerated at East Mississippi Correctional Facility near Meridian.