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
A headline on his July 16, 2018, column in the Herald declared, “We can’t allow officials a ‘free ride’ when it comes to safety and security at SMCI.”
MDOC declined to comment, pointing to a statement by Hall 20 days after the escape that said, “While understaffing has not been directly attributed to the July 5 [2018] escape, it could be a contributing factor that ultimately affects public safety.”
In the wake of the escape and subsequent inmate violence, SMCI appointed a new prison superintendent.
These days, Turner calls SMCI “a ticking time bomb.”
‘The Prison Is Run by the Prisoners’
In the middle of the night on May 30, 2018, a nurse on her rounds found 57-year-old inmate Eddie Shorty bleeding in his cell, according to an incident report obtained by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting.
Inmates say they heard Shorty, who had been placed in a separate part of the prison under closer scrutiny to ensure his safety, begging an officer for weeks to move him because his cellmate, Jace Hicks, was abusing and extorting him.
On the night of May 29, “we listened as Eddie screamed for help as he was being beaten to death,” said one inmate, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared retaliation. “We had beat on the cell doors for hours, trying to summon help … all the officer in the tower would do is yell over the P.A. speaker for us to ‘shut the hell up.’”
No help ever came, he said. “Nobody counted or done a single security check that night.”
Under MDOC policy, officers are required to regularly count inmates, as often as once an hour, but a recent memo from the SMCI superintendent discussed the problem of officers failing to count: “Any Staff falsifying count will be reprimanded. This STOPS NOW!”
MDOC spokeswoman Grace Fisher declined to confirm or comment on the memo, which was posted in an inmate dayroom. “I do not discuss internal security matters,” she said.
According to the State Medical Examiner’s Office, Shorty died of blunt force injuries with strangulation.
Hicks, who has pleaded not guilty to a murder charge, told the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting in a telephone interview that Shorty began sexually assaulting him. Hicks said authorities disposed of his blood-stained boxers he claimed was evidence of sexual assault.
Hicks acknowledged “nobody came for another four or five hours” after the two men had literally fought to the death.
A little over two months later, an inmate broke into the maximum security cell of Tony Howard Jr., doused him with gasoline and set him on fire.
