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
At 5:25 p.m. on Aug. 3, an officer heard prisoners yelling that an inmate was on fire and saw “a big black cloud of smoke,” according to an incident report obtained by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting.
Albert Wilson, who accused Howard of previously throwing feces on him, has been indicted for inflicting second-degree burns on his fellow inmate. Wilson did not respond to a letter seeking comment.
Howard’s parents said they were unable to visit him until he was transferred to a burn unit at a Jackson hospital. After recovering, he was sent to Central Mississippi Correctional Facility. Howard did not respond to a letter seeking comment.
Howard’s mother, Linda, said the lack of oversight by officers led to her son’s attack. “If I go to see my son,” she said, “I’m patted down under my arms and between my legs.” She raised a question unaddressed by the court documents: How could an inmate obtain gasoline and a lighter behind bars?”
‘I Didn’t Feel Like Pressing My Luck’
Wallace Carpenter, of Richton, served as a correctional officer at SMCI for a dozen years. In 2007, an attack by several inmates in the dining room gave him a black eye and sent him to the hospital for observation.
“The response time (by fellow officers) was excellent,” he said.
Carpenter returned to work. But in 2015, with the staff shrinking and the prison growing more violent, he said he and other veteran officers quit. “I didn’t feel like pressing my luck,” he said.
Mississippi pays the lowest salary for jail and correctional officers in the nation, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The starting salary for a correctional officer at SMCI is $12.33 an hour.
In contrast, a kitchen manager at a nearby Hardee’s starts at $36,000 per year, more than $10,000 higher than the $25,650 a new guard would earn.
The average salary for a correctional officer in the U.S. is $49,300 a year.
Hall asked lawmakers to increase the starting pay for officers to at least $28,000, a little less than the starting pay in Alabama.
The Mississippi Legislature instead approved a 3% raise. The current starting pay is still low enough for a prison guard raising a family of three to qualify for food stamps.
Officers who remain oversee more and more inmates.
