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
Courts have generally allowed corrections officials to lock down prisons and cancel yard calls in response to threats or violence, but those same courts have drawn a line for other reasons, Fathi said.
In a lockdown case decided by the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 1974, judges noted such emergencies “cease to be emergencies when they continue indefinitely.”
Hall said when there aren’t enough correctional officers, she must use lockdowns.
“We do that for the safety of the staff,” she said in April. “We do that for the safety of the residents incarcerated. And we do it for the public.”
But she acknowledged that extended lockdowns create “an unsafe environment for my staff.”
When the doors are finally unlocked after a long lockdown, she said, “rage is coming out that door.”
“Gangland”
Wilemon said the gang held him hostage for more than 12 hours. He eventually alerted an officer, who let him outside to walk to the prison’s medical clinic. He never made it, passing out on the grass.
He was airlifted to Forrest General Hospital, more than 50 miles away, where doctors removed his ruptured spleen and gallbladder, he said. “They also repaired my small intestines.”
An incident report confirms he was airlifted to Forrest General, but the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting has been unable to confirm the extent of Wilemon’s injuries.
After his time in the hospital, SMCI returned Wilemon to the place he called “Gangland.”
Jerry Mitchell is an investigative reporter for the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization that seeks to hold public officials accountable and empower citizens in their communities. Email him at Jerry.Mitchell.MCIR@gmail.com and follow him on Facebook at @JerryMitchellReporter and on Twitter at @jmitchellnews.
The Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting and ProPublica are spending the year examining the state’s corrections system. We want to know what’s really happening behind the walls of Mississippi’s prisons. You can share your tips and your stories by emailing us at mississippi@propublica.orgor filling out this form.
