Report Slams Mississippi Prison System : Investigation: Auditor charges that inmates run the facilities and control drug traffic in and out of them. State contends changes are being made.

Citing poor oversight and lax controls, a state official who investigated corruption in Mississippi prisons Friday said inmates run the facilities and control much of the state’s drug trafficking from behind bars.

Referring to one institution in particular, the notorious Parchman Prison in the delta region, State Auditor Steven A. Patterson said: “It’s the corporate headquarters of crime in Mississippi. Much of the drug activity and much of the gang activity in the state is, in my opinion, being conducted and led from Parchman under the auspices of the state of Mississippi.”

In the report and in an interview Friday, Patterson painted a picture of a prison system with few controls, in which drugs and cash flow freely in and out and in which inmates have unfettered access to prison pharmaceutical supplies and personnel records, which he says allows them to blackmail prison employees.

“The bottom line is the inmates are running the penitentiaries,” he said.

The investigation grew out of allegations made late last year by a convicted murderer and others about improper use of state funds, theft of state property and confiscated drug money, falsification of state documents, embezzlement, bid-rigging and illegal gifts to officials within the prisons.

Patterson said he decided to investigate after an employee in the state inspector general’s office resigned because she said the governor’s office had impeded the inspector general’s probe of the prison system.

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Patterson’s investigation began as a probe of alleged financial irregularities and was broadened after every inmate and prison employee interviewed complained of rampant drug abuse, drug trafficking and gang activity in the prisons, he said.

The state’s commissioner of corrections declined to speak to a reporter Friday and would not allow his staff to comment other than to issue a two-page statement. In the prepared statement, Corrections Commissioner J. Stewart Murphy said, “Gang members are no longer running our institutions.”

Since he was appointed by Gov. Kirk Fordice last September, he said he had already rectified many of the problems identified in the auditor’s report.

Patterson, however, dismissed Murphy’s contention as “political posturing” and called on state officials to make sweeping reforms.

Parchman Prison, begun at the turn of the century as little more than a state-owned plantation with free black labor, had become legendary for its brutality and corruption by the 1960s. A number of Mississippi blues artists, including Son House, Sonny Boy Williamson and Bukka White, did time there, and the prison farm found its way into the lyrics of their songs.

Inmates picked cotton on a plantation that grew to 21,000 acres, with the money flowing directly to the state Legislature. Reform came in the early 1970s, after civil rights workers were abused in the prison.

Last year, the prison’s history of brutality was revisited when six prison guards pleaded guilty to assaulting inmates. Parchman and the state’s other prisons were rocked in recent years by allegations that some of the dozens of inmates who have been found hanged while incarcerated in the state had, in fact, been murdered.

U.S. Justice Department officials announced last week that they had concluded an investigation into the hangings and had found no evidence of wrongdoing, although investigators did find that conditions in at least 13 county jails violated the constitutional rights of inmates.

Parchman’s history and archaic design--along with decades of neglect and a lack of regard for inmates--are part of the reason why it has been difficult to turn it into an efficiently run institution, Patterson said.

Today, most of the farmland is leased out to local farmers and the prison runs a number of rehabilitation programs. Patterson claims, however, that the programs have been misused and that little rehabilitation takes place.

The investigation was launched just as the corrections department was undertaking a massive expansion in prison space after the Legislature approved 4,000 new cells. Without significant reforms, however, Patterson said the expansion will do little to cut crime.

After a prisoner has served his sentence, “we take (that prisoner), drug-dependent and destitute . . . and we give him $20 and a bus ticket home. He’s had no rehabilitation, no nothing. It does nothing but foster street crime and makes you and me and everybody else walking down the street a target,” Patterson said.

Several aspects of the investigation are continuing. Patterson said he is working with two district attorneys’ offices and that criminal prosecution may result. A spokesman for the state attorney general’s office, however, told the Jackson Clarion-Ledger on Thursday that the report did not contain enough specifics to help prosecutors. He referred to the allegations as “rumors and innuendo.”

Among the recommendations included in the 33-page report:

* Use drug-detecting dogs to inspect vehicles, persons and packages entering and leaving Parchman.

* Conduct periodic unannounced shakedowns of inmates, visitors and guards.

* Perform an audit of the Parchman Hospital to help stem the flow of illicit prescription drugs.

The report also calls on the Legislature to create an independent task force to target drug trafficking related to the prisons and asks the state to make changes in a number of prison programs--including prison canteens and industries that manufacture garments, signs and janitorial supplies--to make them more accountable.

Patterson also criticized the work programs--supposedly training programs used for rehabilitation--for employing mostly inmates who are incarcerated for life rather than those that may eventually be released back into society.