By Justin Randolph
Special to the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting

I’m a historian of policing and prisons in Mississippi. Here we go again.

In a press conference last week, Gov. Tate Reeves said, “We’re seeing it every night on Jackson’s local news: a never-ending cycle of violent crime.” Jacksonians, he said, “aren’t asking for much. They are just asking for the ability to walk down the street and not fear for their lives.”

Deploying such inflammatory language while promising “public safety,” Reeves has taken the real, lived experience of being harmed by a neighbor and played it to his political advantage. Instead of promising expanded social services—health care, nourishment, shelter, violence interruption—he sends in the state troopers.

To be sure, his new policy to expand the Department of Public Safety and invite state policemen to police the capital city depends on real fears of pain and robbery for its legitimacy. However, the governor and city council are on their way to stoking a crime panic and repeating mistakes of the past. 

In fact, Reeves (and the people who write his speeches) are reaching for a playbook to which Mississippi’s state government has returned every few decades since the Civil War: more police officers with more police power, more incarceration with fewer chances for release. In reality, historians know this cycle always ends the same way: The number of people incarcerated goes up; the number of people living in desperation stays the same. Police and prisons offer only an illusion of safety to the outside world. For those incarcerated, elected officials create hell on earth.

As early as 1877, a former Confederate general and state lawmaker named Winfield Scott Featherston worried that no one would move to or invest in Mississippi because of the state’s international reputation for lawlessness. “The impression prevailing abroad” Featherston feared, was “that ours is a land of bloodshed & violence.” The answer, he thought, was the “speedy enforcement of all laws for the prevention & suppression of crime.” This, Featherston said, “will be the most effective means of…drawing immigrants & capitalists to us.”

By 1890, Featherston attended the constitutional convention that stole the right of Black Mississippians to vote, serve on juries and attend quality public schools. “Public safety” were watchwords of that convention. So were “white supremacy.”

Future Mississippi Gov. James K. Vardaman was also a delegate at the 1890 convention. He’s best known for leading the movement to build Mississippi’s state prison farm. In 1905, he stoked a panic around Black men raping white women on the streets of Jackson. The expansion of policing and incarceration was his solution. “The beast who blighted the life of that good woman might have been on the County farm, working on the streets, or locked in prison,” he wrote of one alleged rapist in Jackson. The next year, he opened the Mississippi State Penitentiary, better known as Parchman farm. There, a super-majority Black population—men and women—worked at hard labor without pay until the 1970s.

In a major win for human rights, a federal court outlawed the unfree labor of incarcerated Mississippians in 1974. Calling Parchman “a farm with slaves,” a civil rights attorney named Roy Haber represented Nazareth Gates and three other incarcerated men in a class action lawsuit against the state. The resulting case, Gates v. Collier, became a major victory of the national prisoner’s rights movement. In part, it demanded that the number of incarcerated people at Parchman be limited until overcrowding improved. As a result, judges sentenced fewer people to prison and state officials paroled more people back to their communities.

The backlash to this prisoners’ rights movement is the most recent and most resonant comparison to Gov. Reeves’ crime panic.

Amidst court-ordered reform, Mississippi’s pro-prison advocates built a system of what historians call mass incarceration. The Department of Public Safety’s budget grew from $5 million to $22 million between 1960 and 1980. After decreasing 30 percent between 1975 and 1977, Mississippi’s rate of incarceration per 100,000 residents grew every year from 1978 until 2002. In that year, Mississippi incarcerated 10 times more people than it did after the prisoners’ rights movement.

How could this happen? In part, aspiring politicians whipped up a panic around the criminal activity of formerly incarcerated people. “People are being released down there right and left,” Gerald Chatham Jr. claimed of Parchman in 1977. “You still give him the same sentence, but he gets out on work release, good time or parole….We need to build more facilities.” Chatham, the president of the Mississippi Prosecutors Association and the son of the district attorney who unsuccessfully prosecuted J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant for the killers of Emmett Till, got his wish. The state created a Department of Corrections and constructed more prisons. Overcrowding was no longer an issue; Mississippi once again incarcerated its societal problems.

Reeves knows this game well. “Many of these murders and homicides…are being committed by individuals who appear to have been arrested recently and let out on bail,” he said in his press conference last week. Such reckless rhetoric threatens the increased bail and parole eligibility he signed into law this April in hopes of relieving the crisis inside Mississippi prisons and jails.

Any sincere student of history knows society cannot incarcerate its way out of inequality. Reeves is only trying to score short-term political points for appearing tough on crime. Reeves believes “the government’s most basic responsibility is to protect its citizens and residents.” But what does “protection” mean to pro-prison advocates? His chief concern is for the Capital Complex Improvement District, where the Mississippi Highway Safety Patrol will now have jurisdiction. “To our residents, and those looking to relocate, and those looking to invest in our capital city, I make this commitment to you: My administration will do whatever it takes to help keep downtown Jackson safe.”

Ours is a history of profits over lives. We must demand that our leaders make other investments.

Justin Randolph is writing a book on the history of policing in Mississippi for the University of North Carolina Press. He was born in Amory, received his PhD from Yale University, and teaches history at Texas State University .

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