Incarcerated women are being moved from Central Mississippi Correctional Facility in Rankin County, the state’s designated women’s prison, to a formerly decommissioned prison in the Delta more than a hundreds miles away. MDOC By Mina Corpuz Mississippi Today Incarcerated women are being moved from the state’s designated women’s prison in central Mississippi to a formerly decommissioned prison in the Delta more than a hundreds miles away. Nearly 300 women at Central Mississippi Correctional Facility in Pearl have been relocated to the Delta Correctional Facility in Greenwood. The Miss ..read more

  Water flows through the Atchafalaya Basin, south of Morgan City, in St. Mary Parish, La., Tuesday, May 25, 2021. Sophia Germer, NOLA.com, The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate BY Tristan Baurick The Times Picayune/The Advocate A Louisiana tribe under threat from flooding, storms and rising seas will receive a federal grant aimed at helping Native American communities adapt to climate change or move to safer ground. The Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana was awarded $5 million as part of the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs’ greatly expanded efforts to assist tribes severely affected b ..read more

  A black carp collected by USGS scientists from the Mississippi River. U.S. Geological Survey By Juanpablo Ramirez Franco WNIJ The black carp, one of four invasive species of carp in North America, has made it into the  Mississippi River basin. A new multi-year report from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) found the range of black carp in the Mississippi River basin now includes the entirety of the river, from New Orleans to the southeastern edge of Iowa, near Keokuk. The black carp is a large species of fish endemic to parts of east Asia, typically growing over th ..read more

  In January 2020, two inmates at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman, Miss., died at the hands of fellow inmates at Unit 30B of the facility. MCIR By Kayode Crown Mississippi Free Press A gang helmsman at Unit 30B of the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman, Miss., shouted a threatening message about some inmates he had singled out from that unit in January 2020. “We’re going to make an example out of these guys,” the African American inmate proclaimed in earshot of Timothy Myers, a white man at the tail end of a 25-year kidnapping sentence, an offense for which he sa ..read more

  Mississippi Corrections Commissioner Burl Cain talks to inmates following the first graduation on April 1, 2022, of the new comprehensive Betty Ford-type alcohol and drug treatment program at the Walnut Grove Correctional Facility in Leake County. Photo courtesy of MDOC By Jerry MitchellMississippi Center for Investigative Reporting Mississippi — the world’s leader in imprisoning people — will soon skyrocket past its capacity to hold them all. In just 10 months, the state’s prison population has exploded, rising almost twice as fast as inflation. If this rate persists, the Mississippi ..read more

  By Claire Sullivan, Brittany Dunn, Shelly Kleinpeter and Allison Allsop LSU Manship School News Service Last in a four-part series Shunda Wallace was 3 months old when her father, Leonard Brown, and another student, Denver Smith, were shot dead by a sheriff’s deputy on Southern University’s campus in Baton Rouge in November 1972. Fifty years later, Wallace still does not know who killed her father. The anger and the grief for a dad she never got to know burn in her, especially when her 18-year-old daughter, Raven, asks questions she cannot answer. Shunda Wallace and her daughter Raven ..read more

  Forensic scientist Chris Wise shows on June 29, 2022, the pistols logged into evidence for analysis at he Mississippi State Crime Lab in Pearl. Sarah Warnock/MCIR By Katie FogartyMississippi Center for Investigative Reporting Autopsy reports are backed up five years, and now a former judge faces the task of cleaning up this mess. Can he? Mississippi Public Safety Commissioner Sean Tindell, a former state appellate judge, said the state is working through a backlog dating to 2017. Meanwhile, families and loved ones wait, sometimes years, for a verdict on how someone died. The factors af ..read more

  By Drew Hawkins, Adrian Dubose, Allison Allsop and Alex Tirado LSU Manship School News Service Third in a four-part series At 12:35 p.m. on Nov. 17, 1972, the phone rang in the office of acting FBI Director L. Patrick Gray in Washington. It was Deputy Attorney General Ralph Erickson, calling to order an investigation into the shooting of two students at Southern University amid a cloud of tear gas 25 hours before. FBI officials quickly made plans to send dozens of agents from across the country, including some who had investigated shootings at Kent State in Ohio and Jackson State in ..read more

  According to a report by the Brennan Center for Justice, spending on all state supreme court elections in the 2001-2002 cycle, including spending by candidates themselves, totaled $47.38 million in 2020 dollars. In 2019-2020, this total reached a record-breaking $98.09 million, with outside groups making up 36% of all spending – their largest share ever. Shutterstock By Noel SimsMississippi Center for Investigative Reporting In a slew of recent decisions, the U.S. Supreme Court has relinquished decision making on controversial issues such as abortion and environmental regulation to ind ..read more

  By Drew Hawkins, Adrian Dubose, Maria Pham and Annalise Vidrine LSU Manship School News Service Second in a four-part series The knock on the door came at 4 a.m.  Rickey Hill and Herget Harris, two protest leaders at Southern University, peeked out and saw sheriff’s deputies outside their apartment. Hill had been arrested the week before for disrupting the campus. Now, on Nov. 16, 1972, the deputies were looking for Harris and others in their Students United protest group.  Harris jumped out a rear window to avoid detection. After the deputies left, he and Hill learned in a ..read more