More than half of Mississippi’s prison population belongs to gangs.
Inside Mississippi’s prisons, gangs rule.
If you refuse to join, they will beat you, stab you, addict you, extort you, abuse you and-or rape you.
And there is no place to hide because corrections officials won’t let you live separately from gangs — despite a state Department of Corrections policy that declares “zero tolerance” for them.
“When you walk in, you walk into bedlam,” one inmate, whose name is not being used for his safety, told The Clarion-Ledger. “Gang members stab people down, and nothing happens to them.”
Corrections Commissioner Chris Epps disagrees that gangs are powerful in Mississippi prisons.
In fact, his department doesn’t recognize gangs, he said. “These inmates are identified as Security Threat Groups. The inmates are classified appropriately, following the national trend of correctional practitioners.”
At last count, 5,520 inmates of Mississippi’s 19,972-inmate prison population were classified as members of Security Threat Groups.
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