It's not too late for prison reform in Mississippi

Mother of inmate with cancer says he was moved to Unit 32, which reportedly has mold, standing water and plumbing problems

Alissa Zhu | Mississippi Clarion Ledger

Chaunta Shannon said she never imagined her son, who has stage-three colon cancer and is undergoing treatment at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman, would be moved from the medical unit into a notorious maximum-security unit that was closed 10 years ago.

Authorities have moved an undisclosed number of inmates to Unit 32 at Parchman in an effort to quell deadly violence during a statewide prison lockdown. In the past nine days, five inmates have been killed, a unit at Parchman has been set on fire and two inmates have escaped then been re-captured.

A spokeswoman for the Mississippi Department of Corrections has not responded to multiple requests for comment about the reopening of Unit 32, which was shuttered in 2010 as part of a settlement after the American Civil Liberties Union sued MDOC. The lawsuit challenged the unit's inhumane conditions and lack of medical and mental health care.

Reports that inmates are now being housed in Unit 32 are confirmed by prisoner rights attorneys, Cliff Johnson and Ron Welch, as well as MDOC's online inmate tracker.

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Those attorneys say sources from inside Parchman have told them about conditions inside Unit 32. They report when inmates were first brought in, there was no running water or electricity. Allegedly cell doors, which relied on electricity to lock, could not be secured.

Johnson, director of the MacArthur Justice Center, said he was shocked to hear that people were sent to a unit that had been vacant for a decade.

"(I) have been extremely concerned about the well being of the people languishing there," Johnson said.

Shannon said when she saw online that her son's location had been changed from 30A, a secure medical unit, to 32, she panicked.

"I feel like they're trying to kill him," Shannon said.

Her son, 29-year-old Nicholas Demorst, was diagnosed with colon cancer a year ago. His immune system has been severely weakened by ongoing chemo radiation treatment, she said.

She saw a video reportedly posted online by an inmate, who claims to show walls spotted with mold, defunct plumbing and floors covered with standing water inside Unit 32.

"It makes me feel helpless," the mother said. "It makes me feel frantic. It makes me feel afraid .... I'm not able to sleep, I'm not able to eat."

Inmate rights lawyer: 'Everything you could do wrong, they're doing wrong'

Welch, who monitored prisons and advocated for prisoners' rights for decades, watched the same video that Shannon saw. He has visited Unit 32 on multiple occasions and confirmed the video appears to be taken inside Parchman's former maximum security building.

In the video, an inmate walks through pools of water and pans across cell doors covered with dark spots.

"Condemned man, this m*****f***** be condemned, 10 years," the inmate says. "...Look at the mildew everywhere, man."

He walks along a narrow corridor, where the paint is flaking off in big chunks. When he toggles sink and shower knobs, no water comes out.

"We ain't got no hygiene, no toothbrush, no running water," he says.

The inmate says they haven't been given sleeping mats and have to lie on bare concrete.

The complaints outlined in the video appear to match what inmates and family members of inmates have told Johnson.

Johnson said he's heard that sinks and showers don't work, mold covers the walls, and when inmates were first moved, there was no electricity in Unit 32.

A photo shared thousands of times on Facebook shows six inmates sleeping in a small, cramped cell.

Welch said he has a source inside the prison that confirmed the photo is from Unit 32.

In the photo, only one person can fit on the concrete platform that serves as a bed. Five others are stretched out on the ground, lying shoulder-to-shoulder. They don't have sleeping mats or mattresses. Four are wrapped up in what appears to be thin white sheets or towels.

"Let that sink in," Welch said. "That's conducive to making inmates less tense, more calm? Everything you could do wrong, they're doing wrong."

It's unclear how many inmates are now being housed in Unit 32 because MDOC has not responded to questions. On Saturday, Gov. Phil Bryant tweeted that more than 500 inmates have been moved to "more secure detention" and the lockdown continues.

Her son has cancer. Why was he moved to Unit 32?

The last time Shannon spoke to her son was on Christmas.

Demorst told his mother he was feeling tired and nauseated from chemo radiation, she said. People in his unit had come down with colds so he wrapped a t-shirt around his face and nose as a make-shift face mask.

Demorst has been in prison since 2014. He's serving a life sentence for vehicle burglary and two counts of armed robbery out of Jackson County. Shannon said she's hired a lawyer to appeal his convictions.

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To Shannon, her son is not a convict. She knows her son as a smart "sensitive, loving kid" who attended private school and excelled at football.

"He loves to kiss you, to hug you. He jokes around. He's the class clown. Everybody loves him," she said.

Four days after the mother and son's last conversation, an inmate was killed at the South Mississippi Correctional Facility in Leakesville and the prison system statewide went on lockdown.

Shannon followed the news of riots and deaths at Parchman. She had heard that inmates from Unit 29, which has more than 1,500 beds and houses some of the system's worst offenders, were being moved. She never thought that her seriously ill son would be too.

Shannon said MDOC has told her Demorst will continue going to cancer treatment appointments three times a week, but she's skeptical.

She said she hasn't been able to get in touch with anyone from the prison. Calls go unanswered. Messages are not returned, Shannon said.

"I want to make sure he's in a safe, clean, therapeutic environment," said Shannon, who is a nurse. "He needs clean water, clean air, clean food."

'Truly a dangerous and degrading environment'

Parchman's Unit 32 once held more than 1,000 men "from gang leaders to petty thieves to seriously mentally ill inmates whose howls could be heard day and night," a Clarion Ledger report said in 2010.

Welch said Unit 32 was built as a "lock them up, throw (the key) away" maximum-security unit.

Corrections officers had to walk down long narrow corridors to monitor the single cells that lined the walls, Welch said, and the design required "huge numbers" of officers to staff. Cages were installed in an interior courtyard to separate exercising inmates.

"Prisoners were kept in isolation 23 hours a day, often behind full metal doors in stifling cells with broken lights, yet violence was common between inmates and guards and among the inmates themselves," the 2010 Clarion Ledger report said.

An ACLU news release described cells that reached 120 degrees in the summer and housing areas that "were routinely awash in sewage from broken plumbing." Inmates were "subjected day and night to the ravings of severely psychotic prisoners whose mental illnesses were left untreated."

Some people held in Unit 32 were only there because they had HIV, were seriously mentally ill or needed protective custody, the ACLU's release said. They were trapped in solitary confinement and not given a way to earn their way out for good behavior.

In 2010, after years of litigation, MDOC agreed to close the unit down.

"This is nothing short of a huge success story," the release quotes Margaret Winter, then-associate director of the ACLU National Prison Project, as saying. "This facility was truly a dangerous and degrading environment for prisoners and staff alike. The fact that this facility is now being closed is a great end to the long road that we have been on."

Now that Unit 32 has been reopened a decade later, it's "evidence of crisis and the inability of Mississippi to maintain the third largest per-capita prison system in the nation," said Joshua Tom, interim director of the ACLU of Mississippi.

Johnson said the violence, deaths and escapes that Mississippi's prison system has seen in recent days is a manifestation of larger issues in the criminal justice and corrections systems.

"There is no one simple solution. Collectively, we have to re-examine everything we are doing in regards to sending people to prison and operating prisons across the state," Johnson said. "Continuing to do what we’ve always done is simply not an option."