Epps fought the suit. He defended the department’s work at Parchman. The case went to trial. Epps lost. A judge ordered the department to improve the conditions at the death row unit. Epps appealed and lost again. “After that his attitude changed considerably,” said Winter, who worked on the lawsuits.

The ACLU filed another suit over conditions at Parchman. This one involved “Unit 32,” the state’s supermax facility, reserved for the prison’s most dangerous inmates, “the worst of the worst,” as Epps put it. In Unit 32, more than a thousand inmates were locked in solitary confinement cells for 23 hours a day, for an indefinite period.

This time Epps did not fight. “He was open to a much more collaborative approach,” said Winter. He met with the lawyers representing the prisoners and they negotiated changes to the facility.

“In a fairly short time he agreed to settle that case,” said Winter. “It was the most far-reaching limits on the use of solitary confinement as has ever been the case at that time.”

As part of the agreement, the ACLU selected advisers to review the files of every inmate in Unit 32. The advisers, working with Epps’ staff, found that most of the inmates in the unit were not particularly dangerous or violent but had simply broken prison rules. Many of them suffered from mental illness. Nearly 80% of the inmates in Unit 32 should not have been in there, the review determined. The department transferred around 700 inmates out of the unit.

Epps admitted that his lockdown philosophy had been misguided. “That was the culture, and I was part of it,” he told the New York Times in 2012. “If you treat people like animals, that’s exactly the way they’ll behave.”

He eliminated indefinite solitary confinement and allowed inmates to spend more time outside their cells. He let them play basketball and offered them rehab programs. He implemented a system that rewarded good behavior with more privileges, and punished bad behavior with reduced privileges.

Within a few years, Epps declared that violence in the unit had decreased by 70%.

“It was courageous to agree to an extraordinary experiment like this, which had never been done in any other state,” said Winter. “Mississippi became a leader in what was then an embryonic national movement against solitary confinement.”

Suddenly Parchman Farm, the remodeled plantation, was a model for prison reform. Epps became a national figure. He traveled the country telling the story of Unit 32. He was the face of the anti-solitary confinement crusade.

But Epps was no ideologue. He was a numbers man. Solitary confinement is expensive. Some studies have shown it costs three times more to house an inmate in solitary than in general population. In 2010, three years after Epps began reducing Unit 32’s population, he closed the building. Shutting down the unit, he told legislators, would save the state $5 million a year.

Epps’ knowledge of the system, and his ability to recite data off the top of his head, won over potential adversaries. When Haley Barbour, a Republican, defeated incumbent Musgrove, a Democrat, in 2004, the new governor planned to bring in a new corrections commissioner.

Epps requested a meeting with Barbour and said that he hoped to keep his job. “He came over carrying about four notebooks,” Barbour told the Clarion-Ledger. “We met for more than an hour and went through everything. He knew about every criticism I had made about corrections and had answers.”

Corrections is a sophisticated, sprawling, expensive endeavor and most politicians understand little about how the system works. “A governor doesn’t want to do corrections,” said Ron Welch, a civil rights lawyer based in Jackson. “A governor needs somebody able to run a complex system rife with politics.” Epps translated the system into a language that lawmakers could understand. He talked budgets and statistics. And when the recession hit, he explained that the only way to shrink costs was to shrink the inmate population.

“Epps is a very good communicator,” said Simmons, the state senator. “He has a way of making individuals feel comfortable even when he’s telling them the truth that they don’t want to hear. People saw him as a trustworthy person, someone who was going to tell it like it is.”

Trust in Epps gave him wide discretion. The state legislature handed him a tight budget and said, Make it work. And he came back to the statehouse with a proposal that made it work, and in that proposal he began reshaping the state’s criminal justice policy. In 2008 his proposal included a provision that would make non-violent felony offenders eligible for parole after serving 25% of their sentences, instead of 85%. The legislature accepted his pitch, and over the next two years the state released more than 3,000 inmates under the new standard.

Epps made himself accessible to all sides. Prisoners' rights advocates could come to him about reforms. State legislators could come to him about budgetary concerns. Reporters could call him and he’d personally answer their questions. Defense lawyers could contact him about problems their clients were having in his facilities.

Leslie Lee, the state defender, recalled one defendant who received death threats in jail. For six months Lee tried to get him transferred. She followed normal protocols but the bureaucracy was too thick. Frustrated, she called Epps directly. The inmate was at a new facility within three weeks.

Perhaps no public official in Mississippi was welcome in so many different circles as Epps was. He was a hub that held together many spokes, which gave him a unique power. In 2013, Epps formed and led a task force dedicated to drafting a bill that would overhaul the state’s criminal justice system. His office gathered the data and organized the gatherings. The group included members from every slice of the criminal justice system — prosecutors, defense attorneys, civil rights lawyers, judges, sheriffs, advocates.

“Epps had contact with every group at the table,” said Andre de Gruy, an attorney for the state defender’s office who sat on the task force. “When things got tense in the task force, he would lessen the tension with his likability.”

Epps, by all accounts, had strong political instincts. He remembered names and faces and anecdotes. Before meetings, he asked how your wife was doing and whether your son’s little league team won on Saturday and have you taken the new boat out for a ride yet? At hearings, he always used proper titles. Mr. Chairman. Senator. Sirs and madams.

“He always captures a room,” said Bozeman, the lobbyist. “Whether in a restaurant or church or outside sitting in a parking lot. He’s a guy that you believe. When you see him and talk to him, you know this is an honest and good guy.”

Many on the task force expected a painstaking, perhaps years-long process. Instead, the group crafted a bill within a year. Lee credits Epps, “his personality and persuasive argument.” The bill proposed sweeping changes aimed at diverting non-violent offenders away from prison. Probationers would not go to prison for technical violations like failing a drug test, and judges would have more power to determine sentences. The group calculated that the changes would save the state $266 million over the next decade.

In July 2014 the legislature passed it. “It was one of the most significant pieces of legislation passed in the country this year,” said Jody Owens, a managing attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

And Epps had more plans for reform. Next on his docket were pay raises for prison guards. As always, he framed his argument with pragmatism.

Correctional officers in Mississippi state prisons earned a starting salary of $22,000. Low pay, he explained, was a big reason the corrections department had such trouble with contraband. Inmates offered guards money to smuggle in phones and drugs and other goods. If guards made more, they wouldn’t be so tempted. If guards made more, the department could be more selective with its hiring. And so Chris Epps began his mission to end corruption in Mississippi’s prison system.