Corporal officers’ starting annual salaries have been bumped to just over $36,000. Sergeants will now begin with more than $40,000. Captains’ pay will start at over $42,000 and Majors’ salaries have been raised to more than $47,000.
“This substantial salary increase will help us attract people who will really invest back into our vision and goal for what MDOC will become,” Commissioner Burl Cain said in a press release.
Cain did not further expound on the goals of MDOC in the release but said the pay bump is the first of several efforts to increase staff within the department, which came under scrutiny in 2019 and 2020 after unrest and fires broke out in multiple Mississippi prisons.
After five people incarcerated at Mississippi State Penitentiary were killed and three others committed suicide all in January 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice launched an investigation into the facility, which is also known as Parchman Prison. The salary boost comes roughly two months after the DOJ released its report on Parchman, in April 2022, and found that, among other conclusions, “MDOC subjects individuals incarcerated at Parchman to serious harm and an unreasonable risk of serious harm through grossly insufficient levels of security staff that result in lack of supervision and control.”
Mississippi has the third-highest prison population per capita in the country and neighboring Louisiana has the highest. Despite this, staffing shortages have been noted across the Gulf States region in the last several years.
Parchman has seen 12 suicide deaths and at least 10 homicide deaths in the last three years.
Two recent deaths in the Orleans Justice Center, in New Orleans, have also been attributed to longstanding and severe staffing shortages. Last fall, the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office, which manages the jail, reported 100 job openings.
In March, the Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola Prison, transferred incarcerated people to another facility due to a lack of staff. In December, a federal judge who previously called the Alabama prison system’s mental health care “horrendously inadequate” ordered the state’s corrections department to increase its staff by 2025.
This story was produced by the Gulf States Newsroom, a collaboration among Mississippi Public Broadcasting, WBHM in Alabama and WWNO and WRKF in Louisiana and NPR.
