By Jerry Mitchell,
Mississippi Today ,
This article is part of a reporting collaboration by The Mississippi Link, Mississippi Today, Clarion Ledger, Hattiesburg American and The Marshall Project – Jackson.
During the war, Denorris “Nod” Howell was strangled to death. No one was charged with his killing.
Howell, who grew up near Holly Springs, was one of 42 people who died by homicide in Mississippi prisons over the past decade, a toll uncovered by a reporting team that includes The Mississippi Link, The Marshall Project – Jackson, the Clarion Ledger, Hattiesburg American and Mississippi Today. Total convictions in those cases? Six.
“Oh, my God, there’s something wrong with that picture,” said Howell’s great aunt, Annie Moffitt, who runs Annie’s Home Cooking in Holly Springs, where he once worked.
Parchman’s gang war came after years of neglect by state officials, who slashed millions in funding and allowed conditions at the prison to deteriorate after federal courts ended oversight of the facility in 2011, according to an investigation by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, now a part of Mississippi Today, and ProPublica.
The U.S. Department of Justice later blamed the war and the violence leading up to it on inadequate staffing, cursory investigations, insufficient security measures, unfettered access to contraband and uncontrolled gang activity.
Mississippi Department of Corrections officials said they referred only one of the three homicides in three days to prosecutors. Overall, the agency referred 15 of the 42 homicides to prosecutors over the past decade, and said in a recent statement that it “remains committed to ensuring the safety of inmates in its custody.”
David Fathi, director of the ACLU National Prison Project, called these numbers inconceivably low. “I can’t imagine any other law enforcement agency failing to refer three-fourths of the homicides under its jurisdiction to prosecutors,” he said. “These victims’ lives are not seen as sufficiently valuable to warrant the effort.”
After the gang war, Gov. Tate Reeves hired the former head of Angola, Louisiana’s most notorious prison, to clean up Parchman and the other prisons. The Mississippi Legislature passed raises for correctional officers.
But the violence that initially declined under Corrections Commissioner Burl Cain’s leadership is now back on the rise. With five killings already, 2025 marks Mississippi’s worst year for prison homicides since 2021.
In 2012, a jury convicted Howell of manslaughter, rejecting his claim of self-defense. He was sentenced to 17 years and began serving that time at Parchman, one of the nation’s most infamous prisons.
After her son began serving his time in Parchman, two hours away, Wilkins began working locally at the Marshall County Correctional Facility, where she taught incarcerated men how to give haircuts.
The whole time there, she thought of her son, she said. “I was praying that he was safe.”
‘Ain’t nothing under control’
In the waning days of 2019, a war between the Vice Lords and the Gangster Disciples spread across Mississippi prisons.
In hopes of preventing the violence from spreading, Parchman officials locked down the men in their cells to prevent their movement.
The Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting received a series of text messages and videos during that war from people in the prisons and their loved ones.
A message sent on Jan. 2 identified a female correctional officer in Unit 29 “giving inmates keys right now, and my brothers have no one to alert.”
A similar message followed on a private Facebook page, accusing the same officer of cutting off lights.
Photos and videos showed men in red-and-white-striped uniforms, reserved for people convicted of the most violent crimes, walking freely through Unit 29, with no correctional officers in sight.
The message from inside Parchman continued: “If MDOC thinks they have control, they are very mistaken.”
In a video recorded during the unrest on a contraband mobile phone, a cell sits in darkness while other parts of the prison are lit.
Loud shouting can be heard as an incarcerated person inside the cell appears to be punching someone. A man can be heard saying, “I’ve got him in a chokehold.”
Another voice cheers him on: “Oh, yeah, oh, yeah. Dead. Oh, yeah. Dead. Deaaaaad.”
Despite the loud shouting throughout the incident captured on video, no officer can be seen responding.
At 3 a.m. on Jan. 3, an officer called additional staff to the Unit 29 building, where they found Howell’s body in his cell. His cellmate, who had been stabbed repeatedly and whose name was blacked out on the incident report, was taken by ambulance to the hospital. At 4:22 a.m., the coroner pronounced Howell dead.
The coroner ruled that Howell’s cellmate had strangled him to death in self-defense.
Detrick Munford, who was the captain over Unit 29 then and later served as Parchman’s deputy warden, said he heard on the evening of Jan. 2 about a female officer allegedly sharing her keys with prisoners. He said he confronted her and took her keys.
After that, he opened an investigation into the officer’s actions to determine if she had a relationship with a gang, he said. “When she found out, she quit.”
He sent his findings to the prison’s investigators, he said. “They take it from there.”
No charges were ever brought against the officer, who was never identified in any report. She said in text messages that prisoners lied about her, that she was never investigated by MDOC and that she wasn’t even at work that night.
“I was the one lied on,” she said. “No inmate ever got any keys.”
She confirmed that the deputy warden checked that she had her keys, but said it was after Howell’s death.
Munford, who served as deputy warden at Parchman from 2018 to 2022, said he knows of some cases where correctional officers did favors for gangs. He said he also knows of several cases where correctional officers enabled violence against those behind bars, but he doesn’t know of any cases where officers were prosecuted.
Munford said officers can cut off the lights to an individual cell.
‘He told me that he feared for his life’
On Jan. 3, 2020, Wilkins got a call from the chaplain that her son was dead. Since then, she has received no other details about his death and no autopsy report.
“I just felt empty,” she said.
She paused. “Sometimes it feels like it just happened yesterday.”
She had just talked to her son the night before, and he sounded nervous, she said. “He told me that he feared for his life.”
She said her son told her that the lights had been turned out and that a guard was letting men out of their cells.
Today, five years after his death, Wilkins continues to have questions. No one from the prison has ever explained what happened to her son, she said.
“Justice needs to be served,” she said. “My son had four children who loved him very dearly.”
Reporter Leonardo Bevilacqua contributed to this report.
Be the first to comment