Joe Paul will serve as interim president at University of Southern Mississippi.
Joe Paul, the former vice president for Student Affairs at the University of Southern Mississippi, will come out of retirement to serve as interim president of the state’s third-largest public university.
The Institutions of Higher Learning board of trustees announced Thursday that Paul, who served in student affairs for more than 40 years, would serve as interim president of the University of Southern Mississippi, replacing former President Rodney Bennett.
Bennett, who has served as USM president since 2013, announced in January he was stepping down before the termination of his current contract. Bennett will serve as president until July 15, according to the IHL press release, and Paul will begin as interim president on July 16.
Bennett, when he announced his resignation, initially said he would step down in June 2023.
“Dr. Paul’s vast experience through a lifetime of service to the institution makes him the perfect choice to lead the university during this transition period,” said IHL Board Chair Tommy Duff. “I appreciate him stepping up to the plate when asked and know that the university will be in steady hands with him at the helm. As decades of alumni can attest, he has great affection for the university and tremendous concern for its students.”
The IHL board will soon begin the search for a full-time USM president, according to the IHL news release sent out Thursday afternoon. Duff and Gee Ogletree will serve as co-chairs of an IHL board search subcommittee, and they’ll be joined by other IHL board members Jeanne Luckey, Alfred McNair Jr. and Steven Cunningham.
The search for a new USM chief administrator comes after the IHL board made its presidential search process more confidential through a series of policy changes earlier this year. In April, the board voted to make it so search committee members are anonymous, even to each other, and to decrease the role that campus advisory groups play in selecting the president.
Faculty are concerned these changes will make university presidents less accountable to students, faculty and staff.
Bennett, who became the 10th president of USM in 2013, was the first African American to lead a predominately white Mississippi university. Bennett earned his academic honors from the state of Tennessee university system and was serving as vice president of student affairs at the University of Georgia when tabbed to lead USM.
Duff praised Bennett for what he said was his many accomplishments, including the school earning “the distinguished R1 designation as a top-tier research university.”
The news release announcing Paul as the interim president said the IHL board decided on the transition plan earlier this month.
“I am honored to serve my alma mater as the IHL Board of Trustees completes its search for the University of Southern Mississippi’s next permanent leader,” Paul said in a statement. “I am eager to lead Southern Miss as we chase bold dreams, and I will be happy to return to chasing our grandsons once our next leader is on board. I am fully confident the IHL Board of Trustees will identify a dynamic leader as our 11th Southern Miss president.
“Our role is to ready the ship so that the next president finds an institution in good order, energized, and poised for this pivotal transition. I will pursue those ends with full vigor.”
Paul retired from the university in 2015. During his retirement, he has held part-time or volunteer positions with the University Foundation as a fundraiser, as Citizen Service Coordinator for the city of Hattiesburg and in various other roles.
Paul earned a doctorate in administration of higher education from the University of Alabama and was named the university’s Most Outstanding Doctoral Student in the field in 1985. Paul, a Bay St. Louis native, earned his undergraduate degree in communication and political science from USM in 1975, graduating magna cum laude.
Mississippi Today reporter Molly Minta contributed to this report.
Hattiesburg, Mississippi – On Thursday, June 30, the Hattiesburg City Council met in a special called meeting to receive the Fiscal Year 2021 audit, completed by Topp, McWhorter, Harvey, PLLC.
This financial audit will be the seventh audit completed since 2017, three of which were completed within the first 17 months of Mayor Toby Barker’s first administrative term.
“I am pleased that the City of Hattiesburg and TMH delivered another on-time audit for Fiscal Year 2021,” said Barker. “This audit, which is the seventh completed in the past five years, proved especially challenging due to the city’s much-needed changeover in accounting software. We are grateful to our staff for their tenacity and work ethic, particularly Comptroller Lisa Hansen, CAO Ann Jones, Interim CFO Malcom Berch and City Clerk Kermas Eaton.”
The seventh audits and receipt dates are listed below:
2015 audit received in December 2017 2016 audit received in July 2018 2017 audit received in November 2018 2018 audit received in June 2019 2019 audit received in June 2020 2020 audit received in May 2021
Audits for fiscal years 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021 were completed on time.
As I complete my fourth year as your State Auditor, I’d like to update you on some of the cases my investigators have been working on to help protect your money.
In November 2021, Special Agents from my office made two arrests in Hinds County. Former Hinds County employee Marketa Graham was arrested after being indicted for fraud, and Chris Smith, former Mississippi Board of Animal Health Director of Accounting and Finance, was arrested after he was indicted for embezzlement.
Graham is accused of submitting fraudulent invoices for cleaning services to the Hinds County Board of Supervisors from her own company. Despite the invoices being submitted and paid, no work was actually performed. Mississippi law would have prevented Graham or her company from being paid for these services even if they had been performed, so she allegedly manipulated the billing process to submit these invoices.
Graham was paid approximately $4,700 before Hinds County officials reported her alleged scheme to the Auditor’s office. Upon her arrest in November, Graham was issued a $9,661.44 demand letter.
Chris Smith was arrested after previously being served a demand letter. He is accused of embezzling from the Mississippi Board of Animal Health. The State Auditor’s office has already recovered $25,000 from Smith’s surety bond. Smith’s trial date is set for August 23, 2022.
My office also recently made two arrests in separate Rankin County cases. Former Mississippi State Hospital police officer Roberto Williams was arrested for fraud in February and former deputy tax collector Tiffany Loftin was arrested last November for embezzlement.
In a multi-jurisdictional case, Roberto Williams was actually arrested by authorities in Corsicana, Texas, and extradited back to Mississippi after he was indicted. Special Agents from my office presented a $3,135.62 demand letter to Williams when he arrived in Mississippi.
Williams is accused of submitting fraudulent timesheets to receive payment for the time he was not actually working. He allegedly left work for extended periods of time while he was “clocked in” and being paid by the police department. Williams’s purported scheme took place from April to June, 2020, soon after he was hired.
Tiffany Loftin was arrested by Special Agents from the State Auditor’s office in November of last year after video cameras in the Rankin County Tax Collector’s office showed her stuffing recently-collected cash into her pants. She pleaded guilty to embezzlement in March. She embezzled nearly $6,000 from Rankin County residents as they paid cash for county trash collection fees.
Tiffany Loftin is now convicted of a felony offense and will not be able to handle public money again.
As it is with so many of our cases, most were reported to my office by someone who was paying attention and realized something wasn’t right. I am thankful these individuals alerted my team of investigators. I am also thankful for the work the investigators do to help safeguard public funds, ensuring that those who choose to break the law are held accountable.
As State Auditor, protecting your tax dollars is my highest priority. You deserve a team that works just as hard to protect your money as you worked to earn it in the first place. And that is my continued commitment to you.
Shad White is the 42nd State Auditor of Mississippi
Children with cystic fibrosis, rare genetic conditions and transplant recipients who receive care at the University of Mississippi Medical Center will now face astronomical medical bills or be forced to get their care elsewhere if they are insured by Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Mississippi.
Federal law required UMMC, the state’s safety net hospital, to continue honoring in-network rates for certain patients for a 90-day period after it went out of network on April 1 with Blue Cross, the state’s largest private insurer. That required “continuity of care” period expires Friday, putting many adults and children in a tough situation with no timeline of if and when it will end.
UMMC spokesperson Marc Rolph said the institution had “no comment” when asked whether any exceptions would be made for certain patients to continue their care at the in-network rate. He also responded “no comment” to questions about the financial losses UMMC has incurred as a result of this dispute and whether there are any updates on the status of mediation with the insurance company.
Cayla Mangrum, manager of corporate communications at Blue Cross, said they are prohibited from discussing mediation. She did not answer a request for comment on the continuity of care period expiring.
In the meantime, patients and their families are scrambling to make plans for what’s next.
Emmett Rymer was born with hydrocephalus and requires frequent care with his team of doctors at UMMC. Credit: Courtesy of Ashton Rymer
Three-year-old Emmett Rymer was diagnosed with hydrocephalus while in his mother’s womb and has been seeing doctors at UMMC since before he was even born. He will now be traveling to Baton Rouge to see an entirely new team who will monitor the shunt in his brain and his seizures, his mother Ashton said.
Jett Brown is a 20-month-old who has a rare genetic condition called Pompe disease. His mother Brittany has started the process of transferring his care to LeBonheur Children’s Hospital in Memphis, a three-hour drive from their home in Madison.
Christy Van, whose 8-year-old son Cooper has cystic fibrosis, is trying to put together the puzzle pieces to keep him at UMMC, the only accredited cystic fibrosis center in Mississippi. She can’t remove him from her husband’s Blue Cross insurance until later this year during open enrollment, and even then it wouldn’t take effect until January.
Cooper goes to appointments at UMMC at least every three months and often more frequently to see a dietitian who works with him to ensure he’s gaining an adequate amount of weight since gastrointestinal issues can make it difficult.
Trae McWilliams of Yazoo City won’t be able to go to his regular appointment in August with the pediatric craniofacial team at UMMC, the only such team in the state. McWilliams has been seeing those specialists and others at UMMC all 12 years of his life for several conditions, including a submucousal cleft palate, and has undergone five surgeries at the hospital.
His mother Samantha said she will likely reschedule the appointment for later in the year in hopes that UMMC is back in network with her insurer by then.
Samantha McWilliams, left, and Trae McWilliams, right, of Yazoo City. Trae has been treated at UMMC for a submucousal cleft palate since he was three months old. Credit: Courtesy of Samantha McWilliams
“I would hate to know how much the bill (for that appointment) would cost (out of network) because you’re seeing, like, 14 different specialists at one time,” she said.
Rymer’s mother Ashton said their pediatrician in Natchez has already made the referral to the children’s hospital in Baton Rouge for her son, who has had three brain surgeries at UMMC – including one on the day he was born – and suffers seizures that land him in the hospital for days and require several follow-up appointments.
“Not being able to go (to UMMC) is not only inconvenient but detrimental to his care and his health,” she said.
Her son is actually doubly insured through both her and her husband’s jobs, both of which are Blue Cross plans. But the thousands they pay each year won’t help him continue his care with his UMMC team.
Insurance Commissioner Mike Chaney has warned Blue Cross it could be violating state law if certain providers like UMMC are out of network to its members. In a March letter to the company’s CEO, he expressed concern specifically about UMMC’s Level IV Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, the pediatric and adult congenital heart programs, the children’s cancer care program, the sickle cell anemia program and the organ transplant program.
State law requires health insurance companies to maintain a network of providers that assures “adequacy, accessibility and quality” of care. The law specifies certain services that must be accessible within a certain time and distance of the insured. Blue Cross has maintained it is adequately meeting these requirements even when out of network with UMMC.
Chaney said he could not comment on specifics regarding the dispute or the status of the mediation between the two parties, but that if he believes insurance members don’t have access to legally required care, he will act.
“We will take some pretty hard-line actions against all the parties on network adequacy,” he told Mississippi Today on Wednesday.
Jett Brown, who has Pompe disease, sees therapists and a slew of specialists, including a neurogeneticist, at UMMC, which is home to the state’s only children’s hospital. He also receives twice-monthly, $20,000 infusions to ensure he is able to walk, swallow and perform other basic tasks.
Jett’s mother Brittany Brown squeezed in as many appointments as possible over the last three months in case the contract dispute was not resolved by the continuity of care deadline. Several weeks ago, she received a letter in the mail from UMMC.
“When the continuing care period ends June 30, 2022, all future care, except for emergency services, provided by UMMC to Blue Cross commercial health plan members will no longer be considered as in-network care, but instead will be out-of-network care,” a June 15 letter from Dr. Alan Jones, associate vice chancellor for clinical affairs at UMMC, stated.
Then, in bold: “Therefore, beginning July 1, 2022 with the exception of emergency services, you will be responsible for the full bill for items or services provided by UMMC, less applicable UMMC discounts.”
Jett Brown, pictured here in May 2022, has a rare genetic condition called Pompe disease that affects his muscles. Credit: Courtesy of Brittany Brown
Brown knows if Jett continues at UMMC, she’ll have to pay large bills for him to continue seeing his pulmonologist, cardiologist, neurologist and neurogeneticist. She’s still unclear what will happen with his infusions as the UMMC doctor is involved in those but they are administered by a non-UMMC clinic.
Brown is not aware of any other neurogeneticist in the state, and she knows that if she were to switch him to other specialists, there’s no guarantee those doctors would be familiar with the intricacies of Pompe.
“We can go to Baptist, and maybe there’s a cardiologist there, but they probably don’t know anything about Pompe. It’s just not the right fit for him,” she said.
She said she’s already spoken to one of Jett’s doctors about transferring his care to LeBonheur Children’s Hospital in Memphis, a three-hour drive from their home.
“At this point the doctor’s hands are tied. They don’t have control over that – they’re unhappy about it, too, I’m sure, because they know these kids and they know what to look for and what to ask,” said Brown.
A new report from The Commonwealth Fund ranked Mississippi last in the nation for health system performance.
The yearly scorecards released by the Fund typically rank Mississippi near the bottom or last across health care access and quality measures, but this year the scorecard also judged how health systems fared during the pandemic.
Among the report’s findings:
Between August 2020 and March 2022, there were 323 days in which at least 80 percent of ICU beds in Mississippi were occupied. Only Georgia, Rhode Island, Alabama and Texas fared worse by this metric.
Every state has experienced higher-than-expected mortality from all causes due to COVID-19 and the interruptions to routine health care, but Mississippi saw the highest rate of excess deaths in the nation between Feb. 1, 2020 and April 23, 2022. The number of excess deaths varies fivefold across states, from 110 per 100,000 people in Hawaii to 596 per 100,000 in Mississippi. The state saw the highest rates of excess deaths from both COVID-19 and treatable causes like heart disease.
Mississippi saw a 55% increase in drug overdose deaths between 2019-2020, the highest in the nation. In 2020, there were more overdose deaths involving opioids than any other substance at 69%. Deaths involving synthetic opioids such as fentanyl accounted for 53% of all overdose deaths.
Richard Roberson, vice president of state policy and in-house counsel for the Mississippi Hospital Association, said that the failure to expand Medicaid has been a major factor in keeping many Mississippians uninsured and weakening the state’s hospital system.
“The federal government has offered us an option for a decade, and that option is Medicaid expansion,” Roberson said. “If you don’t like that option, then come up with something else. We’ve had a decade to come up with something else, and I haven’t seen leadership on that issue.”
Mississippi is one of 12 states that haven’t expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, leaving hundreds of thousands of Mississippians without coverage. Those in the coverage gap make too little to enroll in Medicaid, but too much to qualify for subsidized health insurance plans through the Affordable Care Act marketplace.
Gov. Tate Reeves and Speaker of the House Philip Gunn oppose Medicaid expansion and have long maintained that the state cannot afford the costs despite studies that indicate otherwise.
If Medicaid were expanded, the federal government would cover 90% of the health care costs related to expansion, while Mississippi would have to cover the remaining 10%. Last September, one of Mississippi’s top economists released a study showing that the 10% state match would be more than covered by health care-related savings to the state and new tax revenue generated.
Not only have elected officials failed to offer meaningful alternatives to Medicaid expansion, they haven’t seriously considered the alternatives presented to them, Roberson said.
Roberson points to the Mississippi Cares plan as one example, a provider-sponsored health plan that the Mississippi Hospital Association proposed in 2019. The plan would have extended coverage to Missisippians earning up to 138% of the federal poverty level.
Under the plan, enrollees would have the same benefits as Medicaid enrollees, except for non-emergency transportation services. Dental and vision coverage would be included as well.
Mississippi Cares would have primarily been paid for through a Medicaid waiver program, with hospitals themselves making up for any excess costs that would have otherwise fallen on the state. Patients would have only paid a $20 monthly fee and $100 copay for certain non-emergency hospital visits.
Roberson said that Mississippi Cares was never seriously considered by the Legislature.
“‘No’ is not a solution and just sticking your head in the sand doesn’t make it (the problem) go away,” Roberson said.
In Mississippi, it costs hospitals $1,311 to provide one day of inpatient care according to Kaiser Family Foundation data. This is the lowest cost in the nation, and less than half of the national average, but Roberson said Mississippi’s hospitals don’t bring in enough revenue for the low costs to keep them afloat.
“It doesn’t matter how low your costs are,” Roberson said. “If you can’t have enough revenue to cover your costs, you’re still going to be underwater. So that’s where a lot of our hospitals find themselves.”
Intern Allison Santa-Cruz contributed to this report.
An unserved arrest warrant in the lynching case of Black teenager Emmett Till nearly 70 years ago has been found in the basement of a Mississippi courthouse.
The original warrant is for Carolyn Bryant Donham and is dated Aug. 29, 1955. It was found last week by a search group in a file folder in a box in the Leflore County courthouse, the Associated Press reported Wednesday.
The group that found the warrant included members of the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation and two of Till’s relatives: Deborah Watts, Till’s cousin, co-founder and leader of foundation, and her daughter, Teri Watts.
In March, Watts, other family members and supporters visited the Mississippi State Capitol to deliver a petition to state officials and call for Donham to be charged for Till’s lynching.
“We made a promise to Mamie (Till) that we would persist, and that’s why we’re here today,” Deborah Watts said in March.
Donham is now in her 80s and most recently lived in North Carolina.
She is the former wife of Roy Bryant, one of the men who kidnapped and killed Till in the Mississippi Delta in 1955. Till was 14 years old and was visiting family from Chicago when he whistled at Donham inside the store where she was working.
Donham testified in court Till grabbed her and made unwanted advances toward her. In a 2017 book by Timothy Tyson, Donham said the allegations were false. She later disputed the claim and recanted her story, according to the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting.
The U.S. Department of Justice has investigated Till’s case multiple times but did not file additional charges.
Former Gov. Phil Bryant’s own words about his role in the state’s welfare fraud scandal are a great understatement.
And now at the three-year mark since investigators began nibbling at the edges of what state Auditor Shad White has called the largest public fraud case in state history, things still don’t look good. But there remain as many questions as answers on how at least $77 million in federal welfare dollars was stolen or misspent. And by whom.
The questions in chief: Is the case being thoroughly investigated, top to bottom, and will all those responsible be held accountable? Have punches been pulled because of politics or celebrity?
Revelations about involvement of Bryant and former NFL star quarterback Brett Favre have fueled these questions. Text messages obtained by Mississippi Today have revealed that Bryant was at least briefed through texts about the flow of state money from welfare officials he oversaw to a private pharmaceutical venture Favre was backing. Bryant was set to accept stock in the company hours after he left office — until the auditor made arrests in the case.
Credit: Graphic by Bethany Atkinson
The state auditor and Hinds County district attorney charged six people in early 2020, and four have pleaded guilty to the state charges – some as serious as bribery and racketeering. The state recently filed a lawsuit to attempt to “claw back” $24 million in misspent money from 38 people or companies, including Favre and the pharmaceutical venture’s owner. But to date, neither Bryant nor Favre have faced criminal charges or, at least to the public’s knowledge, the same scrutiny others faced.
It’s unclear where any continuing federal or state investigations stand at the three-year mark. No further arrests have been made since February of 2020. Interim Southern District U.S. Attorney Darren J. LaMarca and the U.S. Department of Justice declined comment.
This has raised questions, in particular, about state Auditor White, who spearheaded the initial investigation and charges with a local DA — for eight months — without involving federal authorities despite the case involving millions of federal welfare dollars. White has explained that he made arrests to stop the flow of funds to the allegedly corrupt nonprofits and afterward turned all evidence over to federal authorities.
But questions about if and when White’s office alerted other authorities to Bryant’s text messages remain. The auditor’s office refused to turn the messages over to Mississippi Today after a public records request, and the outlet has a pending Ethics Commission records complaint against the office.
Did White and his investigators know Bryant was in talks with the company at the center of the embezzlement scandal when they made the arrests, which derailed Bryant’s business arrangement with the company?
Also, there are questions about a forensic audit ordered up by the state Department of Human Services and White’s office, whether the state put too many limitations on the firm conducting the probe.
Should auditor have informed feds he was investigating for months?
White’s close relationship with Bryant — who directly supervised his welfare director as taxpayer money flowed to people and programs the governor favored — has been questioned. Recently, three former state auditors said White should have recused himself or limited his involvement in the initial investigation to avoid perception of conflict of interest.
White ran Bryant’s 2015 reelection campaign, worked for Bryant in the lieutenant governor’s office and was initially appointed auditor by Bryant, who then helped White win election to the post.
White’s office gathered the messages between Bryant and Favre in early 2020, but some parties to the cases hadn’t seen them until almost two years later, sources told Mississippi Today, raising questions about when the auditor’s office alerted other authorities to their existence.
White, who has often declined comment citing a long-running state judge’s gag order on the case, on social media blasted such questioning in Mississippi Today articles, calling it “garbage reporting” and a liberal attack. He said he would no longer speak with Mississippi Today.
“Guess what? I did hand it to another law enforcement agency,” White tweeted recently. “After our initial arrests, I gave the FBI access to everything we have over two years ago. They have even worked from my office on the case. Between all of us, this case will be fully investigated. Period. … The reporting contains a blatant lie. ‘Questions about if and when White’s office alerted other authorities to [Bryant’s] text messages remain.’ Questions do not ‘remain.’ The FBI has had access to everything we have for years. That answers the ‘questions.’”
But experts in major federal investigations and criminal forensic auditing said there are some unusual or questionable aspects of the case to date.
“What’s really unusual is for (the state) not to reach out to the feds in a matter like this,” said law professor and former Alabama U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance, referring to White’s office and a local DA bringing indictments and arrests without involving the FBI or U.S. attorney.
“Everybody likes to handle their own cases when they’ve found something, but in many ways the feds are able to bring in better resources,” Vance said. “… The federal government has better resources but can also move more quickly. It also typically has better statutory remedies — meaning people spend more time in prison if that matters to you in these types of cases.”
Vance said Mississippi’s welfare fraud case “implicates uniquely federal interests when you’ve got federal money involved.”
“The state auditor went to the DA, and the DA didn’t call (the feds) as a courtesy, either?” Vance said. “That’s a little unusual.”
Hinds County District Attorney Jody Owens told Mississippi Today he did email a courtesy notice to the U.S. attorney’s office, but not until a day or two before the state secured indictments. This was after the state auditor had investigated for eight months. At the time, in early February 2020, then U.S. attorney Mike Hurst issued a release complaining, “We in the United States Attorney’s Office and the FBI only learned (the day of the arrests) from media reports about the indictments and arrests, at the same time the general public did.”
Hurst in the release said his office caught wind of the investigation and reached out to the auditor and DA and was given some information about the investigation the day before the arrests, but “… Neither the FBI nor the United States Attorney’s Office was contacted by the state Auditor or the Hinds County District Attorney about this investigation, although millions of federal dollars are alleged to have been stolen.”
James T. Wood, founder of Utah-based Venture Forensics, is a former longtime FBI forensic accountant and former head of the FBI’s Forensic Accountant Support team at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C.
Wood said the state not involving federal authorities in the initial investigation and indictments is “an odd scenario.”
“I understand from reading about this that (White) said the feds take a long time to do anything,” Wood said. “Part of that is that they are thorough and when they bring an indictment they want to make sure their ducks are in a row … I do think it’s odd that they weren’t notified … The magnitude of the dollar amount here is not insignificant. It would be one thing if this were just $10,000 in TANF funds, the feds might not care.”
Vance said that in many states, federal and state authorities have good relationships and can hand off to each other to avoid perception of political conflicts of interest.
“But this is a different situation than that sort of usual reciprocal behavior,” Vance said, “because this implicates uniquely federal interests when you’ve got federal money involved.”
But both Vance and Wood said that just because the welfare scandal has dragged on for three years without federal authorities announcing action doesn’t mean the feds aren’t working on it.
“You won’t get any insight from them until there’s either an indictment or not,” Vance said.
Wood said: “I guess I might be surprised if there isn’t a federal investigation going on given the magnitude and the fact that it’s federal funds.”
But the question remains: Did the state’s decision to bring charges on its own stymie or delay federal intervention, or give others involved a chance to take cover?
Why was the forensic audit of welfare spending limited?
Other questions remaining about the case involve a forensic audit ordered up by DHS and the state auditor’s office after initial malfeasance was spotted.
The prominent national accounting firm Clifton Larson Allen was hired for up to $2.1 million to get to the bottom of where the state’s welfare money went. This report is what led the state’s lawsuit to try to recoup some of the money from people and companies.
But the forensic audit firm was limited in what and whom it was able to examine in its probe. In its audit reports delivered in September of 2021, CLA noted that it was not given access to former DHS Director John Davis’ computer hard drive and it was initially limited in whose emails it could examine.
“CLA was unable to obtain a copy of John Davis’ MDHS hard drive, as it was in the possession of the (Office of State Auditor) investigative division. Additionally, the scope of work limited CLA’s review of emails to include only John Davis’ MDHS emails. If other electronic evidence had been made available to CLA, additional information not currently known to CLA could impact the findings communicated in this report.”
MDHS explained that it asked CLA to review John Davis’ work emails as a starting point, and said that the firm was given freedom to review anything else in the agency’s possession the auditors deemed relevant. MDHS deferred Mississippi Today’s questions about why the auditor’s office did not let CLA examine John Davis’ hard drive to the auditor’s office and the auditor’s office has refused to respond to Mississippi Today’s questions.
CLA also noted that it was not provided records from Mississippi Community Education Center, the nonprofit at the center of the fraud scandal, and that MCEC did not cooperate with its probe. It’s unclear how many of these documents the auditor possessed but did not turn over to CLA – such as MCEC’s contract with Brett Favre for promotional activities, which was not discussed in the forensic audit. The firm also noted it was not allowed access to John Davis’ personal finances.
“To the extent that CLA was limited in their ability to review records, MDHS was disappointed that the issues could not be fully explored in the forensic audit,”MDHS Director Bob Anderson told Mississippi Today in a statement.
In an addendum in late April of this year, CLA said it was allowed “expanded email review” by MDHS, with the agency providing the firm emails from a few others, including two other MDHS employees. The addendum still did not explore Bryant’s or Favre’s involvement in welfare spending.
Wood, who reviewed CLA’s audit reports, said, “I would say that scope limitation is odd.”
“I think that’s a fair question,” Wood said. “… The fact that (CLA) noted it in their report is what we call a scope limitation. It’s odd that they were not allowed access to the entire hard drive … It’s odd because the (Office of State Auditor) had it, so it wasn’t a situation where it was destroyed or the hard drive failed or something. It sounds like they have it, and I’m puzzled why they wouldn’t let them look at it.”
Wood said it also appears unusual that CLA was thwarted in trying to get nonprofit MCEC’s records.
“Were they not allowed to go up the ladder to the governor?” Wood said. “Sounds like from what you guys have uncovered, and from what’s cited in the OSA’s (earlier audit) report — it mentions Favre Enterprises — it strikes me as odd there’s no mention in CLA’s report of any of that. They did mention that they’ve reviewed the OSA’s report, and maybe they didn’t want to duplicate things.”
“There may be a reason why, but I’m surprised that there’s nothing discussed in their report about that,” Wood said. “OSA’s report mentioned a number of entertainers and things that they found were questionable … Usually a forensic audit is going to look at as much as possible. I’m not criticizing CLA’s work — It looks like they did it the right way as far as I can see.
“… It’s an interesting situation where OSA brought those actions, and then the state hires an independent audit firm, but then limits the scope of that audit,” Wood said.
The forensic audit helped the state Attorney General’s office craft its civil lawsuit trying to recoup misspent money intended to help poor people. While the lawsuit highlights the taxpayer dollars going to the private pharmaceutical venture, it does not scrutinize the role of former Gov. Bryant. Besides Favre, the lawsuit targets former football stars Marcus Dupree and Paul Lacoste, retired WWE wrestler Ted “The Million Dollar Man” DiBiase Sr. and his two sons, among others.
None of the audit reports or MDHS’s lawsuit contain relevant details reported in Mississippi Today’s investigative series, “The Backchannel,” such as Brett Favre’s communication with Bryant about pharmaceutical company Prevacus; a calendar entry in which John Davis recorded that the governor and Favre requested he meet with Prevacus; the athlete’s communication with Nancy New, John Davis and the governor about funding the volleyball facility; Nancy New’s relationship with the governor’s great nephew; or Bryant’s casual requests to John Davis to fund his favored vendors.
Credit: Graphic by Bethany Atkinson
The lawsuit also fails to target numerous others involved in alleged misspending of welfare dollars. Notably, two entities that received welfare money through activities referenced in criminal proceedings — the University of Southern Mississippi Athletic Foundation and tech company Lobaki Inc. were not named in the suit.
Nonprofit MCEC’s director Nancy New and assistant director Zach New admitted to defrauding the government of $865,000 for a Lobaki virtual reality center and program. Zach New admitted to fraud by transferring $4 million in welfare money for the construction of a volleyball stadium at USM, disguised as a lease.
State officials have not said whether the state will try to recoup all misspent money from these entities or others that received payments auditors have questioned.
The News also recently pleaded guilty in a separate federal case involving public funding they bilked for their private schools. But in the state case, the News received a favorable plea deal that keeps them out of the state penitentiary, allowing them to avoid any more prison time for charges related to the welfare scheme, as long as they cooperate with the ongoing investigation. Such a deal suggest they may have valuable information prosecutors could use to pursue someone higher up the chain.
Bryant in a lengthy sit-down interview with Mississippi Today appeared to at least understand why people have more questions about the case.
“Now I can clearly see why you’re following those trails,” Bryant said. “And it doesn’t look good. Should I have caught it? Absolutely. I should’ve caught it. Was I extremely busy as governor? I can’t even describe to you what it is like on a daily basis as governor. This was not on the top of my list. This was not something that I was looking at every day. I’d get a text and it just kind of glance through it. I’d say, ‘Good,’ and I would go on and try to work on something really important for state government.”
All 50 states now allow the sale of home-baked foods to the public. At least to a certain extent.
Mississippi has had a cottage food law for a number of years, and made it slightly better two years ago, but trails many other states – including all neighboring states – when it comes to freedom for entrepreneurs.
Cottage food laws allow individuals to bake and sell foods made in their own kitchen without government inspections.
A new report from the Institute for Justice gives Mississippi a C for homemade food laws, which stands out among neighboring states. Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Tennessee all received B’s for their laws. The grades were based on allowable food varieties, sales and venue restrictions, and regulatory burdens.
Receiving an A were Wyoming, Montana, Oklahoma, Utah, and North Dakota. Each of these states has some form of “food freedom” laws that generally do not have restrictions on what you can sell or where you can sell it.
In recent years, we have seen progress. The legislature has expanded the sales cap for cottage food operators from $20,000, which was one of the lowest caps in the country, to $35,000. While any increase is a positive step, half the states do not have a sales cap.
The truth is this works fine for most cottage food operators who traditionally do this as a side business to support their family, but it is an artificial cap created by the government that serves as a disincentive for entrepreneurs.
Another issue is that foods can only be sold in certain settings such as farmers markets or via word of mouth. Operators are now allowed to advertise online, a change from the 2020 bill, but they are not allowed to actually sell over the internet. For the past two years, there have been unsuccessful attempts in the legislature to allow online sales, something we are all use to today.
Alabama had similar laws to Mississippi. If anything, Mississippi’s laws were a little better. Alabama, for example, still had a $20,000 cap. Both states prohibited online sales and shipping of cottage food products.
That changed. In Alabama.
A new law in Alabama removed the sales cap, and put Alabama in line with the national sentiment. But it will also remove the online sales and shipping restriction. Something we’ve been unable to accomplish in Mississippi.
“In December alone, over 20 people requested to purchase my baked goods and have them shipped, but I had to turn them away because of the way the law is written. I lost $400 in sales,” one cottage food operator testified in Alabama, Melissa Humble.
Her business will be able to grow. And that is part of the reason Mississippi is stuck with a C while Alabama received a B.
INDIANOLA – The new crop of workers arrived with clipped accents and small khaki shorts.
Richard Strong remembers the young men – farmers back home – had never seen a massive 28,000-pound tractor until traveling some 8,000 miles to Mississippi.
As kids, Richard and his brother, Gregory, earned calloused palms chopping cotton in the swelter of southern summers. As adults, they spent 24 years filling acres with cotton, soybeans and corn on Pitts Farms – just like their daddy had.
“Farming is actually in our DNA,” said Richard Strong, now 51. “I could close my eyes and drive a tractor.”
But the brothers haven’t been on a tractor or in the fields in over two years. They say they unknowingly trained themselves out of jobs when the Pitts family hired South Africans through a visa program.
The Pitts paid their foreign workforce nearly $12 an hour while their local workers – usually Black men – made just $7.25 to $9.50 per hour, according to a Department of Labor audit that spanned 2020 and 2021. The audit also found four local workers lost out on shifts when the temporary workers arrived.
But the Strongs and other Black workers say the pay gap existed from the first day the South Africans started at the family-owned farm several years before. Records show the Pitts started seeking foreign workers as early as 2014. Locals got an occasional pay bump on the weekends, but mostly took home federal minimum wage as the farm started giving them fewer shifts, according to years of paystubs obtained by Mississippi Today.
The Strongs and six others – who worked for the Pitts for more than 100 combined years – say they were pushed out of their jobs completely.
Richard and Gregory Strong of Indianola. Both brothers once worked for Pitts Farms, where they say they witnessed white South Africans being hired, and paid more, to do the very work the and other Black workers were doing. Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi Today
“I just want to know how you do this with a clear conscience,” said Willie Mae Ward, daughter of a former Pitts worker. “I see it as slave driving.”
Pitts Farms is not the only Delta farm that has misused the program. A Mississippi Today investigation found at least five farms in the Delta paid their local workforce less money than workers who came to the state on foreign farm work permits – called H-2A visas – over the past few years.
All but one of those farms worked with an agency that specializes in recruiting South Africans, who are usually young, white and speak English. They’re eager for the American dollar, which holds 15 times the value of the South African rand.
Across the Delta, farm owners say they’re responding to a generational shift from farming and a shortage of willing labor. Their local workforce is aging and foreign workers jump at the chance to come work in Mississippi.
But poor recruitment efforts among local workers, evidence of low wages, and a labor culture rooted in racism mean men like the Strongs wonder if there’s a future for them in the fields, or whether decades of family history end here.
The brothers and their coworkers are named in a discrimination lawsuit against Pitts Farms. It was filed last year by lawyers with the Mississippi Center for Justice. The lawsuit alleges men, ranging in age from 42 to 71, were replaced by a younger and whiter workforce, in part by exploiting the visa program to import foreign laborers.
Black workers have been sounding alarms across the Delta for the last year.
This April, the lawyers handling the lawsuit against Pitts Farms filed another – this time, on behalf of five Black catfish farm workers at Harris Russell Farms in Sunflower. The workers made up to $3.38 less an hour than their South African counterparts, according to the lawsuit.
The H-2A program is supposed to fill gaps for farmers when they cannot find enough local workers for seasonal positions. The program mandates a premium hourly wage, produced by a formula. This year in Mississippi, that wage rose to $12.45 per hour. Labor regulations mandate farms hiring H-2A workers must offer jobs to prior local workers at that adjusted rate and cannot pay current workers below it.
Yet, another Black worker from a different Delta farm settled outside of court this year because his employer paid white South Africans more than him per hour. A recent Department of Labor investigation found two other catfish farmers – one in Indianola and the other in Tunica – paying local workers less money than those brought in through the foreign visa program, according to records obtained by Mississippi Today.
“There has been a wholesale failure to adequately recruit U.S. farmworkers for H-2A jobs, particularly in the Mississippi Delta,” said Ty Pinkins, one of the Mississippi Center for Justice attorneys. “There are plenty of Delta residents with extensive experience who would eagerly accept a farm labor job that paid between $11 and $13 per hour.”
A South African worker heads to the fields in Sharkey County, Wednesday, Oct. 13, 2021. Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi Today
The Mississippi Delta is one of the country’s poorest regions with unemployment rates ranging from 4% to 12% across its 18 counties.
The Pitts lawsuit was filed in September 2021 and is still moving forward in court. The farm, which has been family owned and run out of Indianola since at least 1987, declined to respond to Mississippi Today’s questions through their lawyer, but did offer a statement.
“We strongly disagree with the plaintiffs’ claims and we look forward to presenting the full set of facts in the course of the litigation and having this matter decided according to the law,” attorney Tim Threadgill said via email.
The other farms Mississippi Today found underpaying local workers either declined to comment or never responded to a reporter.
So far this season, four of the five farms – including Pitts – have applied for foreign workers. The labor department has approved them all.
Nationwide, use of the H-2A program is exploding.
It has more than doubled in size over the past decade, breaking a record last year when the U.S. issued nearly 258,000 of the temporary farm work visas.
In Mississippi, 368 farms asked for H2-A workers for the 2020-21 season, according to application data analyzed by Mississippi Today. Only 14 were denied.
For the roughly 34,000 farms across Mississippi, about 400 cases have been opened by the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division in the past 15 years. Among that fraction, a Mississippi Today analysis found 81% of the cases ended with farms found breaking labor regulations. That’s about 10% higher than the national rate.
Critics say the fines for underpaying U.S. workers – $1,898 per offense – or failing to call back local workers for jobs are barely a deterrent. When farmers do get caught breaking wage rules, investigation records show they feign ignorance.
“For some of these employers, it’s like speeding down the highway when there’s not a lot of police out,” said Jim Knoepp, a lawyer and visa program expert with the Southern Poverty Law Center. “It’s a good gamble they’ll never get caught.”
Richard Strong would work for another farm if he could. Farmers talk, he said. As far as he can tell, he and his brother are blacklisted.
Strong remembers a Pitts Farms manager telling him he was taking the farm into the “new millennium.”
“A lot of stuff was going to change,” Strong recalled. “And there was a lot of people who wasn’t going to be a part of the farm.”
That meant men like Wesley Reed, 71, and Andrew Johnson, 67. Men who were born into the Jim Crow South and came of age during the earliest years of desegregation. Men who have only ever farmed.
They may not be as spry as they were 40 years ago, but they know their way around a row-crop tractor. Both managed to find other jobs with farmers who don’t use South Africans.
“At the time I started, it was about the only job I could get because I have no education,” Johnson said as he refueled a John Deere tractor.
Andrew Johnson, farmer in Indianola, plowing a field in preparation for soy bean planting. Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi Today
He spent two decades working for the Pitts. He can’t read, but taught himself how to set up a tractor’s satellite settings.
Johnson and Reed cannot afford to retire. They’ve never earned enough to save much.
One of their attorneys, Gregory Schell, points to payroll records Pitts Farms produced during the court case’s discovery: individual H-2A workers earned over $41,000 working for Pitts Farms in 2019.
Reed, Schell said, earned $11,000 that year, as the Pitts stopped giving him as many shifts.
That was his last year with the farm. Johnson’s, too. Both had planned to come back in 2020.
Reed – who had already asked for, and been denied, a raise – says he was told that year they weren’t sure they’d need him anymore. The South Africans were coming, Reed recalled.
Johnson waited for a phone call to return to work that never came.
Before Richard Strong found a pay stub that confirmed the South Africans were making higher wages, Reed had his suspicions.
A month after the lawsuit was filed, Reed sat in his shotgun living room, still in his dirtied denim overalls from a day plowing the fields.
“Did you know, when the South Africans started, they’d be paid more? How did you know?” Reed’s daughter, Willie Mae, asked.
He smirked.
“Skin color,” he said.
Wesley Reed and his daughter, Willie Mae Ward, sit in the family living room. Credit: Sara DiNatale/Mississippi Today
As attorneys with the Mississippi Center for Justice were piecing together the Pitts Farms lawsuit in early 2021, investigators from the Department of Labor were beginning an audit.
It’s unclear what prompted DOL to look into Pitts Farms and whether it was related to the lawsuit. The department’s Wage and Hour Division, which handles H-2A program violations, has a hotline – 1-866-4-USWAGE – anyone can call to anonymously report mistreatment to help steer investigators.
The audit of the farm’s payroll began in February 2021. The entire investigation was done remotely. The agency says that was because of COVID-19.
Mississippi Today obtained a copy of the Pitts Farms audit through a public records request.
On June 4, 2021, investigators had a conference call with Pitts Farms to explain that the Indianola business was facing 18 labor violations, owed local workers $76,000 in missing wages, and was being fined $25,000.
Investigators wrote in their report Lisa Tharp, the office manager, said she and Pitts Farms were “not aware that local U.S. corresponding workers needed to be paid the same as H-2A workers.”
But every year from 2014 to 2019 the Pitts applied for H-2A workers the farm’s owner, Will Pitts, signed agreements on its applications confirming that job opportunities for its local workers had “no less the same benefits, wages, and working conditions” as the incoming H-2A workers.
Despite Pitts Farms’ admission, the audit only looked at two seasons of the farm’s payroll: 2020 and 2021.
The two catfish farm owners in the Delta who were told to pay a combined $102,000 in back wages to their local workers in 2020 had a similar response when confronted about underpaying workers, according to investigation reports. The catfish cases also examined two years of payroll.
In a statement, the labor department said each of its investigations is driven by “the availability of evidence, including records and testimony.” Generally, the agency said, it applies a two-year investigation period as its standard scope.
“Had they gone back even one more year, they would have picked up on every one of our clients being underpaid,” said Schell, one of the men’s attorneys.
Of the eight men included in the Pitts Farms case, only one got a portion of the $76,000 in wages the investigators found missing from workers’ paychecks, according to Schell.
Before asking for foreign workers, Pitts – like all H-2A farms – was required to offer jobs to the locals who had worked at the farm before, usually by mail. Investigators found Pitts hadn’t done that, either.
The farm argued that the local workers who lived on the farm’s property were drawing unemployment and did not want to work out of fear of COVID-19 exposure. Yet, as the investigators pointed out, the violations occurred before the pandemic began.
Schell called the audit a perfunctory investigation.
He estimates the men in the lawsuit are owed more than $100,000 in unpaid wages. There is a larger amount being sought in addition that would cover lost hours. Schell said his team is still calculating that figure.
“I’m doing the math and the Pitts came out way ahead,” he said.
When COVID-19’s omicron variant closed the U.S. borders to South Africans, Mississippi farm owners panicked.
They had become so reliant on South African workers that the ability to harvest crops was dependent upon their arrival. In response, Mississippi Farm Bureau Federation President Mike McCormick wrote a letter to the state’s members of Congress, begging that South African farm workers be exempt from any potential travel bans.
The State Department made provisions within days so that the farm workers could travel without issue.
The visa program is popular because it brings in workers for eight to 10 months and sends them home during the winter season, McCormick told Mississippi Today
“It fits the farm industry,” he said. “No work for four months? That’s a hard thing to justify (to local workers). Maybe back in the old days, but as expensive as things are today, everybody needs to collect a paycheck every week.”
Farmers say as their longtime workers reach retirement, there isn’t a young workforce eager – or with the proper skills – to take their places, which has added to the popularity of the H-2A program.
“Coming generations of workers in our state, most of them did not grow up on a farm,” said Mississippi Commissioner of Agriculture and Commerce Andy Gipson. “They don’t really know the current status of the type of work that’s performed or the high-tech technology it takes even to use a tractor today.”
More than 90% of H-2A workers come from Mexico. South Africans make up about 3% of the program, according to DOL data.
Ricky Williamson, a rice and soybean farmer in Tutwiler, has been using Mexican H-2A workers for the past decade. Farmers have to reimburse travel expenses. Williamson said he uses workers from Mexico to keep those costs down.
“I have no local labor because they don’t apply for jobs,” Williamson said. “I run ads in the paper and they don’t respond. I would like to have some, but I just think they’re not interested.”
A farm sprinkler on untilled land in Sunflower County, Wednesday, October 13, 2021. Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi Today
Growers are required to advertise the jobs to U.S. workers before seeking H-2A employees. They often list farming experience requirements along with the ability to read and write or the completion of high school or high school equivalency.
Only six Delta counties have full-time WIN Job Centers, which host the job postings on their website. Swaths of the Delta struggle with reliable internet access. That leaves some agriculture experts unimpressed with the efforts farmers are taking to reach or train workers in their own zip codes.
Farm workers told Mississippi Today that finding a job is about who you know.
“White farmers say they tried to hire labor locally and couldn’t find it when they’re in a region with the highest unemployment rate in the country?” posed Lloyd Wright, the former civil rights director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“That takes a big imagination.”
Wright has researched the Delta. He’s spent time in South Africa, too, as an expert in rural farming.
Most of his work at the USDA involved systemic racism that limited USDA funds going to Black-owned farms, making it all the more challenging for them to survive.
White-owned Mississippi farms have an extensive post-slavery history of finding ways to both exploit, and minimize their reliance on, Black workers – from tenant farming and sharecropping to using European prisoners of war in the fields during World War II. A century ago, there were about 1 million Black farm owners. The USDA says of the country’s 3.4 million farmers today, only about 45,000 are Black
The mostly Black population of the Delta largely struggles in poverty. There are few industries to provide jobs other than agriculture. Small towns in the region can have upwards of 50% unemployment rates, according to a 2016 Alcorn State University study.
Federal dollars regularly flow into the region – but to farm owners through the U.S. Department of Agriculture grants. Public records show Pitts Farms received nearly $2 million in USDA grants since 2018.
“These towns are crumbling in the Delta,” Wright said. Since farmers accept this money readily, they need to “get local folks educated so they can provide for their communities. The bodies are available.”
Cindy Ayers Elliott is an investment-banker-turned-farm-owner based in Jackson. Like Wright, she worries the growing popularity of the H-2A program is sending needed money out of the Delta, as H-2A workers primarily save up to bring their earnings back home.
If farm owners are struggling to attract workers, Elliot said, they need to ask themselves why. One of the answers? The children of farmworkers grew up watching their parents struggle on minimum wage.
“Right now, systemic racism is in the farm culture in Mississippi,” she said.
Farm owners don’t have the time to hunt down South African workers themselves – so they outsource the task. Most use an agency to handle the H-2A process from paperwork to finding a pool of applicants for a fee.
Ty Pinkins with niece Lyell Knight in Delta City. Pinkins is an army veteran, author, attorney and son of a Delta farm worker. Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi Today
Of the 354 Mississippi farms that were approved for H-2A workers last year, about half used the Mississippi-based agency C.O.C Placement Service. That same agency also handled finding workers for four of the farms Mississippi Today found underpaying its local workers.
The company declined to speak to Mississippi Today.
Mississippi Today contacted two dozen farmers that used the agency. Most declined to speak with a reporter out of fear it would bring attention to their farm and prompt a labor department investigation.
“These practices by third-party organizations, like C.O.C Placement, simply show that there has previously been – and likely still is – widespread non-compliance by farm owners to pay local U.S. workers the (wages) required,” said Pinkins, one of the attorneys.
Mississippi farmers say they like South Africans because they’re dedicated. South Africans say they like Mississippi farmers because they want to get paid American wages.
“When they come here, they want to go six days a week,” said Allen Flowers, who runs a mom-and-pop soybean farm in Greenwood. “They’re polite and all about being on time.”
A 15-hour workday isn’t unusual, H-2A workers said. Nor is seeing tractors in the fields after dark when visibility is low – a risk local workers told Mississippi Today they wouldn’t feel safe taking.
The South African workers are usually – if not always – white. The apartheid regime fell three decades ago, but the country’s 80% Black population’s historic limited access to wealth and landownership hasn’t made it easy for them to join the H-2A program.
Neil Diamond, the president of the South African Chamber of Commerce U.S.A., says his commission is working to bring more Black South Africans into the program but their lack of participation is a definite shortfall.
Van Der Walt, of South Africa, poses for a selfie during his time working on a Mississippi farm.
The South Africans who do make it to America get a respite from their country’s own problems, as it continues to grapple with a high rate of violent crime.
“Everything is about the money,” said Dwayne Van Der Walt, a former H-2A worker from South Africa. “No man would leave behind his wife and children if it wasn’t for the good salary there, so you can buy burglary-proof stuff and better fences to keep homes safer.”
Van Der Walt, 31, spent seven years working months at a time on U.S. farms, including in Clarksdale and Greenwood.
In America, he was able to save up about $20,000. It went far in South Africa, where he’s now a trucker. He got his commercial license while working in America. The program helped set him up to support his 3-year-old child as a single parent.
H-2A workers told Mississippi Today that performing a similar type of farm work in South Africa would pay just a few hundred dollars a month.
The only raise Black Pitts Farms workers ever recalled getting was when the federal minimum wage changed.
That means as recently as 1989, these workers were making just $3.35 an hour. That’s about a $1 raise each decade to hit $7.25.
In December, civil rights group the Leadership Conference Education Fund wrote a letter to Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh stating the department’s efforts to protect Black southern workers was “falling short.” They were referring to the Pitts Farms lawsuit.
“Unfortunately, in all too many instances, importation of these foreign workers has been to the extreme detriment of rural U.S. employees, many of whom are people of color,” the letter said.
The labor department responded by touting their Pitts Farms investigation – the one Mississippi Today found only captured a two-year payroll audit.
Walsh’s office has since announced plans to hold a roundtable discussion in Indianola.
“Equity is a critical issue for the department, and the Wage and Hour Division is firmly committed to working with our stakeholders on the ground to protect the most vulnerable workers,” a DOL spokesperson said in a statement.
On June 8, the agents who investigate farm wages and other violations held a seminar in the Delta to explain regulations and the audit process – like the one the Pitts went through – to farm owners.
Diamond, the director of the South African commerce office, says any farm or agency found breaking the rules is kicked out of their trade group.
“There are bad actors out there,” he said. “We don’t have control over everyone, it’s a very large program, but we encourage farmers and workers to be fully compliant with the regulations.”
These days, Richard Strong makes money cutting hair. His brother takes on odd mechanic jobs.
One of the other men in the Pitts lawsuit, a truck driver in his 40s, now drives for Dollar General rather than transporting crops. It’s the first time in his adult life he’s had health insurance.
Richard misses the tractor’s steady thrum. Sometimes, he closes his eyes and he’s back. He can see the controls in his head.
He has a 15-year-old son, Amaureon, who wants to farm. The teen is drawn to the powerful machinery, the massive tractors, the combines – just like his dad.
He’s in a farming program at school where he works hands-on with equipment. He takes pride in watching dirt and seeds become corn through his hard work.
“Farming is the one thing I’ve always loved,” he said.
He knows what his father has gone through. He knows it’s unfair. But he still wants to farm.
He watched a tractor rake through a field across the street from his home on a recent morning. He thought about owning acres of land. Maybe one day he could be his own boss.
That way, he wouldn’t be at the whims of someone else.
Note: Mississippi Today reporter Alex Rozier contributed to this report.
Nikki Benz’s obedience to the Lord led her to the cold walls of the Hinds County jail in downtown Jackson. The jail, at that time nearly two decades ago, was located around the corner from First Baptist Church where Nikki was a member.
“Nikki would leave church and go around the corner to the jail where she led a Bible study on Sunday afternoons,” said Phillip Brown, director of the Buried Treasures Home. “It was a Bible study for prostitutes who had been arrested. Nikki carried chocolate candies in the shape of a treasure box and would go around the room to each one of those ladies and give them a piece of chocolate and tell them, ‘You are a treasure from the Lord.’”
During Nikki’s early days of ministry, she watched in disappointment as so many women would “graduate” as they called it when they got out of jail but then end up right back behind bars. Nikki asked one of the repeat offenders why she was back in jail, and she answered, “Ms. Nikki, I’ve got to make a living. I have no place else to go. What else can I do?”
Those words echoed in Nikki’s mind and she and her husband Dick opened their Clinton home to the women who participated in the Bible study as they left the jail. That was the meager beginnings of Buried Treasures Home which, today, sits on a 65-acre piece of land and offers a chance at a new life to the women who participate in the program.
Now located in Byram, the home is run by Phillip and Karen Brown. The Browns served on the mission field in West Africa until 2003, then planted cowboy churches across Arkansas until 2020 when they were called to Buried Treasures Home.
At Buried Treasures Home, the women participate in classes that help with life change, anger management, family and children, and optional Bible studies. The home keeps an 80 percent rate of success in regard to recidivism.
Programs like these aid in helping women turn away from addiction, co-dependency habits, and occasionally provide recovery for victims of human trafficking. Transition homes help with regulating emotions and learning how to build healthy relationships. Just as those entering a different environment experience culture shock, those who have been incarcerated not only experience that culture shock but also a time shock. These individuals haven’t been in the real world for years and are often coming from broken homes or unhealthy influences. Buried Treasures fills those cultural voids left by their old lifestyle with a new life away from crime and a place to heal.
“When they leave prison, they need that coming away time. They need to get away from that environment long enough for their thinking to change – long enough for emotions to calm down so they can begin to see real life and what it means and the value in it.” said Karen Brown. “Because they have been in that addiction for so long, the only value they see is what they can get from someone else.”
Transition can be frustrating and overwhelming. At Buried Treasures, residents begin with a 30-day transition period that includes counseling, communication of expectations, and sorting logistics of parole.
“We do practice grace, if we had them gone for any infraction, there would be nobody here,” said Phillip.
The next stage is transformation which consists of 90 days. Residents sign a 90-day commitment and are provided with opportunities to grow spiritually, relationally, and emotionally. Healthy family reconnections are encouraged as classes on emotional health, life skills and work continue.
The final stage of the program is trusting. This stage ranges from 60 – 240 days and helps the women build spiritual trust and trust in others as they reenter society. In this stage, off-campus education access and work may be allowed. Graduation from Buried Treasures home happens after completing the trusting phase.
“We haven’t been here long enough to see how they are doing long-term, but we can see the lives of the ladies that have gone through this same program and graduated, and we do have relationships with them,” said Karen.
Buried Treasures assists the women in getting birth certificates, social security numbers, IDs, and driver’s licenses. The women also take classes to learn how to live as law-abiding citizens.
“We have to restore their identity when they come in. They have no form of identity other than a mug shot and a wrap sheet from the prison,” said Phillip.
Tasks that should be simple like getting an ID so that they can go to work are sometimes insurmountable. It is a barrier that many leaving incarceration face, but groups like Buried Treasures help navigate those difficulties to help ensure that their residents are set up for success. Without it, hope for a brighter future is lost.
“If there is no hope what is there? People have to have hope of change, hope of better life, hope of tomorrow, hope of the future. If we don’t have hope and we’re just going through the motions what’s the point?” said Karen, “That what we are here to do is show ladies there is hope and to share how the Lord has changed their life.”
2015 audit received in December 2017
