Four former inmates and former deputy deputies said Mississippi sheriff Brian Bailey, who had been federally investigated by the department to torture people, worked on the farm using equipment purchased from county jail prison prison prison and taxpayers.
They said that the special privileged inmate, known as the trust, was repeatedly forced onto the farm by Sheriff Bailey himself to perform a variety of tasks in addition to his daily duties in Rankin County.
Former trusts and others who worked at Sheriff Billy's family farm said the prisoners received cash and meals in exchange for work. Christian Dedmon, the former vice-chairman who is now serving a federal prison term, said he worked on the farm while he was on the Sheriff's Office watch.
For more than six months, Mississippi reporters interviewed several deputies of former Rankin County Sheriffs today and 20 former trusts. The trust, who said they were working on the farm, asked that their names not be used, as they feared retaliation. Reporters also reviewed more than 1,000 pages of county financial records and text messages Mr Dedmon sent while working on the farm.
The report reveals that for most of his 13-year inauguration, Sheriff Bailey used his highest wages and most powerful public figure in a way that would benefit him and his family financially. Through his departmental lawyer, Sheriff Bailey declined to comment on the article.
For years, those familiar with sheriff's activities were kept quiet because of their loyalty or fearing crossing Mississippi's political ties and popular sheriff.
But that began to change in 2023 when five Rankin County Sheriff's deputies were charged with a civil rights crime by tortured two black men at their home and shooting one of them in the mouth. Subsequent investigations by the New York Times and Mississippi revealed that today, representatives from the department, including people called the Goon Team, had been using similar atrocities for nearly 20 years against anyone suspected of using or handling drugs.
Since then, dozens of victims have shared accounts of the violence, with some community leaders demanding that Sheriff Bailey resign. Dedmon, one of five Rankin MPs who pleaded guilty to a torture case, began to openly talk about his time in the department.
“I hid everything for him,” Dedmon said of the sheriff. “I did everything for him. I now know that I am just a tool for being used at a certain time, just like everyone else.”
In a series of interviews, Dedmon explained how he transported prisoners from the trustworthy work program in Rankin County Pre-Detention to the farm and worked with them.
Dedmon said the sheriff had directed him to use a construction vehicle purchased by the department for $97,000 in 2019. Vehicles called skid steers by those who used it were sometimes stored there, he said.
Dedmon said farm workers also use other items purchased by the department, including weed killers.
County financial records show that since 2018, the Sheriff's Department has purchased Skid Steer attachments that exceed the supplies designed to care for more than $50,000, $10,000 worth of weed killers and poultry.
The reporter provided staff with a detailed list of purchases, along with a specific explanation of the obligations detailed by the trust. Neither department officials nor county leaders explained the purchase of this article or answered questions.
Jason Dare, a lawyer for the Sheriff's Office, said officials would not answer questions from Mississippi or era today, as previous articles from the publication summarise Dare's written statements in full. The article cited many of Dare's statements, but did not include his complaints that the press did not write positive stories about the department.
In addition to his farm work, the former trust said that Sheriff Bailey had directed him to create cabinets, install floors and do other jobs for him and his companions.
Some former trusts said they were working on vehicles owned by deputies and sheriffs. The sheriff earns nearly $120,000 a year, making him one of Mississippi's best paid elected officials.
Dedmon said in 2020, at Sheriff Bailey's proposal, he paid a trust to build a back deck for his home.
A photo shared by Dedmon's ex-wife and dated February 29, 2020 shows Dedmon and three other men, all wearing civilian clothing, working on the deck. Several people familiar with the men identified two as former trusts who served during prison time when the photos were taken.
Mississippi law prohibits the use of public assets or property by elected officials from their own use. Violations will be fined or punished in prison for up to 20 years.
And the Mississippi Code of Ethics of the Government is that civil servants use their positions to seek the economic benefits of the companies they or their relatives are associated with.
“It's broader than using prisoner labor, but it certainly involves the use of prisoner labor,” said Roun McNeal, assistant professor of criminal justice, who works for the board of directors overseeing the state's labor programs for prison inmates.
Almost every former inmate interviewed by Mississippi praised the Trusty program and said it helped them defeat addiction and build skills for their post-release life. Some said they had no complaints about the work they did, including their farm duties.
However, other trusts said they felt strong pressure to do whatever they were asked to do without complaints.
Rankin County's trustworthy program allows defendants to spend time at the county jail rather than going to the state jail. The program gives Trusties special privileges and assigns them the obligation to assist in the operation of prisons, a common practice for trusted working programs across the country.
To become trustworthy, some inmates have been signed to agree to accept the maximum sentence for a crime if “for some reason it was removed from the program.”
The trust joined the program on Sheriff Bailey's recommendation, and department officials decided whether and when the trust violated the terms of their contract, according to Andy Sumral, a Jackson, Michigan-based criminal defense lawyer who has represented many former trusts.
“You're his property, just like the sheriff's trusted program,” said one former trustee.
“This hasn't happened.”
McClain Farm is located next to a two-lane road that snakes through patchwork of farmland and forests south of Puckett, a quiet town in Rankin County, with welcome signs that read, “300 good friendly people and some old soarheads.”
The 38-acre farm came to Sheriff Bailey's family in 1997 when his mother remarried. Farms produce corn and other produce, but their main focus is raising chickens. In recent years, McClain has housed about 10,000 chickens each year for Tyson Foods, which harvests eggs.
The former prisoners who worked on the farm said they were all interviewed separately and told by other trusts to keep their work secret. One recalled warning Sheriff Bailey to the trust on the farm. “We're not here. This isn't happening.”
Deadmon said sheriffs often took two or more trusts to the farm in the afternoon to complete small tasks such as weed spraying, sorting tools and cutting grass.
Farms produce about 300 tons of waste per year, a mixture of feces, feathers, dietary feed and bedding. During the annual chicken macking, the sheriff has about six trusts on the farm every day, Dedmon said.
At 9:29 on the eve of Halloween 2020, Mr. Dedmon sent a message to his then-wife, telling her that it was covered in chicken waste. She told reporters that work sometimes lasts until 3am.
After one cleanup, after a former trustworthy recall, the sheriff put dozens of prisoners in civilian clothes for boots and other items in Jackson, buying a replacement for the ruined boots. The former Trusty said he worked 12 hours a month on Saturdays and Sundays. He said he never got paid.
Dan Pacholke, a revision consultant and co-founder of the prison sustainability project, called the use of prison labor for personal gain “a huge ethical violation” because the sheriff “have the ability to control their fate.”
Working on a sheriff's family farm can raise ethical concerns, even if prisoners are paid, according to Pacholque and other experts.
“Every decision you make about inmates is in some way contradictory because they don't voluntarily live in that prison,” said McNeill, a criminal justice professor.
Trusties gave various explanations about their salary. However, none of them describes the formal process in which the checks are issued or the money is deposited into any account. Experts said cash payments were unrecognizable, causing concerns about transparency.
The Sheriff's Office failed to meet record requests made earlier this month.
Taxpayer-funded chicken
Another assistant director, Dedmon, who is familiar with the work of another former deputy director, said sheriff Bailey used county funds and supplies on the farm, in addition to relying on prisoner labor to supplement the work on his mother's farm.
Dedmon and another person who worked on the farm told Mississippi that the sheriff had taken truck gravel from Rankin County government stockpiles and used it to resurface the farm's roads.
Mr. Dedmon said he would sneak into county property at night and sometimes take gravel with Sheriff Bailey. “You can't do that with the county gravel you hauled along with a dump trailer over the weekend or evening, or with him,” Dedmon said.
Deadmon said the sheriff had a magnet made to hide the sheriff's star in the department vehicle where Deadmon was picking up gravel. Dedmon said the magnet was marked with a nonexistent business name derived from the previous trust name. “Cazell welding.”
Photos taken last month show grey gravel on the road where Dedmon said he had been placed in the county gravel.
The skid maneuver that Dedmon described as using on the farm was purchased by the department for search and rescue teams with money seized during the drug attack, county documents show. Lawmakers said it was intended to help clean the storm.
Mr. Dedmon mentioned skid maneuvering in a text message to his then-wife on September 16, 2020.
County records show in April 2019, the Sheriff's Department used $36,000 seized from a drug bust to buy mulching heads. Dedmon said Sheriff Bailey would use it to clear the farm's land.
The Sheriff's Department also spent about $600 on items normally used in poultry farming. Among them are chicken nets, “angled house breeding” to keep the chicks warm and house chicks.
Angela English, chairman of the NAACP Rankin County Chapter, has called for Sheriff Bailey to resign in the torture incident, but said more should be needed to keep the sheriff accountable.
“When you provide someone with so much authority and they don't need to answer anyone,” she said, “You're looking for trouble.”
The Mississippi report for this article was supported by grants from the Center for Journalism and Civil Human Rights at Columbia University's IRA A. Lipman Center, along with Arnold Ventures, a nonprofit research foundation supporting journalism.
