Chris Mack has been locked up in Mississippi’s Rankin County Jail on and off since he was a teenager. In a lawsuit, he detailed a jailhouse assault that left him with broken ribs, a broken nose, and two black eyes. But it wasn’t just guards who attacked him. Mack said a group of inmates joined in—men in the jail’s Trusty Inmate Program, who had special privileges and wore blue jumpsuits.
“They were called the blue wave,” Mack said.
Through more than 70 interviews with former inmates and officers, reporters from Mississippi Today and the New York Times discovered a system in which guards ordered beatings, inmates who participated were rewarded, and those trying to raise an alarm about the system for more than a decade were ignored.
This week on Reveal, on the heels of our reporting on abuses in the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department run by Sheriff Bryan Bailey, we expose a wave of violence in his county jail.
Dig Deeper
Listen: The Deputies Who Tortured a Mississippi County (Reveal)
Read: In a Brutal Mississippi Jail, Inmates Say They Were Enlisted as Enforcers (The New York Times)
Read: How a ‘Goon Squad’ of Deputies Got Away With Years of Brutality (The New York Times)
Read: ‘You’re His Property’: Embattled Mississippi Sheriff Used Inmates and County Resources for Personal Gain, Former Inmates and Deputy Say (Mississippi Today)
Read: Sway, Sanctions and Second Chances: The Complicated Legacies of Rankin County’s Celebrated Program for Jail Inmates (Mississippi Today)
Read: Ex-Deputy Describes Rampant Violence by Mississippi ‘Goon Squad’ (The New York Times)
Read: ‘They Beat Me Like a Slave’: Signs of Violence in Sheriff’s Office Dated Back Years (The New York Times)
Credits
Reporters: Brian Howey, Nate Rosenfield, Mukta Joshi, and Steph Quinn | Contributing reporter: Jerry Mitchell | Producer: Najib Aminy | Editor: Jenny Casas | Production manager: Zulema Cobb | Fact checker and digital producer: Artis Curiskis | Reporting and producing support: Chris Davis, Dean Baquet, and Debbie Skipper | Original score and sound design: Jim Briggs and Fernando Arruda | Legal review: Victoria Baranetsky | Episode executive producer: Kate Howard | Deputy executive producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Host: Al Letson | Special thanks: Steven Rascón
Support for Reveal is provided by listeners like you, and the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Park Foundation, The Schmidt Family Foundation, and the Hellman Foundation.
Transcript
Reveal transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Please be aware that the official record for Reveal’s radio stories is the audio.
| Al Letson: | From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. |
| Speaker 1: | Well, good morning. |
| Audience: | Good morning. |
| Speaker 1: | How are y’all doing today? |
| Audience: | Good. |
| Speaker 1: | Good? Okay. |
| It looks like we have about a hundred people here, so good turnout. | |
| Al Letson: | It’s a Saturday morning in Rankin County, Mississippi, a suburban community just outside the state capitol, and a prayer breakfast is about to begin. |
| Bryan Bailey: | All right. Dear Lord, we love Rankin County. That’s why we’re here, Dear Lord. We pray blessings on all the officials here that have to make hard decisions, Dear Lord. |
| Al Letson: | People are sitting around tables drinking coffee and grabbing food from the buffet. Many of them are local business leaders and politicians here to mingle. And every month this prayer breakfast is co-hosted by the local sheriff Brian Bailey. |
| Bryan Bailey: | So y’all know what I’m going to do. If you’re an elected official, I want you to stand up, please, right now. All elected officials. [inaudible 00:00:56]. |
| Al Letson: | At this breakfast in May, a recent scandal was on everyone’s minds. Bailey’s department was under intense scrutiny. Two Black men were tortured in their home by a group of Rankin County deputies who called themselves the Goon Squad. A deputy shot one of the men in the mouth during a mock execution, and the officers planted drugs and a gun to cover up their crimes. |
| The deputies have been convicted and the men sued the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department, seeking $400 million. But just days earlier, the county settled for 2.5 million. County supervisor Steve Gaines takes the mic and says the quiet part out loud, heaping praise on the department’s attorney. | |
| Steve Gaines: | Tremendous attorney. He’s playing chess when they’re playing checkers. We come out of last week with the best settlement. We could never even expect to come out of it like that. |
| Al Letson: | The lawsuit was supposed to be a path towards accountability, but Supervisor Gaines was focused on the legal victory for the department’s attorney. |
| Steve Gaines: | He beat the pants off of those guys. He beat their pants off. |
| Al Letson: | After the torture of the two men first came to light in 2023, reporters at Mississippi Today and the New York Times found that there were many more Goon Squad victims in Rankin County. They uncovered dozens of similar allegations of brutality spanning decades. A federal investigation soon followed. Sheriff Bailey denied knowing anything about the abuses in his department, but community leaders and voters were calling for him to step down. For a while, his political career seemed to be in jeopardy. |
| But then President Donald Trump reentered the White House and froze many of the federal investigations into troubled police departments. It seemed like good news for Bailey, like the scandal would blow over. And in this room at the prayer breakfast, it was easy to see that Bailey still had plenty of friends. | |
| Steve Gaines: | [inaudible 00:03:11] got his legs back [inaudible 00:03:12]. I mean, you can’t go through what he’s went through with all the fake news. It made me cry at night that Sheriff Bailey, my friend, was absorbing this and a lot of us were doubting him. But I’m going to tell you, he has weathered the storm and we’re back. |
| Al Letson: | Last week we brought you the story of how far the Goon Squad torture scandal went inside the Sheriff’s Department. But our partners from Mississippi today and the New York Times never stopped following this story. After their first round of reporting, they kept getting tips about violence in another arm of the department run by Sheriff Bailey, one less visible, less scrutinized: the county jail. |
| Mississippi Today reporter Mukta Joshi looks into an inmate work program that was revered in public but feared behind bars. | |
| Mukta Joshi: | One of the first tips that led us to the Rankin County Jail came from a guy who had spent a lot of time there. His name is Chris Mack. |
| Chris Mack: | I’ve been going to that jail since I was 16 years old. |
| Mukta Joshi: | In 2021 when Chris was in his mid-30s, he was pulled over by local police. Officers found weed on him and took him to the county jail. And even though he’d been booked into the Rankin County Jail a bunch of times, he said this time was different. |
| In a lawsuit, Chris says officers brought him to an interrogation room and asked him to name other drug users, and when he refused, jail guards assaulted him. | |
| Chris Mack: | I wound up with broken ribs, a broken nose, two black eyes. |
| Mukta Joshi: | But it wasn’t just guards. Chris says there was also a group of jail inmates who joined in. They wore blue jumpsuits and they were called trustees. |
| Chris Mack: | During this situation, I seen two trustees at the time came in and helped them. |
| Mukta Joshi: | Chris says these trustees had a name for themselves. |
| Chris Mack: | They were called the Blue Wave. |
| Mukta Joshi: | The Blue Wave. |
| Chris says that a few days after he was attacked, he got his bail paid. Still covered in bruises, he ran into the sheriff on his way out. | |
| Chris Mack: | I walked out the front door and Bryan Bailey came out, and he was like, “Christopher, who did this to you?” I looked at him and said, “Mr. Bailey, you know who did this to me. Your officers and trustees did this to me.” And he, excuse my language, he muttered, “Fuck” under his breath and walked off. |
| Mukta Joshi: | We didn’t know what to make of Chris saying he’d confronted Sheriff Bailey directly, but it raised a lot of questions. |
| Chris’s lawsuit was dismissed in court. He had filed it after the statute of limitations. | |
| What was going on with this trustee program? It was supposed to prepare inmates for the outside world, but Chris was describing it almost like a gang. So our team started reaching out to dozens of former inmates to learn more about the trustee program, and that’s how we met John Phillips. | |
| John Phillips: | Hey, Mr. Brian. This is John Phillips, man. |
| Brian Howey: | Hey John. Thanks for calling. |
| Mukta Joshi: | John spent many hours talking to my reporting partner, Brian Howey. He would video call about once a week from state prison. |
| Brian Howey: | So what are you looking out on? Can you describe it to me? |
| John Phillips: | Just the rec yard. You can see people playing volleyball, see people walking around. That’s the view from my little window of the world out there. |
| Mukta Joshi: | John’s in his forties, born and raised in Mississippi. For years he worked in fire safety, installing sprinklers in offices and industrial buildings. He’s a chatty guy and he’s made a lot of friends in prison who call him by his nickname, Little John. |
| John Phillips: | I’m a Capricorn, Brian. You know me. I’m going to do whatever works. I’m going to do the same routine. |
| Do you know your sign? | |
| Brian Howey: | I’m a Sagittarius. |
| John Phillips: | Sagittarius. Good sign. |
| It’s amazing, the stars, bro. We come from the stars, you feel me? | |
| Mukta Joshi: | This February John was picked up for a parole violation. He’d only been in prison for a few months when we reached him, but he was looking at 10 more years of being locked up. |
| John Phillips: | When I lay on my side to go to bed, it’s white bricks everywhere. I mean, if you want to consider being insane, there’s almost 2,666 bricks in this motherfucker. I mean, you’re going to take that time and you’re going to count them bricks. |
| Mukta Joshi: | But back when John was in the Rankin County Jail, serving time felt easier. John was a trustee in Sheriff Bailey’s program from 2017 to 2021. |
| Typically for nonviolent offenders, the trustee program lets inmates work in the jail in exchange for a reduced sentence. This was a huge deal for John. After getting arrested for burglary, he was facing up to 25 years until prosecutors let him sign up for the trustee program, cutting his sentence down to less than four. | |
| Like dozens of trustees before him, John started in the jailhouse kitchen. After a few months, he worked his way up through the ranks of the program, earning a spot with the trustees who had the most responsibility, the Blue Suits. | |
| John Phillips: | The top of the chain in the inmate was … |
| Mukta Joshi: | He was the head of jail maintenance, and as a Blue Suit trustee, John was allowed to join the work release program, which meant he could leave the jail by himself. |
| John Phillips: | You could go out Thursdays and Friday to do HVAC work in the free world. You know, they let you go out of the jail, wear your free world clothes, but you had to come back and make sure you’re totally back. |
| Mukta Joshi: | The best part of being a Blue Suit was the perks. John said he had a custom-made cabinet in his cell and he could roam around the jail as he pleased. The guards even got him a pet dog, a border collie named Ellie. |
| John Phillips: | They let me put her kennel in my cell, and after five o’clock, I could bring her into the jail and she’d walk around with me. |
| Mukta Joshi: | He said the guards even let him go hunting with traps. What he caught, he could bring back and cook for the other guys. |
| John Phillips: | I’d cook like sweet potatoes and raccoon, turkey. I even did raccoon Alfredo. |
| Mukta Joshi: | Raccoon Alfredo. |
| John thought he had it made. He was making money working and had access to comforts from the free world that were motivating him to stay out of trouble. That was all part of the design of the trustee program. | |
| There are similar rehabilitation programs across the country where nonviolent offenders can work in exchange for privileges. But Sheriff Bailey’s became a model for other jails across Mississippi. His program offered counseling, GED classes and job opportunities. Former trustees told us the program turned their lives around. | |
| Here’s the sheriff speaking on a panel about the program’s success. | |
| Bryan Bailey: | Y’all, I’ve had three cases of people in my program that came to me in tears saying, “Sheriff, I’m not ready to get out. I need longer. If I get out right now, I’m going to fail.” That’s how well they learned theirself and how far along they had come. |
| Mukta Joshi: | It was working out for John, until he realized that there was more to this deal than he’d signed up for. |
| A few months into being a trustee, John says he was expected to join the jail guards on shakedowns: searches for any contraband or items that didn’t belong in the jail. | |
| John Phillips: | We’d go around with the guards. We took everything extra from them, anything they was not supposed to have. |
| Mukta Joshi: | One day, John said he and a few other trustees were helping out with one of these shakedowns. |
| John Phillips: | A lot of people with a lot of [inaudible 00:11:18] would be like, “Hey, what the hell are you doing going through my shit like this for?” |
| Mukta Joshi: | One of the inmates got angry about his things being taken away and got into an argument with the guard- |
| John Phillips: | One of the guys was like, “Man, you can’t put your hands on me. You can’t do nothing to me.” |
| Mukta Joshi: | … And the guard turned to him and said- |
| John Phillips: | “You know, we can’t put hands on you, but I know somebody that can put their hands on you,” and looks over and points at me and everybody else. “I might not put my hands on you, but they can.” |
| I’m thinking, “There’s no way in hell I’m going to say, ‘No, I’m not going to do it,’ because then they’d turn around [inaudible 00:11:52], ‘Oh, you’re either with this shit or you’re not.'” | |
| Mukta Joshi: | There was no violence that day. John said it ended with that conversation. |
| We weren’t able to independently verify this account from John, but we spoke to three other former trustees who told us similar stories of how they were expected to help guards during shakedowns. | |
| John says this was the beginning of a new chapter for him at the jail. Now when his fellow inmates got rowdy, he had to step in. | |
| John Phillips: | And they’d have us go in there and basically whoop them. “Only whoop them in their stomach, in their ribs. Don’t hit them in the face.” You know, basically get them to comply. |
| Mukta Joshi: | Not all of the trustees were involved, but he says the blue-suited trustees who joined in on these beatings had a nickname. |
| John Phillips: | They called it the Blue Wave. |
| Mukta Joshi: | Chris Mack had used the same phrase, the Blue Wave, to describe the trustees who beat him when we spoke with him a year before. |
| We heard that beatings by guards and inmates happened all the time. Inmates who got caught with contraband, who mouthed off to guards or tested positive for drugs often got the same treatment. And we heard over and over again that the guards had a few tricks to cover their tracks, like beating people in corners of the jail where the cameras couldn’t see. | |
| John Phillips: | Everybody knew the stairwell never had no cameras. Everybody knew that. The dress-out room, the stairwell and all the showers. |
| Mukta Joshi: | John said he didn’t like participating in these beatings, but he didn’t feel like he had much of a choice. All the perks, the promise of getting out of jail years sooner, all of that was on the line. |
| John Phillips: | I don’t believe in whooping another inmate, man. You know what I’m saying? Because we all mess up. But if you don’t do what they say, they will put you back in front of the judge and reset you, ship you off. |
| Brian Howey: | Yeah. |
| Mukta Joshi: | John was one of the first sources we got in touch with, but he was hardly the last. We spoke to dozens of other inmates and former members of the trustee program and we kept hearing the same story |
| Al Letson: | Up next, how this wave of violence spread across the jail. |
| Inmate 1: | People would do just about anything for a cigarette or a box of Church’s Chicken with a honey biscuit or something. And that was the motivation of the Blue Wave. It don’t take much, man. It don’t take much. |
| Al Letson: | And the reporters try to find out who knew about it. |
| You’re listening to Reveal. | |
| Al Letson: | From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. In 2022, a movie called The System came out in theaters. |
| Movie: | I need y’all to understand that there’s one rule and one rule only. All right? And that’s that there are no mother fucking rules. Make some noise. |
| Al Letson: | The movie is about a guy whose mission is to expose a corrupt prison warden who forces inmates to battle each other in a fight club called The Dungeon. |
| Movie: | One will come out a champion, and the other, well, there may be a lot of singing and flower bringing when that mother fucking bell starts ringing. |
| Al Letson: | The movie was filmed inside an actual jail, the Rankin County Jail in Mississippi. And in the credits, there’s a special thanks to Sheriff Bryan Bailey. The reporting team with Mississippi Today and The New York Times was uncovering similar violence in the real Rankin County Jail. |
| It wasn’t an inmate fight club like in the movie, but they were hearing about abuses in the jail, and that the top officials knew about it. Before we continue, just to note, this segment has graphic descriptions of violence. His reporter, Nate Rosenfield. | |
| Nate Rosenfield: | We interviewed more than 70 former inmates from the Rankin County Jail. Many of them had great things to say about the Trustee Program, but the vast majority told us the same thing. We’d heard from our source, John Phillips, how a group of blue-suited trustees would terrorize the jail following guards orders. |
| Inmate 1: | They called it the blue wave. |
| Zachary McLendon: | The blue wave. |
| Inmate 2: | The blue wave. |
| Nate Rosenfield: | How guards and trustees would beat inmates who broke the rules. |
| Inmate 3: | He backhanded me at least eight times. |
| Inmate 4: | He kicked me in my head like a football. |
| Inmate 5: | They were jumping up and down on me with their knees into my chest, and they snapped several of my ribs and punctured my lung. |
| Nate Rosenfield: | How guards covered up their tracks by hiding the violence off camera. |
| Inmate 3: | I’ve seen so many inmates started screaming and everything, because they knew as soon as they turned that corner, there’s no cameras. |
| Nate Rosenfield: | Guards ordered beatings and rewarded trustees who went along. |
| Brock Reed: | Oh dude, they’ll bring you free world chicken for roughing up an inmate that they don’t like. |
| Inmate 1: | And people would do just about anything for a cigarette or a box of Church’s Chicken with a honey biscuit or something. And that was the motivation of the blue wave. It don’t take much. It don’t take much, man. It don’t take much. |
| Nate Rosenfield: | Our sources said the beatings were punishment for everything from breaking rules to getting rough with staff, or even just getting on guards’ nerves. About half the former inmates we talked to asked not to be named because they were afraid of retaliation from the department, but the other half were willing to put their names to what they told us. |
| We also confirmed our findings with four former Rankin County jail guards. They worked for the department from the early 2000s to just a few years ago. In total, we investigated 69 alleged incidents dating back over 10 years, and it’s not like no one ever brought these abuses to the department’s attention. | |
| At least eight inmates filed official grievances with the jail, claiming they were beaten by guards and sometimes trustees. 11 different inmates filed lawsuits with similar claims. Most didn’t have lawyers and their lawsuits were dismissed. But these documents show that inmates have been reporting similar abuses again and again since at least 2013. | |
| We also looked through medical records, video evidence, and department documents. They started to show us the full extent of the violence in the jail and who knew about it. Take the case of Carvis Johnson. He spoke with my reporting partner, Brian Howey. | |
| Brian Howey: | You filed a few lawsuits against the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department. |
| Carvis Johnson: | Yeah, I filed six of em. |
| Nate Rosenfield: | It’s safe to say Carvis didn’t get along with the jail staff. His disciplinary records show he had a history of fighting with guards and trashing his cell. But there was one incident in 2020 that caught our attention, where Carvis was accused of breaking an emergency sprinkler and flooding his cell. |
| Carvis Johnson: | April 2020, they had the inmates to jump on me, the trustees that worked for them. |
| Nate Rosenfield: | In his lawsuit. Carvis described a group of guards and trustees ordering him out of his cell into the hallway. |
| Carvis Johnson: | Made me get on my knees and the inmates to jump on me, and told me as I turned around they going to kill me. |
| Nate Rosenfield: | The guards had a different story in their reports. They said they went to Carvis’s cell to deal with the flooding, and when they took him out into the hallway, he threatened them and turned toward them aggressively, so a guard punched Carvis and threw him down. But we talked to Brock Reed, one of the trustees who was there that day. |
| Brock Reed: | So the guards came and got us, and they were like, “Well, y’all got to clean this shit up, so y’all should beat the ones beating him up.” |
| Nate Rosenfield: | Brock said that the guards took Carvis to a corner of the hallway and beat him up. When Carvis hit the floor, Brock said he kicked him in the back and hips. |
| Brock Reed: | I wasn’t going to be the one trustee to tell the police, “No, I’m not doing this because I know how they look at you for that.” So I got with the program and kicked him a couple of times. |
| Nate Rosenfield: | Brock was one of nine former trustees who told us they helped guards beat people up. The other thing about Carvis’ case is there wasn’t any security footage. One of the jail supervisors did a routine review of the incident. In her report, she wrote that it happened beyond the view of the cameras. |
| We found a few cases just like this, where guards reported using force on an inmate in an area that wasn’t covered by cameras. Many of the inmates and guards we spoke to confirmed blind spots were used as a tool for hiding evidence. So there’s no footage to prove what happened to Carvis, but we did find a separate incident involving guards that was recorded on a cellphone. | |
| Speaker 2: | All right, say, “My name’s Larry and I volunteer for this.” |
| Nate Rosenfield: | We got a disturbing video from one of our sources who asked not to be named at a fear of retribution. The video was taken in 2018. It shows a thin man named Larry Buckhalter sitting quietly in a chair. |
| Larry is the only one in the frame, and over his jumpsuit, he’s wearing what looks like a white bulletproof vest. It’s actually a kind of taser that guards use to keep combative inmates under control during court hearings. | |
| Larry Buckhalter: | Wait, hold, let me take a deep breath. |
| Speaker 2: | Okay. |
| Larry Buckhalter: | My name, Larry and I volunteer to this. |
| Nate Rosenfield: | A guard triggers the vest and Larry begins to scream. Larry had an intellectual disability. In the jail, he was called Crying Larry because he’d often asked the guards for things. The day the video was taken, he’d asked for a Coca-Cola and the guards said they’d give him one if he agreed to get shocked. |
| Larry Buckhalter: | Oh, come out. Come out. |
| Speaker 2: | Now you get a Coke. It’s all over. I’m so proud of you, Larry. |
| Speaker 3: | That’s it. |
| Nate Rosenfield: | Larry got out of jail the same year this video was taken. He died a few years later. |
| Derrick Shoto: | People definitely should have seen this video. Whoever in that office need to go to jail. |
| Nate Rosenfield: | We met with four of his relatives, including his nephew, Derrick Shoto. |
| Derrick Shoto: | It’s clear to know that he’s not mentally all the way there, so why would they even do him like that? That’s terrible. |
| Nate Rosenfield: | When we asked the department about this video, they responded with a statement pointing out that we hadn’t talked to Larry. And they said our reporting relied on hearsay from people with, quote, “No personal first-hand knowledge of events.” |
| All the guards in the jail reported to one person, the captain who ran the jail. And until last year, that was a guy named Barry Vaughn. We heard about Vaughn from former inmates who said he was a serious guy, a former Marine. And if you stayed on his good side, he would help you out, but he wouldn’t tolerate inmates breaking the rules. | |
| Malcolm Porter: | There’s good people as long as you respected them and done what you said you were supposed to do. Don’t get caught fucking up ’cause Vaughn would snap the shit out of you. Hell yeah. |
| Nate Rosenfield: | We heard from many of our sources that Vaughn not only knew about the violence in the jail, he participated in it. Eight former inmates told us Vaughn himself punched, slapped, and even beat them with phone books. As punishment. |
| A former guard told us they saw Vaughn beat an inmate in his office and we heard the same thing from a former sheriff’s deputy about another case involving a different inmate. One former trustee named Cameron Kennedy told us about a few times when he was on the receiving end of these office beatings. Once Cameron was caught sneaking a contraband cell phone into the jail. | |
| Cameron Kennedy: | He asked me a question, “Where’d you get the phone? How’d you get it in?” I says, “Apparently you already know all this.” |
| Nate Rosenfield: | He says, Vaughn brought him into his office and handcuffed him to a chair. Vaughn grabbed an antenna with a makeshift duct tape handle. |
| Cameron Kennedy: | And he never did stop. For about like 10, 15 minutes just rapping me with it. Wow, wow, wow. And it hurted. I ain’t going to lie, it hurted. |
| Nate Rosenfield: | In 2023, right in the middle of the Goon Squad Scandal, the sheriff’s Department went through a big restructure. Vaughn was eventually promoted to undersheriff, Sheriff Bailey’s right-hand man. We were seeing that the abuse in the Rankin County Jail climbed the ranks, from the trustees to the guards, all the way to the person who ran the jail. But even Vaughn had a boss. |
| John Phillips: | The sheriff kept his hand out of it. You know what I’m saying? He’d act like the good old guy. |
| Nate Rosenfield: | John Phillips is one of our early sources who had been a blue suit trustee when Vaughn ran the jail. He didn’t see Sheriff Bailey around during Blue Wave incidents, but there was one time. |
| John Phillips: | There was another guy, but his name was Keith Richards. This guy was a blue suit up there with us. |
| Nate Rosenfield: | John wasn’t the first person who told us this story. Eight other people also told us about this incident, like other blue suit trustees. Keith had a free world job. It meant he could leave the jail. He just had to come back at the end of the day. But one night in September 2019, he didn’t. |
| John Phillips: | Sunday morning. Everybody’s kind of looking around like, “Boy should we tell it or what? He’s been gone for two days.” That was on Sunday. Come Tuesday, he was high as hell, laid up in somebody’s yard. |
| Nate Rosenfield: | We spoke to several other trustees who were there that day, including a blue suit named Zachary McLendon. He and the others told us that while they waited for Keith to be brought back to the jail, Sheriff Bailey gathered the other trustees and gave them a piece of his mind. |
| Zachary McLendon: | I remember going in there and the sheriff talking to us about holding each other accountable, and, “We can’t do that if there’s sour apples still in the basket.” |
| Nate Rosenfield: | According to multiple people who were there that day. Around this time is when a sheriff’s deputy named Wes Shivers drove up with Keith in his truck. Shivers is also a six-foot eight former UFC fighter. |
| Malcolm Porter: | Hell yeah. He’s a big old guy. Yeah. |
| Nate Rosenfield: | Former trustee Malcolm Porter was also there that day. Malcolm said the same thing as John and a former guard, that they saw Deputy Shivers pick Keith up by his throat. |
| Malcolm Porter: | They picked him up from, grabbed him like this and picked him up like this right here and slammed him down. I said, “Damn, he getting his whooped.” |
| Nate Rosenfield: | Then we heard that a group of guards and trustees dragged Keith into a dressing room with no cameras and attacked him. Four inmates told us they saw Keith days later in the isolation wing of the jail, battered and bruised. One of them was former Trustee Brock Reed. |
| Brock Reed: | He just looked like he got into a fight and lost pretty bad, but it was also like a week later, but I could still see bruises around his throat. |
| Nate Rosenfield: | Keith Richards declined to speak to us for the story, but my reporting partner, Brian Howey, spoke to Deputy Shivers. He can confirmed that Keith escaped the jail, and this is how he described what happened when he brought Keith back. |
| Deputy Shivers: | There was a lot of the blue suit trustees there standing around because they wanted to make… It was going to be known that if you escape or you try to escape, you will be brought back. That’s basically all it was. |
| Nate Rosenfield: | Deputy Shivers told Brian he did not choke Keith. |
| Brian Howey: | How is it that multiple people are saying that you choked Keith Richards, if that didn’t happen? |
| Deputy Shivers: | I can’t sit here and tell you why anybody says what they say. |
| Nate Rosenfield: | He also said our sources were unreliable. |
| Deputy Shivers: | You’re getting all your information from prisoners, from inmates. Of course, they want to talk negatively about anything and everything that is going on there. |
| Nate Rosenfield: | Deputy Shivers said there’s no of violence at the department, and he had nothing but praise for his boss. |
| Deputy Shivers: | Sheriff Bryan Bailey has been the best sheriff that I’ve worked for at that office. He cares for the people of Rankin County and there’s a reason they keep voting him in there, because they know that he cares and that he’s doing a good job. |
| Nate Rosenfield: | But we had another question about this incident that hadn’t been resolved. Where was Sheriff Bailey when Keith was finally brought back to the jail? Some trustees said he was there. Others said they weren’t sure. So we asked Deputy Shivers |
| Brian Howey: | And was Sheriff Bailey there when you got back? |
| Deputy Shivers: | Yeah. He works there. To be honest with you, it’s nine years ago. I don’t really recall. |
| Brian Howey: | Okay, ’cause you just said that he was there. |
| Deputy Shivers: | Well, he’s at the office. The jail and the office, everything is connected. |
| Nate Rosenfield: | We spoke to other department employees. One former guard who was there that day, and asked not to be named, said that they saw Shivers choke Keith. They couldn’t remember if Bailey was in the room, but they said that Sheriff Bailey definitely knew about the choking because they heard other guards talking with him about it. We also heard about what happened to Keith from someone we never expected to talk to us. |
| Christian Dedmon used to be a detective at the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department. Today, he’s serving decades in federal prison for his involvement in the Goon Squad Scandal. He and four other deputies tortured two Black men in their home and shot one of them in the mouth. | |
| After Dedmon’s conviction in 2024, he started emailing with our colleague, Jerry Mitchell, from federal prison. Over hundreds of emails, Dedmon said he wanted the public to know that the abuses he committed were part of a deeply ingrained culture in the department. And in order to rise through the ranks, Dedmon said you had to be willing to go along with it. | |
| He said that Sheriff Bailey would joke about deputies roughing people up. He also specifically remembered Bailey bragging about Wes Shivers picking up an inmate by the throat with one hand he wrote in one email, quote, “Truth is, that house is horrible, and anyone there is far from a saint. Bailey and those close to him will always win.” | |
| Al Letson: | For months, the reporting team from Mississippi Today and The New York Times had been having almost weekly calls with their source, John Phillips, until this past August when John stopped calling. |
| The team asked around, looked through John’s prison records, and found that he’d been transferred out of state prison back into the Rankin County Jail, and the officials there knew he’d been talking to reporters. | |
| Brian Howey: | What specific wrongdoings do you know? |
| John Phillips: | I don’t know. |
| Barry Vaughn: | What have you heard? |
| Al Letson: | The team meets with the Sheriff’s Department, coming up next on Reveal. |
| Al Letson: | From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. John Phillips had been talking to reporters regularly for months about his time as a Rankin County jail trustee. He told them about the abuses he witnessed and took part in at the jail, but it had been six weeks since journalists from Mississippi Today and the New York Times had heard from him and they started to worry. In September, reporter Brian Howey met up with John’s girlfriend to see if she’d heard from him, when out of the blue … |
| John’s girlfriend: | That’s so crazy. Just in case. |
| Brian Howey: | That is crazy. |
| Al Letson: | … John calls his girlfriend’s cell. |
| Brian Howey: | Hey, John. |
| John’s girlfriend: | You’re on speaker. |
| John Phillips: | Hey man, how are y’all? |
| Brian Howey: | I’ve been so worried about you, man. I haven’t talked to you in weeks. |
| John Phillips: | Yeah, we got a lot to sit down and talk about, man. |
| Al Letson: | John’s girlfriend passed the phone to Brian. They talked through everything that happened when John was out of touch. He tells Brian he was transferred out of state prison back into Rankin County jail. |
| John Phillips: | Dude, I mean, they know everything, man. |
| Al Letson: | And officials at the sheriff’s department had a lot of questions for John about things he told reporters. Here’s Brian on how that exchange went. |
| Brian Howey: | When I finally got ahold of John again, he was back in state prison, and he didn’t sound so good. |
| John Phillips: | I hate this. It ain’t no… I’m tired. I hate this shit. |
| Brian Howey: | John had been transferred to the Rankin County jail to await sentencing on a new criminal charge from earlier in the year. While he was in there, he felt like a pariah. |
| John Phillips: | I knew something was up when I walked in and no one at Rankin County would even speak to me. |
| Brian Howey: | After days of getting the silent treatment from guards he used to be friendly with, John got called to see Barry Vaughn. The same Barry Vaughn who ran the jail and allegedly beat inmates in his office. Vaughn was now the number two person in the sheriff’s department. |
| John said there was another man in the meeting, Jason Dare. He’s the department’s attorney, and he and Vaughn then started to question John about his time in the trustee program. | |
| John Phillips: | He said, “When you did your time here,” he said, “Did you ever get mistreated or did you feel like you had done wrong or anything?” I said, “No. Why are we talking about this?” He said, “Brian Howey. Does that name ring a bell?” |
| Brian Howey: | And he’s talking about me. Dare knows me from our past reporting on the sheriff’s department, and John admitted that we’d been talking for weeks. |
| John Phillips: | He said, “Well, what did you and him talk about?” I said, “Well, I’m pretty sure you already know what we was talking about.” I said, “He asked me about some of the incidents in this jail.” |
| Brian Howey: | John says he felt intimidated during the meeting, so he lied and told them what he thought they wanted to hear, that he hadn’t seen any abuses in the jail. Then Dare suggested that he put that in writing. |
| John Phillips: | I wrote, I said, “I, John Phillips, is writing this statement verifying that while I was here at the Rankin County Jail, I never witnessed nor heard any wrongdoing.” |
| Brian Howey: | I had never heard of something like this before. Two top sheriff’s department officials meeting with an inmate, alone, to ask about his conversations with a reporter. |
| Did you have to write in the statement your reasoning for making false statements to us? | |
| John Phillips: | I never had to explain why. All he basically wanted me to do is deny that I ever seen anything or heard anything. |
| Brian Howey: | Now that John had sworn in writing that he hadn’t seen any abuse in the jail, everything he told us was thrown into question. So we asked to sit down with the sheriff’s department to learn more about what happened in that meeting. |
| How you doing? | |
| Jason Dare: | Doing great. Let me get everything set up. Good seeing you. |
| Brian Howey: | Long time. |
| Jason Dare: | Yeah, it’s been a while. |
| Brian Howey: | Last month my reporting partner, Mukta Joshi, and I met with Dare. As the department’s attorney he’s the person we’re always redirected to when we ask the sheriff for comment. And he’s been pretty upfront about his skepticism. |
| Jason Dare: | Correct me if I’m wrong, but this is going to be nothing but a hit piece on the sheriff anyway, so why would the New York Times or Mississippi Today want to shut down the trustee program of all things? |
| Brian Howey: | We asked Dare about the meeting with John and why he wanted to talk to him in the first place. |
| Jason Dare: | Similar to y’all going out and trying to meet with a bunch of folks. I sit down and try to meet with folks, figure out what they know. I’m trying to defend the trustee program. That’s all. |
| Brian Howey: | Dare said he never pressured John to make a statement. He also said he’d collected statements from former trustees who only had good things to say about the program, but he wouldn’t say who they were. Dare eventually gave us audio recordings that captured a portion of the meeting with John. |
| Barry Vaughn: | You want coffee or something? |
| John Phillips: | Sure. |
| Barry Vaughn: | What you want in it? |
| John Phillips: | Some sugar in it? |
| Barry Vaughn: | Sugar? Come on, let’s go get it. |
| Brian Howey: | That deeper voice is Barry Vaughn’s. It’s clear that at this point in the meeting, everyone knows that John has talked to us. And you can hear Vaughn and Dare asking about what John knew and what he told us. |
| Jason Dare: | What specific wrong doings do you know about? |
| John Phillips: | I don’t know. |
| Barry Vaughn: | What have you heard? |
| Brian Howey: | And John says he didn’t see any abuse in the jail first hand. But he’d heard rumors about the violence, and that’s what he shared with me. Just rumors. |
| Jason Dare: | My thing more is, hell, if it’s the truth, let us know. But if it’s not the truth and it’s just trying to hurt somebody. |
| John Phillips: | It’s childish. It just, it’s all lies. It’s all just a bundle of drama. That’s all it is. It’s a bunch of mess. |
| Brian Howey: | Then, just like John said, we hear Dare ask him to write out a statement saying he didn’t see any abuse in the jail. And John agrees. Dare gave us a copy of the statement. John hand-wrote it on a legal pad and it says, quote, “I, John Phillips, is writing this letter to let whoever know that I never seen anything that the news reporters are talking about when spoken about inmates-on-inmates or the blue wave.” |
| Jason Dare: | All I wanted you to do was give me a true, accurate statement of your dealings with the folks at Mississippi Today. Is that what you have done on that piece of paper? |
| John Phillips: | Yes sir. It’s what I did. I gave a volunteer statement. |
| Brian Howey: | This recording didn’t cover the whole conversation, so we don’t know everything that was said in the meeting, but we’d heard enough to know that John had changed his story about the incidents he’d spent months telling us about. The thing is, John wasn’t our only source. Nearly all of his allegations against the department were supported by our reporting. |
| When we sat down with Jason Dare to ask about his meeting with John, it was too early to ask him to respond to our findings. But we did ask him more generally about violence in the trustee program. Here’s what he said at the time. | |
| Jason Dare: | The trustees are not allowed to use any force on individuals. |
| Brian Howey: | Have there been investigations launched by the department into allegations of trustees laying hands on people? |
| Jason Dare: | Since I’ve been there, I’ve never heard of an allegation that a trustee fought with anybody. |
| Brian Howey: | Dare has been on the department’s payroll since 2023, but he’s been defending it in civil lawsuits since at least 2010. And he’s defended the department in at least five lawsuits claiming that trustees had attacked other inmates, including one filed just last year. We followed up with the sheriff’s department asking to sit down again, but they refused. So we sent them a long email detailing all of our findings. Then Jason Dare sent us an email categorically denying our findings and calling our reporting deceptive. |
| In his response, he cited unnamed experts who said the jail is, quote, “One of the cleanest and best-run jails in Mississippi, with jailers never having been found to use excessive force.” We also tried to reach both under Sheriff Vaughan and Sheriff Bailey by phone. They both answered but declined to comment. | |
| David Fathi: | Any form of punishment without a due process hearing is categorically and completely inappropriate. |
| Brian Howey: | David Fathi is the director of the National Prison Project for the American Civil Liberties Union. When we showed him our reporting, he said that the violence we uncovered by Rankin County jail staff went way beyond what could be justified as self-defense. |
| David Fathi: | No reputable correctional professional will defend this. Everyone will tell you this is a bad practice that we got rid of 50 years ago. |
| Brian Howey: | Until the 1960s and ’70s, many prisons across the south had trustee programs that would arm their trustees and let them beat up other inmates to maintain order and save money on guards. Then a Supreme Court ruling stopped the practice. Today, trustee programs are common at county jails across the country, but they aren’t supposed to let trustees have any power over their fellow inmates. |
| David Fathi: | I have not heard of anything like this since literally the late ’60s, early to mid ’70s. |
| Brian Howey: | One of the main local groups continuing to shine a light on the sheriff’s department is the local chapter of the NAACP. |
| Angela English: | I would be lying if I told you anything that’s going on in that jail surprises me. |
| Brian Howey: | Angela English is the chapter’s president. She grew up in Rankin County and her parents, even her grandparents, have done civil rights work here. |
| Angela English: | My father and my mother never told us to run away from our problems. We faced everything head on. |
| Brian Howey: | When the Goon Squad scandal became public, she started organizing. She got together a petition calling for Sheriff Bailey to resign, but she knew the most likely path to accountability was through the Department of Justice. And when the agency began investigating the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department, she coordinated with the DOJ to collect testimonies from the community. |
| Angela English: | We encouraged them to tell their story based on all the information I collected and turned over to US DOJ and that they were able themselves to collect. It was just obvious that this was a pattern. |
| Brian Howey: | English felt confident that with all the materials she had helped them gather, the DOJ would have a strong case against the Sheriff’s Department. But then President Donald Trump was elected for a second term. And when he took office in January, 2025, he steered the DOJ away from their investigations into local law enforcement agencies. |
| Angela English: | I was greatly disappointed. But still, even in the midst of all that I said, the NAACP was formed for such a time as this. |
| Brian Howey: | In the months after Trump took office, English called her contacts at the DOJ again and again to ask if they would continue their work in Rankin County, but no one got back to her. And she could tell the changing political tides were having an effect on Sheriff Bailey and the county leadership. |
| Angela English: | They feel emboldened. They feel like they got their ace in the hole now. |
| Brian Howey: | But she never stopped calling, and then her phone rang. It was a DOJ official. |
| Angela English: | I said, “Is this good news or bad news?” And they said, “Well, I think you’re going to be pleased.” And I said, “Oh, thank you, Jesus. Thank you, God.” |
| Brian Howey: | We reached out to the DOJ and they confirmed. Their investigation into the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department will continue. |
| Angela English: | And I said, “So we’re going to be able to finish it?” And they said “Yes, and that’s all we can say.” And I said, “Okay, thank you. That’s enough.” |
| Brian Howey: | Angela says the continuing DOJ investigation is a win, but it seems to be business as usual in Rankin County. |
| Mukta Joshi: | There’s a bunch of people who seem to be walking in. Do you know where the main entrance is, Jerry? |
| Jerry Mitchell: | Yeah, right over here. |
| Brian Howey: | Last month, my colleagues, Mukta Joshi and Jerry Mitchell, went to a campaign fundraiser for Sheriff Bailey. Despite all the controversy that surrounded his department, Bailey is running for a fifth term. And based on the people attending the fundraiser, it’s clear that he has powerful supporters. Headed to the entrance of the event was Terry Reeves, the father of the governor, Tate Reeves. |
| Mukta Joshi: | Can you tell me a little bit about why you’re attending the fundraiser today? |
| Terry Reeves: | Well, he’s been our sheriff and done a good job, so I’m really proud of him. |
| Brian Howey: | Mukta also spotted a Mississippi kingmaker, Irl Dean Rhodes, a former local politician. To run as a Republican here, in one of the reddest counties in Mississippi, you basically need Irl’s blessing. |
| Mukta Joshi: | I wanted to ask why you’re here at the fundraiser today. |
| Irl Dean Rhodes: | Why I’m here? Because I support Bryan Bailey. |
| Mukta Joshi: | Okay. Could you elaborate on that a little bit? |
| Irl Dean Rhodes: | Well, we got low crime rate, good law enforcement. |
| Brian Howey: | After a group of his deputies were sentenced to federal prison, after investigations into his department were launched at the state and federal level, it seemed like Sheriff Bailey’s political career wouldn’t survive all the controversy. But with Mississippi’s political elite lining up to support him a full three years before he’s even up for reelection it seemed like maybe Sheriff Bailey had weathered the storm. Just as Mukta was about to ask her next question, Bryan Bailey’s daughter walked over and shooed her away. |
| Bryan’s daughter: | You’re in a private event. This is private property. We’ve rented this, so we’re going to ask you to leave. |
| Mukta Joshi: | Okay, thank you. |
| Bryan’s daughter: | Thanks. |
| Irl Dean Rhodes: | Appreciate it. Well, that’s good. |
| Bryan’s daughter: | I’m just making sure y’all can get inside good. |
| Irl Dean Rhodes: | How you doing? |
| Bryan’s daughter: | I’m doing great. |
| Al Letson: | The reporting team published their findings this week in Mississippi Today and the New York Times. You can read their work there and linked on our website at revealnews.org. |
| Today’s story came from reporters Mukta Joshi, Nate Rosenfield, and Brian Howey. Steph Quinn co-reported this episode and Jerry Mitchell also contributed reporting. Our lead producer for this week’s show is Najib Aminy. Jenny Casas edited the show and Kate Howard was the executive producer for this hour. Editorial reporting guidance from Debbie Skipper, Chris Davis, and Dean Baquet. They’ve worked with the reporting teams from Mississippi Today and the New York Times since the beginning. | |
| Special thanks to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and Reveal’s associate producer Steven Rascon. Artis Curiskis is our fact-checker. Victoria Baranetsky is our general counsel. Our production manager is the great Zulema Cobb. Score and sound designed by the dynamic duo, Jay Breezy, Mr. Jim Briggs and Fernando, my man, yo, Arruda. Taki Telonidis is our deputy executive producer. Our executive producer is Brett Myers. Our theme music is by Comorado Lightning. Support for Reveal is provided by the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Park Foundation, the Schmidt Family Foundation, and the Hellman Foundation. | |
| Support for Reveal is also provided by you, our listeners. We are a co-production of the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. I’m Al Letson, and remember, there is always more to the story. |