Anthony Burt still remembers the day he became a “blue suit.”
When Burt was jailed in Rankin County in 2017 on methamphetamine possession charges, he said he had never heard of the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department’s lauded work program for trusted inmates, or “trusties.” But when an acquaintance in the program told Burt it could make his life in jail easier, he became determined to work his way to the top tier of male trusties, who wear blue uniforms and enjoy additional privileges in the jail.
Burt, who was first assigned to wire cars in the department’s auto shop as a “red suit,” teared up remembering how proud he felt when some of the blue suits pulled him aside and told him, “You’re going blue today.”
“I wanted it, and I accomplished it,” Burt said. “I accomplished something for the first time in my life.”
Former trusties consistently said that Rankin County’s trusty program, officially the Pre-Trial Detention Trusty Work Program, changed – or even saved – their lives. The program, which allows people convicted of felonies to serve their sentences in the Rankin County Detention Center rather than a state prison, offered addiction recovery courses, GED classes, mentorship and counseling. It allowed some male trusties to learn or practice their trade and, through work release, enabled some male and female inmates to earn money to pay off their fines, retain lawyers and save for cars.
“I have countless positive stories about the RC trustee program, such as the GED rate of trustees,” said Jason Dare, attorney for the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department, in a December email. However, the department failed to provide any statistics regarding GED outcomes in the trusty program to Mississippi Today, despite repeated follow-ups on five occasions and a public records request, for which the department charged $230.
Some of the 20 former trusties who spoke with Mississippi Today questioned the power wielded by Sheriff Bryan Bailey and Kristi Pennington Shanks, an administrative assistant at the department whom Bailey wed in a 2023 ceremony.
Those former trusties said they felt compelled to do personal work for department officials. They described bias in those officials’ selection and promotion of trusties, and arbitrariness in how trusties got punished.
An investigation published by Mississippi Today and The New York Times last week revealed that, for years, Bailey used male trusties to work on his family’s private chicken farm. One former trusty said the sheriff told him and others on arrival, “You’re not here. This ain’t happening.” Those trusties worked long hours on Bailey’s farm, and at least three said they didn’t get paid.
In a statement issued to some media outlets after the publication of the investigation, the department conceded that Bailey supplemented the farm’s workforce with trusties, but insisted the inmates were always paid. The statement did not directly address many of the details described by former trusties and Christian Dedmon, a former deputy serving a federal prison sentence for the torture of two men.
Besides interviewing the 20 former trusties, three former deputies and others close to the department, Mississippi Today examined court documents, meeting minutes, as well as over 1,000 pages of jail logs and county financial records requested from the department and the Rankin County Board of Supervisors.
The reporting revealed a county program that enabled the sheriff to wield extraordinary power over inmates who participated in the trusty program – including the conditions of their daily lives and their sentencing.
Bailey used his discretion to ask judges to end some trusties’ incarceration early, sometimes hiring them immediately upon release, according to four former trusties, court documents, and meeting minutes from the Rankin County Board of Supervisors noting new county hires. As punishment, on some occasions, trusties were expelled from the program and sent to prison or given extended jail time, according to four former trusties and court records.
Former trusties said they accepted assignments that helped Bailey or Shanks personally in hopes of being chosen for a higher ranking position in the trusty program, or of avoiding a more serious sentence. But gratitude and personal loyalty to Bailey also motivated some trusties to do personal tasks such as cutting grass or sorting tools, they said.
One former trusty said that while a prison sentence renders a convict “state property,” in Rankin County, “the way the sheriff’s trusty program is, you’re his property.”
The line between sheriffs’ personal lives and their professional responsibilities has historically been blurry, said lawyer and journalist Jessica Pishko, who researches the power of sheriffs, referencing the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when inmates were often incarcerated in sheriffs’ homes. “Individuals were seen as the personal property of the sheriff, so long as they were in the sheriff’s custody,” she said.
The chosen few
Former trusties said the program left mixed legacies. They said Bailey and Shanks selected and promoted trusties at their discretion, with few policies or procedures governing the process.
Kandis Nations, a trusty from 2020 to 2022, said she had to convince Shanks to choose her for the program.
Nations said she wrote letters to Shanks during multiple stints at the jail on drug-related charges, asking to join the program, apologizing for relapsing and “having to ask you for this again.”
Another female former trusty recalled that “the biggest thing” necessary to earn Shanks’ trust was to “be repentant.”
Each of the 13 female former trusties interviewed said they were supervised by Shanks. But in response to a public records request, the department indicated no documentation outlining Shanks’ role in the female trusty program existed.
Each time Nations wrote a letter, Shanks would turn her down, once telling her that she “needed to grow up a little,” Nations said.
But once she made trusty, Nations thrived. She was chosen for the department’s work release program, which allows trusties to work at local businesses and deposit their earnings in personal savings accounts. She said she earned more than $20,000 working at Genna Benna’s, a local restaurant – enough to pay off all her fines.
She also gained Shanks’ trust.
Shanks invited Nations to puppy-sit and cook HelloFresh meal kits at her house, sometimes just the two of them, or with other trusties.
“It made me feel really special,” Nations said.
Many male and female former trusties described close relationships with Bailey or Shanks, and credited them for helping them recover from addiction. Former trusty Brittney Martin said Shanks “would come check on us” and “was available to talk anytime that we needed her.”
Burt described the sheriff’s “open-door policy” for blue suits and deputies’ friendliness toward him. “Somebody like me? It was a huge deal for them to treat me the way they treated me.”
Another former trusty said the sheriff was his friend.
A third said that before the program, there was “nothing inside of me, and they really filled that up in me, showing me…you are a strong, capable person.”
But while some said good things came to trusties who took the program seriously, others said Bailey and Shanks played favorites, rewarding those individuals with privileges or higher-ranking positions – such as “head trusty” – in the program.
“It was all based on if Kristi likes you or not,” said a female former trusty. “Whether you stay at the lowest level or whether you actually move up.”
One former trusty said it was his work on Bailey’s family farm, which he signed up to do hoping to impress the sheriff, that resulted in his promotion to a higher rank.
At a 2022 event sponsored by the conservative political action group Empower Mississippi, the sheriff said trusties earn promotions in the program using a point system.
But none of the trusties, nor a former deputy, recalled a point system ever being implemented in the jail.
In response to a public records request, the department said they did not possess any records demonstrating the point system in their trusty program. The department also did not produce any written records showing a formal selection process.
“It potentially becomes a very biased system,” said Dan Pacholke, a corrections consultant and co-founder of the Sustainability in Prisons Project. “It’s not open and fair to everybody that’s in the jail.”
While many former trusties said they were happy to do all the work requested of them, several selected to work in the front office said the position required accepting assignments that made them feel used.
Ginny Tindol, a former trusty jailed in 2016 on substance-related charges, said she quit working in the front office after several months because Shanks expected her to prepare her morning oatmeal, set up her daughter’s birthday parties and “act as her personal assistant at all times.”
“When you work up front, you’re a monkey for them,” Tindol said. “You had to do as she said, or you’re going to get punished.”
Tindol said those who pushed back against Shanks’ demands were passed over for promotions in the trusty program, as well as for rewards of vehicles or jobs upon their release.
Former trusty Jennifer Williams said Shanks once asked for a foot rub, which led her to tell Shanks she felt like she was being treated like a servant.
“I was her housekeeper, I was her assistant, I was her best friend, I was her daughter, I was her secretary,” Williams said.
Tindol recalled fulfilling Shanks’ requests for back massages multiple times.
Shanks also used female trusties to deseed luffa gourds used in loofah soaps she sold around Christmastime in 2021, according to two former trusties who did that work.
One of those former trusties remembered discussing the situation with another inmate, saying, “They’re making money off us, using us as labor.”
Four male and female former trusties recalled training and looking after Bailey and Shanks’ pet dogs. Reporters visiting the department in September 2024 ran into a trusty taking two poodles on a walk outside. “These are Sheriff Bryan Bailey’s dogs,” she said.
Rewards and repercussions
The trusty program allowed some former trusties to stay close to home and family and afforded them opportunities to benefit from the sheriff’s influence in the county upon their reentry.
But it also kept them in the county jail, where Bailey exercised considerable influence over their sentencing, and with less oversight or ability to seek redress than if they had been sentenced to prison.
The department used to host state inmates as trusties in the county jail. But Bailey told the Mississippi Free Press in 2022 he cut the department’s ties with a trusty program of the Mississippi Department of Corrections soon after taking office, because “it got to be where it was too much of a hassle, dealing with the state, the guidelines and different things like that.”
While a prison sentence commits a defendant to the custody of the state corrections department, trusties were not formally sentenced until they had completed the trusty program. Instead, following Bailey’s recommendation to the judge, some defendants signed agreements with their attorney and the district attorney’s office assigning them to work in the trusty program for a certain period of time. The agreements defendants signed said they would accept the maximum sentence for their crimes if they were “removed from the program for any reason.”
Andy Sumrall, a Jackson-based criminal defense attorney whose clients have included former trusties, said high-ranking department officials determined when trusties had violated the terms of their agreements.
On some occasions, former trusties said, Bailey used his discretion to lengthen their incarceration beyond the period stipulated in their trusty agreements, or recommend their early release.
A former trusty’s immediate family member, who asked not to be named fearing retaliation, said she was shocked to learn that department officials had “just added time” for the trusty to serve in jail without the trusty getting the opportunity to see an attorney or appear before a judge.
Two witnesses said a trusty was kicked out of the program and sent in 2021 to serve a longer period in general population after she had an emotional outburst and damaged a fan in her cell. That former trusty’s court documents show that her sentencing date was pushed back by four months.
On the other hand, one former trusty said Bailey secured his early release from jail, and Sumrall said he had seen cases where trusties who excelled in the program served shorter periods at Bailey’s recommendation.
During their time in the program, former trusties said, department officials meted out punishments seemingly without rules setting out consequences for different infractions.
While Mississippi prisons offer hearings to inmates who receive rules violation reports, a former trusty who had served time both in prison and the county jail in recent years said that in the jail, “you had no say-so.”
“If they think you did it, you got punished,” he said. “Just that simple.”
In response to a request for any records detailing rules or disciplinary policies applicable to trusties, the department provided a list of rules for female trusties, which contained no procedures for addressing misconduct. The department provided no documents pertaining to male trusties.
Two former inmates recalled that a trusty who committed a drug-related offense while in jail was brought in shackles before a group of trusties in the department lobby. Bailey and another department official cursed at the trusty and called her names, the former inmates said, “telling everybody, ‘Look at this piece of shit,” and that she wasn’t ‘fit to be a mother.’”
Williams said Shanks would sometimes seek the advice of high-ranking trusties on how to punish someone. “She would ask suggestions, like, what should I do? What should we do? How should we do this?”
“Anybody that’s incarcerated should not be in a position of power over another incarcerated person,” said Pacholke. “It can create tension in the jail population, because they know it’s not a fair and just system.”
Still, former trusties recalled the program as a lifeline when they needed someone to have faith in them.
One former trusty said Bailey and Shanks “showed a lot of us a different life that we didn’t know about.”
She recalled trips to the movie theater and roller rink with Bailey and Shanks, as well as Christmas parties at Fernando’s, a local Mexican restaurant.
Burt said that, in jail, “you try to be this guy that’s walking the right path, but you don’t have the tools you need. The sheriff is giving us tools.”
Bailey got some male trusties cars and local jobs – “a ride and a job,” Burt said – as their release neared. Rankin County Board of Supervisors minutes show that the department itself has hired at least 15 former trusties including as mechanics, supervisors, and in maintenance roles, many immediately after being booked out, according to jail records.
Burt said Bailey showed him a truck with a “locked up motor” toward the end of his time as a trusty and told him he could keep it if he could fix it.
During his two and a half years as a trusty, Burt said, he repaired “anything that had blue lights or a siren on it.”
Because of that, Burt said, the sheriff got him a job as an electrician in a local business and allowed him to start five days before his release.
The sheriff had also arranged Burt’s early release so he could spend time with an ailing family member.
“This trusty program is his legacy,” a former trusty said of Bailey. “He is literally leaving behind a legacy that is different from everybody else.”
Steph Quinn is a Roy Howard Fellow at Mississippi Today.
This story was published with the support of a grant from Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights, in conjunction with Arnold Ventures, a nonprofit research foundation that supports journalism.
The post Sway, Sanctions and Second Chances: The Complicated Legacies of Rankin County’s Celebrated Program for Jail Inmates appeared first on Mississippi Today.
