Mississippi Today reporters interviewed 20 former inmates and pored over more than 1,000 pages of county financial records for this article, which was done in partnership with The New York Times Local Investigations Fellowship.
Bryan Bailey, the Mississippi sheriff whose department had been under federal investigation for torturing people, staffed his mother’s commercial chicken farm with inmates from the county jail and used taxpayer-purchased equipment to improve the grounds, according to four former inmates and a former deputy who said they had worked on the farm.
They said inmates with special privileges, known as trusties, were repeatedly driven to the farm south of Puckett — sometimes by Sheriff Bailey himself — to perform various tasks on top of their daily work duties for Rankin County.
Former trusties and others who worked on Sheriff Bailey’s family farm said inmates had received cash or meals in exchange for the work. The former deputy, Christian Dedmon, who is currently serving a federal prison sentence, said he had worked on the farm while he was on the clock at the sheriff’s department.
Over six months, reporters for Mississippi Today interviewed several former Rankin County sheriff’s deputies and 20 former trusties. The trusties who said they had worked on the farm asked that their names not be used because they feared retribution. The reporters also reviewed more than a thousand pages of county financial records, as well as text messages Dedmon sent while working on the farm.
The reporting revealed that for most of his 13 years in office, Sheriff Bailey used his position as the highest paid and most powerful public figure in his suburban county in ways that financially benefited himself and his family. Through his department’s attorney, Sheriff Bailey declined to comment for this article.
For years, people familiar with the sheriff’s activities kept quiet, out of a sense of loyalty or because they feared crossing a popular sheriff with political connections across Mississippi.
But that began to change in 2023, when five Rankin County sheriff’s deputies were charged with civil rights offenses for torturing two Black men in their home and shooting one of them in the mouth. A subsequent investigation by The New York Times and Mississippi Today revealed that deputies in the department, including those who called themselves the Goon Squad, had used similar brutality for nearly two decades against those they suspected of using or dealing drugs.
Dozens of victims have since shared their accounts of the violence and some community leaders have demanded that Sheriff Bailey resign. Dedmon, one of the five Rankin deputies who pleaded guilty in the torture case, has begun speaking openly about his time at the department.
“I hid everything for him,” Dedmon said of the sheriff. “I done everything for him.”
“I know now I was just a tool to be used during a certain time like everyone else,” he said.
In a series of interviews conducted over phone and email, Dedmon described how he had transported inmates from the Rankin County Pre-Trial Detention Trusty Work Program to the farm and worked alongside them. At the sheriff’s request, Dedmon said, he and others secretly took gravel from a Rankin County government storage yard at night, and delivered it to the farm.
Dedmon said the sheriff had instructed him to use a construction vehicle, bought by the department in 2019 for $97,000, to till soil for corn and clear wooded areas on the farm. The vehicle, called a skid steer by those who used it, was sometimes stored there, he said.
Dedmon said workers on the farm also used other items that had been purchased by the department, including weed killer, attachments for the skid steer and power tools.
County financial records show that since 2018, the sheriff’s department has purchased skid steer attachments worth more than $50,000 and more than 600 gallons of weed killer worth about $10,000. The records also show that in 2022 and 2023, the department spent hundreds of dollars on heat lamps and other supplies designed to care for poultry.
Reporters provided department officials and county government leaders with a detailed list of purchases, along with specific descriptions of the duties detailed by trusties. Neither department officials nor county leaders would explain the purchases or answer questions for this article.
Jason Dare, the attorney for the sheriff’s department, said officials would no longer answer questions from Mississippi Today or The Times because a previous article from the publications had summarized a written statement by Dare instead of running it in full. That article quoted much of Dare’s statement, but did not include his complaints that the news organizations had not written positive stories about the department.
In addition to the farm work, former trusties said Sheriff Bailey had directed them to craft cabinets, install flooring or do other work for him and his associates.
Several former trusties said they had worked on vehicles owned by the sheriff or his deputies. One trusty said he was paid $40 to $50 for those jobs. Another said he spent less time working on county vehicles than he did working on those owned by the sheriff, who earns nearly $120,000 a year, making him one of the highest paid elected officials in Mississippi.
Dedmon said that in 2020, trusties built the back deck of his home, at Sheriff Bailey’s suggestion. He said the sheriff told him he had to pay the trusties, and Dedmon gave each of them about $200 for two days of work.
A photograph shared by Dedmon’s ex-wife and dated Feb. 29, 2020, shows Dedmon and three other men, all in civilian clothing, working on the deck. Several people familiar with the men identified two of them as former trusties who, records show, were serving jail time when the picture was taken.
Mississippi law prohibits the use of public money or property by elected officials for their own use. Violations are punishable by up to 20 years in prison.
And the Mississippi Code of Ethics in Government bars public servants from using their positions for the economic gain of businesses with which they or their relatives are associated.
“That’s broader than just using inmate labor, but it certainly includes using inmate labor,” said Roun McNeal, an instructional assistant professor of criminal justice and legal studies at the University of Mississippi who serves on the board overseeing a state work program for prison inmates.
Nearly all the former inmates interviewed by Mississippi Today praised the trusty program, saying it had helped them beat addiction and build skills for life after release. Several former trusties said they had no complaints about the work they did, including their work at the farm.
But other former trusties said they had felt intense pressure to do whatever was asked of them without complaint because of the power Sheriff Bailey wielded over them.
Rankin County’s trusty program enables defendants to serve time in the county jail instead of going to a state prison. The program grants trusties special privileges and assigns them duties to help run the jail, all without pay, a common practice in trusty work programs across the nation.
To become a trusty, some inmates signed documents agreeing to accept the maximum sentence for their crimes if they were “removed from the program for any reason.”
Trusties entered the program at Sheriff Bailey’s recommendation, and department officials decided if and when trusties had violated the terms of their agreements, according to Andy Sumrall, a Jackson-based criminal defense attorney who has represented a number of former trusties.
“The way the sheriff’s trusty program is, you’re his property,” one former trusty said.
‘This ain’t happening‘
McLain Farms sits beside a two-lane road that snakes through the patchwork of farmland and forest south of Puckett, a quiet town in Rankin County with a welcome sign that reads: “300 good friendly folks and a few old soreheads.”
The 38-acre farm came into Sheriff Bailey’s family when his mother remarried in 1997. The farm yields corn and other produce, but its primary focus is raising chickens. In recent years, McLain has housed about 10,000 chickens annually for Tyson Foods, which harvests the eggs.
The inmates who said they had worked on the farm all participated in Sheriff Bailey’s trusty program.
According to several trusties, the sheriff took an active role in the men’s program. Female former trusties said they were supervised by Kristi Pennington Shanks, an administrative assistant in the department whom Sheriff Bailey wed in 2023.
The program grants trusties special privileges and assigns them duties to help run the jail, all without pay, a common practice in trusty work programs across the nation. In Rankin County, male trusties do carpentry work, staff the department’s auto shop and cook for deputies and fellow inmates. Female trusties clean the jail and other government buildings.
When they worked on Sheriff Bailey’s family farm, trusties were typically picked up in an unmarked vehicle, Dedmon and one former trusty told Mississippi Today.
Several former inmates who worked on the farm, all interviewed separately, said they were told by other trusties to keep the work secret. One recalled Sheriff Bailey warning trusties at the farm: “We’re not here. This ain’t happening.”
According to Dedmon, the sheriff often took two or more trusties to the farm in the afternoons to complete small tasks, like spraying weeds, sorting tools or cutting grass. One trusty recalled cutting grass at the farm and carrying out tasks for the sheriff whenever he was asked.
But during the annual mucking of the chicken houses, the sheriff would have about six trusties on the farm every day, Dedmon said.
The farm generates almost 300 tons of waste a year, a mixture of feces, feathers, uneaten feed and bedding. Once a year, Tyson Foods would pick up the birds, and trusties would have to muck out the chicken houses.
“I’m covered in chicken shit,” Dedmon texted his then-wife at 9:29 the night before Halloween in 2020, a text reviewed by Mississippi Today shows. She said that work would sometimes last until 3 a.m.
After one cleaning, a former trusty recalled, the sheriff took a dozen or so inmates in civilian clothes to Boots & More in Jackson, where he bought them replacements for their ruined boots. That former trusty said he worked 12-hour days every Saturday and Sunday for a month, in addition to several weekday evenings that lasted into the early morning hours. He said he was never paid.
While work on the farm was mostly reserved for male trusties, female trusties occasionally helped.
“Once the corn was ready, they would load the female trusties in a van, take them to the farm, pick the corn and then come back to the jail and shuck it,” Dedmon said. A former female trusty also recalled picking corn “at the sheriff’s mama’s house.”
Several experts said it was improper for a sheriff to use inmate labor on a farm owned by a family member or close associate, as the family member would stand to benefit financially from the sheriff’s elected office.
Dan Pacholke, a corrections consultant and co-founder of the Sustainability in Prisons Project, called the use of inmate labor for personal profit “a huge ethical violation,” because the sheriff “has the ability to control their destiny.”
Even if inmates were paid, working on the sheriff’s family farm could raise ethical concerns, according to Pacholke and other experts.
“Every decision you make about inmates, their agency is conflicted in some way, because they don’t voluntarily live at that jail,” said McNeal, the criminal justice professor. “They don’t get to choose what to do with their time, so you have to put some guardrails around what you do and don’t call voluntary for them.”
Trusties gave different descriptions about their pay, which often depended on the kind of work they performed. But none of them described a formal process in which checks were issued or money was deposited into any account. Experts said that cash payments raised concerns about transparency, as they are impossible to track.
The sheriff’s department did not fulfill a records request made early this month seeking any documents related to payments to trusties.
Taxpayer-funded chicken supplies
In addition to relying on inmate labor to supplement the work force at his mother’s chicken farm, Sheriff Bailey also used county funds and supplies at the farm, according to Dedmon, another former deputy and others familiar with the work.
Dedmon and another person who worked on the farm told Mississippi Today that the sheriff had instructed them to take truckloads of gravel from the Rankin County government’s stockpile and use it to resurface roads on the farm.
Dedmon said he would sneak onto county property at night, sometimes with Sheriff Bailey, to take the gravel. “I can’t tell you how many loads of county gravel I’ve hauled down there on the weekends or at night with his dump trailer, or rode with him to do so,” Dedmon said.
According to Dedmon, the sheriff had magnets made to conceal the sheriff’s star on the department vehicle Dedmon used to pick up the gravel. The magnets, Dedmon said, were marked with the name of a nonexistent business derived from the name of a former trusty: “Cazell’s Welding.”
A photo taken last month shows gray gravel on the roads where Dedmon said the county gravel had been placed.
The skid steer that Dedmon described using on the farm was purchased by the department for search and rescue teams with money seized during drug raids, county documents show. Deputies said it was intended to help with storm cleanup.
Dedmon mentioned the skid steer in a text message to his then-wife on Sept. 16, 2020: “I just wanted to come home, but damn sheriff just came in here and asked me to run the skid steer to pucket for him.”
County records show that in April 2019, the sheriff’s department used $36,000 seized from drug busts to buy a mulching head. Dedmon said Sheriff Bailey had used it to clear land on the farm.
The sheriff’s department also spent about $600 on items typically used in poultry farming. Among them: poultry netting, brooder lamps, which keep chicks warm, and an “angled house brooder” to house chicks.
Department officials and members of Rankin County’s board of supervisors, who approve the sheriff’s budget, declined to comment on the purchases. Sid Scarbrough, one of the supervisors, said he was not sure whether the board was responsible for overseeing them.
Angela English, president of the Rankin County chapter of the NAACP, which had called for Sheriff Bailey’s resignation over the torture case, said the board should do more to hold the sheriff accountable.
“When you provide someone with that much authority and they don’t have to answer to anyone,” she said, “you’re asking for trouble.”
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 ‘You’re His Property’: Embattled Mississippi sheriff used inmates and county resources for personal gain, former inmates and deputy say appeared first on Mississippi Today.
