By C1 Staff
JACKSON, Miss. — According to some inmates and correctional employees, prisons in Mississippi are run by Security Threat Groups, or STGs, also known as gangs.
The Clarion-Ledger reports that 13,154 inmates, or more than half of Miss.’s 19,972-inmate prison population, were classified as members of a STG.
Corrections experts say the best approach is to dilute the strength of gangs by dividing them, but a former corrections officer says he believes it best that “all your bad apples are in one barrel. You let them run one area of the facility, rather than having them run multiple areas.”
Ideally, prisons would isolate top gang leaders; otherwise they would be running street gangs and calling hits from prison.
Gangs operate the same way inside Miss.’s prisons as they do on the streets, with cell phones.
One employee, Tangi Truelove, who worked for a prison contractor claimed that she saw proof of the gangs running the prisons, starting with correctional officers. She claimed that the inmates owned them once they figured out how to compromise them.
Truelove said that she even saw gang tattoos on some of the officers, who said, when confronted, that the markings were part of their “past life.”
Truelove quit after a nurse on staff was nearly stabbed by an inmate and officers refused to take the shank away from the inmate, claiming that it was “probably in another cell now.”