when you are totally different from outside people watched a movie. with prison it's like but they don't know. what it is to be and we have to take care of each other when we're inside. a whole lot of things but mean to each other. when you. have to make do so you try to figure out which. we have to. take to wash all clothes. put your clothes in a bag. you take them to the laundry and. you don't know which.

you might. be not good at all. in the prison she is coming to. you bringing in the field there. are a lot of people. and the unit to be the newest the most modern unit. and it's visible to anybody who even walks in normally when you go to have been the $929.00 it's going to be going to be cold either it's going to be extremely cold going to be extremely hot inside normally in temperatures in excess of 100 degrees there's no ak and there's no air. conditioning in a ventilated area. and in the in the sales at home guys they have no circulate.

would you normally would see the short list and they're laying on the coal for because you know when that is in made a cinder block sender blots they hold in their cool air they hold so dear and. they're holding in all the cool air so the gas just lay bare bare chested on the floor it's not uncommon to see 5 or 6 guys just laid out in a sale on the floor vironment visible in the face of the. rats roaches spiders. and little fire fighters mosquitoes the fast. waltz. that you want to see have in the corners of the facility and these are areas where the public are allowed. i mean there's nothing new about what's happening in march and i would say in very recent history i think 2 summers ago in august there was basically every other day most of them parchin and in

a little bit further back history if we look at the 1970 s. there's this successful suit that they. are sort of people win against the state that leads to the end of the trustee system and that was around cruel and unusual punishment so as long as the prison has existed going to continue to see and have seen in the past is these episodic. periods where the state violence is sort of most apparent to us but for people who are incarcerated that state violence every day. i would never drink the water or i don't want to wash my hands in the bathrooms because when you turn water on it's literally the color of mud water fountains when they work the same way they were to come on the water fountains you're too scared to drink the guards will tell you not to drink i've had guards give me about water because i didn't have any they went to water but my clients want that water all the time so the water varies between 2 ways it's either to chlorinate it or it smells like sewage and so all the pipes leak right so the gas

had their socks around the leaky pipes and so if their socks are brown they know not to drink the water if the socks are why they know koreans in the water we can wash our clothes and that if you don't enter into water you're going to drink it at that time period if there is a border notice in the area you guys will get by the water there are still forced to drink that water they take their medication what water that smells like sewage they take medication in water that visibly if you put it in a cup and they think as well take it they let the water sit in they let all of the soil and all of the particles go to the bottom and then they just drink the water that is clarified on top. conditions at parchin have been. behind me is the mississippi state penitentiary known locally as parchment prison where an astounding 9 individuals have died in the past month alone since the start of the new year reports of everything from fights and fires and suicides to

insufficient food and water supplies power outages and individuals sleeping on the floors have been reported and a mountain of human rights abuses are allegedly going on behind these walls we traveled here today to speak with locals activists politicians celebrities and everyone in between and to try and figure out why these things are happening here parchment and what can be done to fix the problem in order to understand the current crisis inside parchment you have to go way back in history and understand the prison's roots of former governor of mississippi and open my supra mrs james k. vardaman was instrumental in creating the mississippi state prison he believed that the money made from convict leasing and chain gang should go to the state instead of private entities and thus the mississippi state penitentiary was born the prison itself is a reform so parchment prison comes about at the turn of the last century as a as a way to sort of. undo what some people are see as the problems of the comically

system and in particular governor the governor at the time james vardaman who is an unapologetic white supremacist actually runs on the campaign of white supremacy. believes that the problem with comic leasing was not really the sort of. human rights abuse that it was but rather that he saw it as sort of lining the pockets of the plantation class that he was a white supremacist populist and believe that this sort of state run plantation style prison would instead be a way of sort of socializing african-americans to their place which he saw as. manual labor the reform that led to the establishment of parchment was also why it's a crime assist in its intent. as i mentioned james james vitamins the person who established. parchment and he used to actually incarcerated people on the grounds of parchment with bloodhounds for sport so if you think about that kind of context

in which this place is born there's really no some training white supremacy. initially. after the timeline of so there were about 4 or 5 it's within 3 or 4 days between december 29th and january 2nd either on january 2nd in the o.c. issued a statement stating that everything was under control however on january 3rd 2 more people died as a result of the incidents that occurred with. one of the indio see it was still a tease throughout the state we did a timeline breakdown of everything that was occurring once we did that time last week we deployed the article on twitter facebook all of our platforms and certainly it began to go really viral we posted

a video image of that was sent of several mean being housed in unit 32 of parchment unit 32 a question that has been condemned and closed down since 2000 and i says 2000 i suffered for over 10 years and that was closed down when i see you know you entered in agreement with the city state prison for parchment to close it down the reason it was closed down was because it was a hellhole the. essential it was it was a place where where 6 of the people that were being housed there it was the different facility it was the place where where people who were very sick was also being housed but it was also a. a place that was a violent place to say the least essentially the a.c.l.u. the side it that this facility should no longer be open so for 10 years this this place had been closed down and this was the place that. these these incarcerated people were moved to this facility now is flooded it has black mold in it they have

no mattresses it basically has not been maintained in 10 years it was continue to be able to years ago but we have video surfaces of these men inside of this facility and we had already told the story that no other new site was telling with regard to those men being in unit 32 nobody else had disclosed it because they didn't have the inside information once we got it we shared it and we shared their video on the video went viral on twitter it was shared by. many hip hop artists and of china's own twitter instagram can people like t.i. david banner and big create a thing even so a lot of rappers have really been vocal about it parchment is located at least 2 hours away from many major cities making it difficult for lawyers family members and having kids to visit in recent months incarcerated people have used contraband cell phones to share videos and photos of their conditions on social media

a risk and incidents of forced transparency in a deadly situation one of the prison officials allege that prison gangs are to blame for the mounting death of the merge been many are pushing against that narrative stating that the inhuman conditions are driving people beyond sanity i think now with all of that. technology that now we're going to have people are now going to be able to see inside and i think that's what's threatening to. the people that are supposed to be in charge of the prisoners not disappoint i think this is was threatening to warm because you can't you've got so many people and so much of that is around so much contraband they were going there you can't you can't really control or find out who were to get retrieve this from who. and so it's going to continue to leak we're going to change them no more things that continue to slip because people are getting bold but now people are also coming up get the

main way their prisons have been able to skirt any type of regulation authority around issues involving prisoners and litigation pretty much came out of the night and if i'm in congress passed the prison litigation reform act and what that was is that at that time congress was seeing in prisons we're seeing a large number of prisoners filing suits about the conditions that they lived in and it was causing a backlog in the backlog. in the system and so congress wanted a way to limit the rights of prisoners to bring federal lawsuits about the conditions that they were being confined and so what the p.l.r. a does is that it basically calls for prisoners to allow their captors time and notice to fix issues that are conditions based so basically which you have to do is that you have to say you have to say to the people who are holding you in these conditions hey. this is why artists males like for this water.

and then you have to give those people are a reasonable amount of time to address. before you can move on. to even file a lawsuit against. the world is driven by a dream shaped by one person. who . thinks. we dare to ask.

micrographs friends aren't slights and gets you know why. for example there are there slights against women or nonwhites so it's always the idea is that statements that directed toward a privileged group are interpreted differently than a statement directed toward an oppressed group and so that's kind of the whole framework and it's a political framework that's used the result is of course focusing at least on certain kinds of minor slights and say well rather than the north more than we need to call attention to them but it's not all slight so it's very political and its contents.

the system is working. this big clear is not a broken criminal justice system the criminal justice system is doing what it was designed to do steal kill and destroy. people it's working what needs to happen with the system is tear the system apart and that's what needs to happen because if we don't repeal it put some lousy i'm going to keep this repetitive cycle. that only rubio will you bring different people to the table with different absalom and there will be mississippi it always will bring the good old boy. in right but i believe this generation is a promo. the good old boys won't work for them it's not the gang leaders who are

feeding them only one meal a day it's not the gang leaders who are not repairing the. plumbing where they can get water i mean more than just one water bottle a day it's not the gang leaders who are leaving trash everywhere i mean this is obviously a problem with the state of mississippi when we think of prisoners we don't think humans we think criminals we think gang members we think murderers rapists we don't think that over half the population in prison are in there for victimless crimes we don't think that these are indeed humans who deserve human rights. we want to think that they're terrible people so whenever the state tells us they're terrible people we feel like it's ok and they get treated terribly and that's just not the case most prisoners are not in there for any other reason than possibly smoking a plant or doing some other victimless crime. for example you have the a.a.r.p. process it's called 8 minutes. very many prices and the way it's supposed to work

is that there is supposed to be a box each unit on each zone in each team here and there are supposed to be these little forms that you can fill out in it and it has it you can only bring up one issue at a time and it has to be so specific as to give everything o.c. reasonable notice to fix your problem before you can move on and so is this there is a 3 step process 1st you fill out the a.a.r.p. and you tell them which your complaint is and you put it in the box and you hope to get a response if you don't get a response within 30 days you move on to the 2nd step the 2nd step is i did not get a response as they all want to respond you put that in the box they have 30 days to respond and then and only then if you have gotten no response in 60 days then if you can file somebody to file a lawsuit on your behalf against the o.c. to do so it makes it virtually impossible to file to get any kind of remedy

legally for prisoners who don't have any. solutions to the problems of parchment are difficult but they do exist holding elected officials and prison officials accountable is on the lips of everyone i spoke with as well as creative solutions to addressing the issue people that are making decisions about what should happen with prisons. should be prayers or have not a clue what's really going on you've got the wrong people at the table you know you need those people at the table that really care people that are connected to the issue at hand people who have had pamela members behind you know the bars how can you really connect how can you really see what you're willing to see and be human and see people as human if you have not been through the experience one way or the other whether you've been a family member if you had a family member in there or locked up. to hold somebody accountable for what's

happening now you almost have to do you go yes because it go back so far it didn't just or it didn't just happen you just keep getting people in position to not change and it is the problem but in order to deal with hold of somebody accountable you've gotta go way back so was ham you got to actually have legislators and people actually going to the facility actually talking to people like they're people and not just walking me and ignoring them like you're looking at the paint on the wall but actually human as i'm bring them me and you know find out the day ask them their main you know make them human because they can help you solve the problems they can tell you is needed they can fix it guess who gets to vote light on this not us not any other organization not even the state of mississippi the inmates the prisoners all 100 percent inchoate 100 percent in

short. all the media attention has pressurize out the more the abuse the abnormal use behind the walls we live behind the wall and you going to have offices this going to say oh. yeah rid of a yaml today you get channel 3 for fat. guy washington whoever here and guess would they go now and you last shall i will when i say you can shout. you go eat when i say you can eat and gas would ask hey take your reckon take it now that's the reality of it was going on i had no while in prison with luck back and a lockdown in this in a state but especially in mississippi is a time for the o.c. out of more laugh staff who are rated been overworked to have time off so it

is a lot. less going on even more pressure rises a pressure situation. we want you to 29 should we want any brothers or sisters as inside you know 32 to be our unit 32 we were partially shut down in the interim. immediately what we want is for those brothers and sisters aside to have better food better health care better mental health care we want to be treated like human beings we want them to be able to have access to their family existed to their representation because these are things that they're being deny right now just the sheer volume of which you have to try and do in the here amount of time and amount of money that it takes to even to file any litigation is about conditions we can take the alabama department of corrections case as an example that's a 6 year this. you know organizers and have attorneys 6 years to

even get it to a point to where they can bring alabama department corrections to the table in mississippi. question when he let the health department last week the reason is the health department is can deal with them before. but sister time they refuse to allow those brothers access to to the necessary beings and we want people out of ultimately we want them to immediately reinstate parole for those who have the ability to have access to the roe we want them to media really release those who have been healed on the love on the finances on drug offenses to de coster rate this system also billy and i'll be honest with you to goal is to abolish this system started over you know what i mean like reboot because we've never had a say in this process whether this is that it never had a say in this process but this process has always come down on us is very defensive . we demand that whatever changes come in

a transformative way the the problem of the prison and prison organizing has remained the same over time which is visibility it's how do you draw attention to these dark sites across the country when they're specifically designed to sort of prevent the public from understanding and empathizing in and knowing how to. address the problem so i think a starting point for all of these campaigns is greater connectivity between people outside and inside so we make sure that we are responding to people's needs inside and also aware of the conditions and creating sort of networks. so that when we have these episodes of extreme violence were able to better address the sort of everyday violence as well as it gets more and more attention and we get more and more leaders stepping up who are using their voices and using their their power 70 or their power to create a voice for. for the incarcerated we're still trying to be centric on the voices of

the actual prisoners i know they're they're bringing in celebrities who are taking their own actions and what not but our thing is we're talking directly right now to incarcerated people and to direct family members of people who are incarcerated because when we look at the root cause and the root solutions of what needs to be done these are the people who are closest to the issue they're going to know what they need done a thing a lot of time people have. to speak almost who didn't have a wall. because they have knowledge or heard someone else speak about it they may feel as deliverable voice booked into you want to march. our green room in the right it's hard to explain to people. you know it expert if you went to school to learn criminal justice reform or you went to law school or you now been elected june june now this you you want to be the expert you want to

have the answers you pay this price of educating your seo to be the expert and then when you have some magic come allow you did to time in the prison. now tell you what you need this is what you need and that's a lot of. the criminal justice system in what's happening here in mississippi is happening because we have. our sadness the voices of the people they need to be heard because here we are 30 plus years in the gang and we still haven't been heard although i hope that we have being heard you heard this year here but if our state has hurt us desta key because we can have people come from all over the world even local give media attention to it but the only way we know that we've been hurt is because chang starts to care. but it's a cause for pride pressure conditions that's what makes this

a pressure like water. a water pipe if you put too much pressure on it and. everything that's happening. right now a disappoint you say it. loss. for no reason. people. are not supposed to be. it's not good. not good it's called is this cause and death. prison and you want to go to prison you. go to prison you own. but not to disc a pass to. this is the worse for her. brothers and sisters. i mean.

we have a stout from the day. to the current moment and we just asked him stand down is strength in the was. dead a week in areas where you can see valid. where you can encouraged. just like you would embrace want with low. i.q. if you want. a like you desirable means. and to know that you have people here work in a way to for you to. be

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from now. so would you hire the retired to use in did their. job. to me when i meet you house on the net passing them. the swarms of them so moving. to build your local was before. much of those who heard it's a preview or. sneer will. who will. move . move when you. move should you just look beautiful little girl meets those who look her good. more muslim also those girls will give you films for go good girls. go to shows

look why do you do seem you believe to show the story through you should go. to starbucks to. get to meet until it was the little one wished they'd see a look at israel. no distance just. a match to. stop the digital these control to. those who have to choose to go to sleep or come up with a new will because those are the girls who. are in this who could use to whom she. could do for the one who's doing. right.

and this is the boom bust the one business show you can't afford to miss branch of war in washington coming up the corona virus has now taken hold around the world but to varying degrees we take a look at the globe and check in on the numbers as they stand now plus markets have seen one of the worst quarters in history of the outbreak in fact trading and has stalled international growth and things are looking any better at the start of q 2 we bring you expert analysis on the issue. would be a lion share of focus and at the pandemic.