then the shame on this decade. when you're inside is totally different from outside people watched a movie take on what prison is like but they don't know. what it is to be inside we have to take you inside. to

a whole lot of things but we do each other. teach. me and i used to. have to make do so you try to figure out. we have to. take to washing all clothes. have you put your clothes in a bag. or you take them to the laundry and. you don't know which. you might. not good at all. the mole in the prison is coming through the wall you bring it to be inhaled. so a lot of people sick. from that.

even though unit $29.00 is there to be the newest the most modern. it is still crumbling the infrastructure is crumbling and it's billable to anybody who even walks into the normally when you go to a visit. it's going to be hotter it's going to be cold either it's going to be extremely cold outside or is going to be extremely hot inside normally in temperatures excess of $100.00 degrees there's no act and there's no air conditioning. there's no accusation for this in a ventilated area. and in the actual pods in the sales that whole guys they have no circulation at all which you normally would see is that you see. this and they're laying on the coal for because you know 20 of them is in made out of center blood's cinder blocks they hold in their cool air they hold so dear in our minds they're holding in all the cool air so the gas just lay bare just like 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 visiting. rats roaches spiders. and little spiders mosquitoes to. waltz in that you want to see in the corners of the facility and these are areas where the public are. 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 there have been these sort of.

cruel inhuman conditions and what we're going to continue to see and have seen in the past is the after saddam. periods where the state violence and 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 turned water on it's literally the color of mud water fountains when they were the same way they were they come on the water fountains you're too scared to drink the guards will tell you not to drink 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 barriers between 2 ways it's either to chlorinate it or it smells like sewage and so all the pipes leak right so the gas tied their socks around the leaky pipes and so if that's not so brand. they know not to drink the water if the sox are why they know chlorine is 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 if there is

a border notice in the area the guys will get by the water they're 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 and they let all of the soil and all the particles go to the bottom and then they just drink the water that is clarified on top. conditions that have been this way for. 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 those of 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 a campaign of white supremacy. believed that the problem with comically scene 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 white supremacist in its intent. as i mentioned james james vitamins the person who established. parchment and he's 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 great in white supremacy. an issue with. 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 incarcerated people died as a result of the incidents have occurred within one of the indio see it was still it 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 of parchment has been condemned and closed down since 2009 says to 1000 i suffered for over 10 years and that was closed down when

a.c.l.u. into than agreement with mississippi 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. decided 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 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 because they didn't have the inside information once we got it we shared it and we share the video and the video went viral on twitter it was shared by. many hip hop artists and it's heinous on twitter and instagram couldn't people like t.i. david banner and big create i think 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 risky act 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 merged 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. do the people that are supposed to be in charge of the prisoners not disappoint i think this is was threatening to one because you can't you get so many people and so much of that is around so much controversy and they were going there you can't you can really control in 5 out who were to get richie this from whom and cell is going to continue to leak we're going to teach them no more things that continue to slip because people are getting bold. but now people also come with it the main way their presidents have been able to skirt any type of regulation authority around issues involving prisoners and litigation pretty much came out of the night of 95 and congress passed the prison litigation reform act and what that was is that at that time congress was saying in prisons we're seeing

a large number of prisoners filing suit 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 complied and so what the p.l.r. a does is that it basically calls for prisoners to allow their captors high and knowingness to fix issues that are conditions based so basically what 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 water smells like or this water tastes like corey and then you have to give those people a reasonable amount of time to address the issue before you can move on. to even file a lawsuit against the president. always

the issue of trying to play in the american elections far to. betray themselves as being. maybe the mark at least rhetorically but reality shows a very different story and it's bipartisan the commanding heights of industry and finance 40 china for in the show is this trying to.

world is driven by a dream shaped by one person. who dares thinks. we dare to ask.

if. the system is working let's just be clear it's 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 work and what needs to happen with the system is tear to system apart. that's what needs to happen because if we don't repeal it put some lousy imply we're going to keep this repetitive cycle. that only rubio will you bring different people to the table with different plants have to move and the way to mississippi would

always go boom the good old boy rule right but i believe that this generation is coming the. good old boy longworth. 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. you know 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 and 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 are 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 they get treated terribly and that's just not the case most prisoners are not there for any other reason than possibly smoking

a plant or doing some other victimless crime partially for example you have the a.a.r.p. process which is called the administrative remedy process and the way it's supposed to work is that there is supposed to be a box in 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 to in you can only bring up one issue at a time and it has to be so specific as to give the m.t.o. 3 reasonable notice in time to fix your problem before you can move on and so if this is a 3 step process you feel that they are p. and you tell them what your complaint is that you put it in the box and you hope to get a response if you don't get a response within 30 days you would answer the 2nd step and 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 find somebody to file a lawsuit on your behalf against in b.o.c. then you can do so it makes it virtually impossible to get eating canned remedies legally for prisoners who don't have any hope. so. so 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 are either bit death should be prison have not a clue what's really going on you've got the wrong people at the table you know you need those who play at the table that really care people that are connected to the issue at hand people who have had family 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 it's 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. 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 got to go way back so what's happened you got to actually have legislators and people actually going to the facility actually talking to people like their people and not just walking me ignoring them like you're looking at the pain on the wall but actually human masm bring in me and you know found out that they asking them. you know make them human because they can help you solve the problems they can tell you was needed they could fix it guess guess what light on is not

a. not in any other organization not even the state of mississippi the inmates the prisoners are 100 percent in charge 100 percent in charge. of the media attention has pressurized out the more the abuse the abnormal use the hand the walls we've lived the hand the world and you're 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 don't shower when i say you can shall. you go eat when i say you can eat and dance would i say take your reckon take it now that's the reality it was going on behind the walls in

a prison with luggage and in lockdown in this in a state but especially in mississippi is a time for dio say out to more to allow staff who are rated been overworked to have time off so this is a lot of. this going on even more pressure rises a pressure situation. we want you to 29 should we want any brothers or sisters as a side unit 32 to be out of unit 32 we were partially shut down in the interim. immediately what we want is for those brothers and sisters a bit of 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 done now right now just as here value of which you have to try and do in this year manage time in the amount of money that it takes to even if out in the litigations about conditions we

can take the alabama department of corrections case as an example that's a 6 year lift you know organizers and have attorneys sit here to even get into a point where they can bring alabama department corrections to the table in mississippi burgess can start question when he will let the health department here last week the reason is the health department is can the on them before. but since that time they refused to allow those brothers access to to the necessary things and we want people out of there ultimately we want them to immediately reinstate parole for those who have the ability to have access to parole we want them to a media really released those who have been healed on not in the fences on drug offenses to de casa rate this system ultimately. be honest with your goal is to abolish this system and start it over you know what i mean like reboot because we've never had

a say in this process rather the sources that never had a say in this process but this process has always come down on us is very necessary 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 where able to better address the sort of everyday violence as well as it gets more and more attention we get more and more leaders stepping up who are using their voices and using their their power stepping

in their power to you know create a voice for the incarcerated we're still trying to be centric on the voices of the actual prisoners i know they are 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 bring a lot of people who will to listen to speak. who did little wall. who because they have knowledge or heard someone speak about it they may feel it was deliverable voice book them to you want to merge she argue you read in the right it's hard to explain to people. you 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 paid this price of educating yourself to be the expert and then when you have some matter come alone you did time in prison. now tell you what you need this is what you need and that's a lot of why. the criminal justice system in what's happening here in mississippi is happening because we have deafen 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 hurt although i hope that we have being heard and you heard your ear. if our state has heard 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 her. but it's a cause for pride pressure conditions that's what makes this a pressure just like water water a bus or a water pipe if you put too much pressure on it and. everything that's happening. right knowledge disappoint so say. the. lobster loss. for no reason. people in sales. are not supposed to be. good. good it's called is causing death. to prison and they want to go to prison to. go to prison. but not to disc a pass. this is the worst ever heard. brothers and

sisters. feel your. pain. we have a stout from the day we. took a current moment and we just asked him stand down is strength in the war. dead a week in areas where you can stop valid us you can encourage to. do they just like you would embrace want would love. you if you. are like you desirable. and to know that you have people out here working. their way to for you.

that's geysers financial survive they say money to develop. such entities if this is a central bank support diet goodness i'm going to call them right now say stop. problem drugs don't always come from unscrupulous dealers but from pharmacies to in every state in the united states we see me very sharp increase in the number of people seeking treatment for addiction to prescription opioids it invaded america under

the banner of medicine persisted with the pain but instead of trying to wean him off though she did dose after dose after dose after dose and really became his drug dealer so who's to blame patients doctors manufacturers all the governments of. the demick no certainly no blood is just blind to nationalities. a summary. of the facts world beats to. judge a. commentary crisis with this system things. we can do better we should. everyone is contributing way but we also know that this

crisis not go on forever the challenges created the response has been masked so many good people are helping us. it makes us feel very proud that we're in it together. u.k.'s opposition the labor party is pushing for our g.'s broadcast license to be revoked demanding a ban in a letter to britain's independent t.v. regulator also ahead. an encounter with a u.s. fighter jet and several are injured on board an iranian a passenger plane and the pilot makes a dangerous maneuver to avoid a collision. trying to orders the united states to shut its consulate in the city of chengdu in response to the closure of its own in texas that says u.s.

secretary of state chooses beijing trying to establish quote a new era in.