Mississippi has the tools to keep its rising parole rates down. Why isn’t it using them?

The report says the Magnolia State has over 9,000 people on parole and around 35,000 on probation on any given day — figures that have been climbing over the last 40 years. 

The report found that Mississippi’s combined rate of probation and parole has risen 57% in the last two decades alone — the 7th-highest rate in the country.

Probation drives much of that growth, according to researcher Jacob Kang-Brown, who crunched the numbers from the past several decades.

“There are a lot more people on probation in Mississippi now than there used to be,” Kang-Brown said. “The rate there is over 1,200 per 100,000,  so that's like more than 1% of people in Mississippi are on probation on a given day, which is a really high number.”

That translates to roughly 12,000 more people on probation in 2024 than in 2009, per PPI, and nearly 5,000 more on parole than in 2009.

Mississippi is the only state among its Gulf South counterparts to see an increase.  Louisiana and Alabama were not among the five other states in the U.S. to see rising parole and probation rates. 

The two, however, saw only modest rates of decline, with Louisiana’s community supervision going down by 17% and Alabama by 18%. Nationally, community supervision rates dropped by about 31%.

Kang-Brown said what the numbers don’t show what is driving the increase in Mississippi. State Public Defender Andre de Gruy said he has a few ideas of what those could be. 

“I would suspect the reason for these elevated numbers compared to other states is that we keep people on probation for too long, and we're not providing services, particularly in year one of people getting out,” de Gruy said. 

de Gruy said that rising probation rates are hard to explain, especially with decreasing crime rates, but he sees a few key factors driving up parole rates.

Mississippi essentially got rid of parole in 1995, with lawmakers requiring people to serve at least 85% of their sentences in prison. 

Lawmakers began expanding parole eligibility in 2008, with more work done over the last decade to further open it up.  

“We dramatically increased, over the last 10 years, the number of people eligible for parole,” said de Gruy. “So that explains part of why more people would be on parole, and most people would agree that's a good thing.” 

Parole and probation are often meant as intermediate measures to address crime without keeping people incarcerated for long stretches. But that’s not always what happens with community supervision. 

“We don't see all community supervision as inherently the wrong thing,” said Kang-Brown. “When someone is eligible for a parole release, we'd love to see that happen. But often, supervision gets tacked on to a sentence or will be thrown in as well as a prison sentence.”

The state has measures to give people ways to cut down their parole sentences, too.

The current program is called earned discharge credits. It operates similarly to “good behavior”-style programs in prison: by participating in certain programs and complying with certain conditions, a person’s supervision sentence can be reduced. 

But de Gruy, who sits on an oversight task force for the state Department of Corrections, said the data he’s seen shows that not many people get those credits.

“They've said things like, ‘Well, you know, Andre, the statute says they have to be in compliance,’” said de Gruy. “They interpret that to mean strict compliance; if there's anything you don't do, then we can't give you the credit.

“So, I think they're artificially holding people on probation and parole.”

Issues like technical violations — things that aren’t new crimes, but infringe on parole or probation conditions — are a huge part of what drives people back into prison. 

“They're still parole eligible, and they're not picking up a new crime, so they may end up serving most of that seven-year sentence by coming back, paroling again, coming back,” de Gruy said. “It does create a revolving door.”

Data shows that exits from community supervision were largely driven by entry into prison in Mississippi. 2024 numbers from the Bureau of Justice Statistics show that about 47% of probation exits were to prison or jail — largely for technical violations.

BJS numbers are similar for parole, with roughly 40% of parole exits in the same year being back to prison. 

In the same year, Louisiana and Alabama’s exits to prison were slightly lower, at about 26% to 29% for parole and probation, except for parole in Alabama, which had a reincarceration rate of about 17%. 

PPI noted, from the BJS data, that 20% of Louisiana’s probation exits to prison were due to a technical violation. They also highlighted the conditions of probation by state, noting that Alabama and Louisiana both have over a dozen different rules, often including financial requirements. 

Alabama, with 22 different rules, has the most of any state. 

While de Gruy pointed to very specific facets driving Mississippi’s rates, MDOC commissioner Burl Cain sees the problem on the grand scale. 

“We don't want to set people up to fail, and we have,” said Cain. “Not only here, but everywhere, so this is a thing that we're looking at across America.” 

Cain stressed the work of MDOC in rehabilitation and of Mississippi’s prisons not just being places to “lock and feed, torture and torment,” though the agency has been under fire in recent years for persistent and severe healthcare issues in its prisons. 

His focus was on the time people spend in prison, citing rehabilitation and practical job skills preparation as critical elements to driving parole and probation rates down, and especially rates of reincarceration. MDOC has some programming for post-secondary and vocational education. 

“If I don't have you prepared for the workforce, you're gonna wander around without a job, then you're going to smoke dope,” said Cain. “Then you're gonna deal dope and drugs because that's the only living you can make: selling drugs, then you're going to get caught.

“Then the ones you're dealing to are going to get caught, too. You're gonna just keep on growing the prison population, and it's not gonna work.”

But Cain also expressed mixed feelings on programs cutting time down on parole and probation. 

“I think if they're performing well on parole and they're following the rules and they are paying their fees and they are doing everything that's supposed to be and they are employed, I think yes,” Cain said in regard to reducing sentences. “But if they are out there missing, not doing that, not complying with the parole and so forth, stay a little longer.”

He similarly shifted responsibility for technical violations to individuals, although he did partially attribute issues with technical violations to failures on the part of corrections. 

“You keep letting them get away with it; they can get worse and worse,” said Cain. “It's better on the front end as soon as they do the violation at home, that you do something to them and have some kind of little punishment or some kind of little restrictions so that you can rein them in early.”

Cain said, like de Gruy, that support in navigating the conditions of community supervision and technical violations are helpful for individuals on probation and parole. 

For Kang-Brown, that’s a critical element to meaningfully breaking the revolving door of incarceration and community supervision. 

“It's important that states and counties work together to reduce the number of restrictions that people are under,” said Kang-Brown. “The sort of standard conditions of probation that people are on make it too easy to fail and then get sent back behind bars.”

This story was produced by the Gulf States Newsroom, a collaboration between Mississippi Public Broadcasting, WBHM in Alabama, WWNO and WRKF in Louisiana and NPR.