TUTWILER, MISSISSIPPI — The cotton is just beginning to bloom. It’s late August in the Mississippi Delta, an alluvial plain formed by soil deposited from the Missouri, Ohio and Mississippi rivers over thousands of years. The temperature sits around 85 degrees. The white cotton bolls sprout from green shrubs that cover the fields, which are broken only by tree lines — signaling the presence of bayous, rivers and cypress swamps — and a tall, barbed-wire fence running alongside U.S. Route 49.
The fence encloses the Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility, a privately managed prison operated by CoreCivic, the largest prison-operating company in the country with nearly $2 billion in annual revenue. A water tower adjacent to the prison welcomes drivers to town: “Where The Blues Was Born.” The story goes that W.C. Handy, who popularized American blues music, first heard it played in Tutwiler in 1903 as he waited to catch a train.
Abandoned buildings pervade the community. There are only a few businesses in town, including two gas stations, a liquor store, a Dollar General, a laundromat and a historic funeral home, which once prepared the body of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy lynched in 1955. There are more beds in Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility — 2,672 — than residents of Tutwiler.
Approximately 240 of them are currently occupied by Montana inmates.
The new agreement includes a plan to send 240 Montana inmates to the company’s private prison in Tutwiler, Mississippi.
This January, CoreCivic announced a two-year contract with Montana to hold inmates at the Tallahatchie prison, an announcement that followed other contracts with CoreCivic’s Saguaro Correctional Center in Eloy, Ariz. In total, about 600 male inmates — roughly 20 percent of Montana’s adult male prison population — are imprisoned out of state. According to Carolynn Stocker, the communications director for the Montana Department of Corrections, the contracts cost the state around $19 million per year.
The Montana DOC states that such out-of-state contracts are a temporary response to years of overcrowding at Montana’s only state-owned prison for men in Deer Lodge, where ground has recently broken for additional housing units and more cells. Yet for some with family in the out-of-state facilities, the arrangement has included fewer programs for inmates and increased costs.
The Montana family of Tallahatchie inmate Del Crawford can’t visit in person because of the expenses, according to his mother, Texas resident Phyllis Richardson. Hers is a common concern.
“His kids can’t come. He can’t see his family,” she said. “And as far as I’m concerned, like I said, he needs to be where he can see his kids.”
Recent history
Montana’s out-of-state contracts with CoreCivic began in 2023, when Republican lawmakers included roughly $4 million in annual appropriations for 120 out-of-state beds in a prison infrastructure bill. The resulting contract with CoreCivic’s facility in Arizona charges Montana $90 per prison bed per day and runs through October 2025.
Last year, the Montana DOC signed another contract for beds at the Arizona facility through July 2026. And in January, CoreCivic announced the Mississippi contract, which reserved 240 prison beds at an initial rate of $82 per bed per day through the end of 2026.
Both stemmed from years of overcrowding at state facilities. Sen. Barry Usher, R-Laurel, who chairs the Montana Criminal Justice Oversight Council, told Montana Free Press that he hopes inmates can be brought back once more space is added to the state prison.
“I think at this point we don’t have any choice,” he said. “… Because we just don’t have room until we build more room or figure out something in-state.”
The reasons for the growth in the prison population are contested. A 2024 legislative select committee pointed to a recent rise in violent crimes, which usually results in longer sentences. But ACLU of Montana lobbyist Henry Seaton, who served on the Criminal Justice Oversight Council until Gov. Greg Gianforte removed him in July, attributed much of the problem to drug and parole offenses.
“There is a rise in violent crime across the state; however, by far the most popular felony offense that we put people in prison for in the state is criminal possession of dangerous drugs for both men and women,” he said in an interview with MTFP. “And it’s not with intent to distribute.”
Three decades in the making
Although the out-of-state CoreCivic contracts were enacted recently, the path that led Montana to Mississippi began decades ago.
In 1994, the Associated Press reported overcrowding at the Montana State Prison and stated that the DOC planned to address the issue by allocating funds to probation, parole and treatment programs. Former Montana Department of Corrections Director Rick Day was quoted as saying that the “next two years could be the watershed years, and we might see our population drop down to around 1,000.”
The opposite happened. Montana’s incarcerated population more than doubled in a decade, increasing from 1,478 people in 1991 to 3,328 people in 2001, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. Similar to today, many of those incarcerations were for drug offenses and probation or parole violations, according to a 2002 Billings Gazette article.
Then as now, Montana contracted with out-of-state prisons, including some operated by CoreCivic, which was then known as the Correctional Corporation of America (CCA). By 2001, federal data reported that 33% of Montana inmates were held out of state.
As prison populations grew in the 1990s, so did the number of private prisons. CCA built the first in the U.S. in 1984; by 2001, the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics reported there were 158.
Montana’s prison expansion efforts since Gov. Greg Gianforte took office have so far totaled more than half a billion dollars.
One of those prisons was in Montana. On Oct. 15, 1998, the Great Falls Tribune announced the name of the new CCA prison near the Canadian border in Shelby: Crossroads Correctional Facility. That same day, roughly 1,400 miles away, residents in Mississippi awoke to news that CCA would build the Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility in Tutwiler.
“It’s going to bring revenue and jobs into the town that are desperately needed, and businesses are going to spring out from it,” former Tutwiler Mayor Robert Grayson told the local newspaper. “I believe that this prison is going to have a very big, positive impact on the town.”
Locals have similar views today. While Mississippi’s minimum hourly wage is $7.25, a CoreCivic billboard outside town advertises correctional officer jobs starting at $19.13 per hour. The Tallahatchie facility pays $2.9 million in property taxes and, with 440 employees, has an annual payroll of $27.7 million.
Tutwiler residents, including Tupac Gibson, who helped build the prison, said the area relies on those funds.
“We’re in the heart of the Delta. What you see now is what you see,” he said, before listing the few businesses in town. “That’s all we’ve got, besides God and love.”
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Costs to visit
Finances are also at the forefront of the minds of Montana residents with family members in out-of-state prisons.
Helena resident KC Betchie said a three-night trip to visit her brother, William Case, in Arizona cost around $1,400. He was convicted of assaulting a police officer when police entered his home in 2021 without a warrant. The U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear his case next month.
“My family has the means to go down there and visit,” she said. “Not every family does.”
DOC says it has made no determinations on how or where to spend $250 million set aside for addressing growing female inmate population.
Betchie and others with family incarcerated in Arizona also said commissary items had higher costs than those at in-state facilities due to taxes there. While Montana has no sales tax, the sales tax in Eloy, Ariz., is 9.7% for non-food items and 2% for food.
Both the Arizona and Mississippi prisons are in rural communities. For those visiting the latter, the closest hotels are approximately 15 miles away in Clarksdale, Miss. Airports are even further. The two largest are Memphis International Airport — roughly 87 miles — and Jackson-Medgar Wiley Evers International Airport, 144 miles away. Round-trip airline tickets between Bozeman and Memphis range between $290 and $680, according to recent Google Flights data.
Audra Holcomb, whose son Erin is imprisoned in Tallahatchie on a deliberate homicide conviction, said visiting has proved too costly.
“No matter what happened, there are loved ones on the other side,” she said. “At least in Montana, I could visit. I could keep his mental health OK because I’m here. They’ve taken away so much from us by moving them.”
Fewer programs and legal implications
CoreCivic denied a request from MTFP to tour the Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility in late August.
Stocker, the communications director for the Montana DOC, said in an email, however, that the department conducts regular visits to both prisons, with 17 visits to the Arizona prison in 2023 and seven to the Mississippi facility this year. One of the Arizona visits was an audit of inmate medical services, and Tallahatchie has a medical audit scheduled later this year, she added.
According to DOC data, there have been two deaths at each out-of-state prison since the contracts began, with all four deaths occurring in 2025. Two men in their 30s died at the Arizona prison; in Mississippi, a man in his 40s and a man in his 70s died. All remain under investigation, according to a Montana DOC database. In comparison, there have been six deaths at the Montana State Prison this year, with four still under investigation.
Criminal justice reform advocacy groups, including the Montana Innocence Project and the American Civil Liberties Union of Montana, expressed concerns to MTFP about the limited re-entry and parole programming options available at the out-of-state prisons.
Montana’s contract with Tallahatchie states that the daily bed rate will increase once the prison implements several programs, including a program called the Integrated Correctional Programming Model (ICPM) offered at some prisons in Montana.
In her email, Stocker stated that Saguaro and Tallahatchie are significantly smaller than the Montana State Prison, which limits the availability of programs for inmates.
“The DOC expects vocational programming and ICPM to be provided to Montana inmates in Tallahatchie in the near future,” she wrote. “In fact, DOC staff members are traveling to Arizona next month to train CoreCivic staff members (including those from Tallahatchie) on the delivery of ICPM.”
She added that existing Tallahatchie programs include life skills, computer classes, carpentry and rehabilitation courses. Saguaro offers those, along with a few more, Stocker said.
Additionally, both Montana residents with relatives in the prisons and criminal justice reform advocates said there was a lack of transparency in how inmates are selected to be sent out of state. In response, Stocker said that DOC staff selects inmates based on factors including “custody level; proximity to parole eligibility; participation in treatment and other programming; health/mental health needs, and separation requirements.”
Prison lawyers and criminal justice reform advocates have also expressed concerns over the increase in difficulty that comes with communicating with inmates across state lines.
Brady Smith is the legal director of the Montana Innocence Project, a nonprofit that focuses on freeing those who are wrongfully incarcerated. She said that a lack of face-to-face contact with inmates, made onerous by the organization’s financial constraints, has complicated making legal appeals on their behalf.
“There are pretty strict deadlines on the timing of when we can file claims, and so timing is very important in our cases,” she said. “… When you have people who are hundreds of miles away, then there are issues with getting communications from them; getting communications to them.”
Montana Innocence Project Executive Director Amy Sings In The Timber added that the organization is concerned about possible “constitutional issues around access to the courts and due process.”
“I think all of that has been something we’ve been trying to keep tabs on, but quite honestly, it’s been a little difficult to do so because of the way that the contracts have expanded,” she said. “They’ve expanded so quickly.”
At a crossroads
As inmates remain out of state, the primary solution proposed by state officials and Gov. Gianforte has been to build more prison space. Currently, five new housing units are being built at the state prison and are expected to be completed in the fall of 2028.
“The reality is, we need more beds,” Gianforte said in an April news release. “… Once today’s expansion is finished, we’ll have another 117 beds right here. A step in the right direction, this new project will help get us closer to our goal of expanding capacity.”
The recent select committee report also encouraged the construction of more prison beds and projected that the system will see up to 1,530 new offenders in the next two decades. But after years of continued prison growth, those like Amy Sings In The Timber argued the state should be looking at alternatives.
“Instead of building bigger prisons and expanding and extending contracts, why are we not focusing on decarceration?” she asked. “Why are we not focusing on solutions that keep people from being in these perpetual cycles of violence and entrapment, in so many ways?”
This story was originally published by Montana Free Press at montanafreepress.org. You can read the original story here.
Christopher Cartwright is a journalist based in Louisiana. He reports on communities along the lower Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, with coverage ranging from prisons to petrochemical companies. He previously wrote for outlets in New Hampshire, Wisconsin and his home state of Texas.
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