When it came to picking a corrections commissioner, Gov. Tate Reeves did a good job of assessing his support in the Mississippi Senate.
The Senate Corrections Committee on Tuesday unanimously approved the governor’s choice, former Angola warden Burl Cain, to lead the state’s troubled prison system. This bipartisan vote is a clear signal that support for Cain in the full Senate is strong enough to overcome concerns about the conflict-of-interest and ethics questions that prompted Cain’s 2016 retirement after many years in Louisiana.
Cain said all the right things to the corrections committee: His conduct was fully investigated in Louisiana and he came out clean. Failure in Mississippi is not an option for him, even though a string of violent deaths at prisons around the state have led to a Justice Department investigation and lawsuits that have attracted national attention.
Most important, Cain vowed to fix the state penitentiary at Parchman, where both Reeves and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann visited early this year to see conditions firsthand. The visit prompted the governor to close Parchman’s “most notorious unit,” which likely means there are other severe problems in the penitentiary that must be addressed.
Cain is an experienced corrections leader, and may not need advice on how to run the ship. However, someone ought to point out to him that Louisiana and Mississippi are two different places, especially when it comes to questionable behavior by public officials.
You may be able to get away with it for a while in either state. But one of his recent predecessors in Mississippi, Chris Epps, was very good at telling governors and lawmakers what they wanted to hear. Unfortunately, Epps said it while he was shaking down prison suppliers in a criminal racket as bold as the state has ever seen, one that made him a prison inmate instead of a corrections commissioner.
It’s up to Cain to stay far, far away from the appearance of unethical behavior. If he is found even in the vicinity of someplace close to any ethical line, the questions and investigations that proved to be his undoing in Louisiana will hound him here.
The Legislature has a secondary but vital role in fixing the corrections problem. It has to make sure the department — along with all of the state’s other departments and agencies — has the proper safeguards in place to discourage criminal activity like theft and fraud. Epps had too much financial authority that did not require supervision, and he took advantage of this lax oversight for years.
As for the governor, it’s safe to say he did not expect his first six months in office to be as eventful as they have been. Perhaps more than anyone else, Reeves has to hope that Cain will be the stable, experienced leader the prison system needs.
Assuming the full Senate approves Cain, he must live up to the challenging vows he made Tuesday: Failure in Mississippi cannot be an option, and Parchman’s problems must be fixed.
