‘You're His Property': How One Sheriff Used Inmate Labor on His Family Farm

New York Times

27-03-2025

Bryan Bailey, the Mississippi sheriff whose department had been under federal investigation for torturing people, staffed his mother's commercial chicken farm with inmates from the county jail and used taxpayer-purchased equipment to improve the grounds, according to four former inmates and a former deputy who said they had worked on the farm.
They said inmates with special privileges, known as trusties, were repeatedly driven to the farm — sometimes by Sheriff Bailey himself — to perform various tasks on top of their daily work duties for Rankin County.
Former trusties and others who worked on Sheriff Bailey's family farm said inmates had received cash or meals in exchange for the work. The former deputy, Christian Dedmon, who is currently serving a federal prison sentence, said he had worked on the farm while he was on the clock at the sheriff's department.
Over six months, reporters for Mississippi Today interviewed several former Rankin County sheriff's deputies and 20 former trusties. The trusties who said they had worked on the farm asked that their names not be used because they feared retribution. The reporters also reviewed more than 1,000 pages of county financial records, as well as text messages Mr. Dedmon sent while working on the farm.
The reporting revealed that for most of his 13 years in office, Sheriff Bailey used his position as the highest paid and most powerful public figure in his suburban county in ways that financially benefited himself and his family. Through his department's attorney, Sheriff Bailey declined to comment for this article.
For years, people familiar with the sheriff's activities kept quiet, out of a sense of loyalty or because they feared crossing a popular sheriff with political connections across Mississippi.
But that began to change in 2023, when five Rankin County sheriff's deputies were charged with civil rights offenses for torturing two Black men in their home and shooting one of them in the mouth. A subsequent investigation by The New York Times and Mississippi Today revealed that deputies in the department, including those who called themselves the Goon Squad, had used similar brutality for nearly two decades against those they suspected of using or dealing drugs.
Dozens of victims have since shared their accounts of the violence and some community leaders have demanded that Sheriff Bailey resign. Mr. Dedmon, one of the five Rankin deputies who pleaded guilty in the torture case, has begun speaking openly about his time at the department.
'I hid everything for him,' Mr. Dedmon said of the sheriff. 'I done everything for him. I know now I was just a tool to be used during a certain time like everyone else.'
In a series of interviews, Mr. Dedmon described how he had transported inmates from the Rankin County Pre-Trial Detention Trusty Work Program to the farm and worked alongside them.
Mr. Dedmon said the sheriff had instructed him to use a construction vehicle, bought by the department in 2019 for $97,000, to till soil for corn and clear wooded areas on the farm. The vehicle, called a skid steer by those who used it, was sometimes stored there, he said.
Mr. Dedmon said workers on the farm also used other items that had been purchased by the department, including weed killer.
County financial records show that since 2018, the sheriff's department has purchased skid steer attachments worth more than $50,000, nearly $10,000 worth of weed killer, as well as supplies designed to care for poultry.
Reporters provided officials with a detailed list of purchases, along with specific descriptions of the duties detailed by trusties. Neither department officials nor county leaders would explain the purchases or answer questions for this article.
Jason Dare, the attorney for the sheriff's department, said officials would no longer answer questions from Mississippi Today or The Times because a previous article from the publications had summarized a written statement by Mr. Dare instead of running it in full. That article quoted much of Mr. Dare's statement, but did not include his complaints that the news organizations had not written positive stories about the department.
In addition to the farm work, former trusties said Sheriff Bailey had directed them to craft cabinets, install flooring or do other work for him and his associates.
Several former trusties said they had worked on vehicles owned by deputies or by the sheriff, who earns nearly $120,000 a year, making him one of the highest paid elected officials in Mississippi.
Mr. Dedmon said that in 2020, he paid trusties to build the back deck of his home, at Sheriff Bailey's suggestion.
A photograph shared by Mr. Dedmon's ex-wife and dated Feb. 29, 2020, shows Mr. Dedmon and three other men, all in civilian clothing, working on the deck. Several people familiar with the men identified two of them as former trusties who, records show, were serving jail time when the picture was taken.
Mississippi law prohibits the use of public money or property by elected officials for their own use. Violations are punishable by fines or up to 20 years in prison.
And the Mississippi Code of Ethics in Government bars public servants from using their positions for the economic gain of businesses with which they or their relatives are associated.
'That's broader than just using inmate labor, but it certainly includes using inmate labor,' said Roun McNeal, an instructional assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of Mississippi who serves on the board overseeing a state work program for prison inmates.
Nearly all the former inmates interviewed by Mississippi Today praised the trusty program, saying it had helped them beat addiction and build skills for life after release. Several said they had no complaints about the work they did, including their duties at the farm.
But other trusties said they had felt intense pressure to do whatever was asked of them without complaint.
Rankin County's trusty program enables defendants to serve time in the county jail instead of going to a state prison. The program grants trusties special privileges and assigns them duties to help run the jail, all without pay, a common practice in trusty work programs across the nation.
To become a trusty, some inmates signed documents agreeing to accept the maximum sentence for their crimes if they were 'removed from the program for any reason.'
Trusties entered the program at Sheriff Bailey's recommendation, and department officials decided if and when trusties had violated the terms of their agreements, according to Andy Sumrall, a criminal defense attorney based in Jackson, Miss., who has represented a number of former trusties.
'The way the sheriff's trusty program is, you're his property,' one former trusty said.
'This ain't happening.'
McLain Farms sits beside a two-lane road that snakes through the patchwork of farmland and forest south of Puckett, a quiet town in Rankin County with a welcome sign that reads: '300 good friendly folks and a few old soreheads.'
The 38-acre farm came into Sheriff Bailey's family when his mother remarried in 1997. The farm yields corn and other produce, but its primary focus is raising chickens. In recent years, McLain has housed about 10,000 chickens annually for Tyson Foods, which harvests the eggs.
Several former inmates who worked on the farm, all interviewed separately, said they were told by other trusties to keep the work secret. One recalled Sheriff Bailey warning trusties at the farm: 'We're not here. This ain't happening.'
According to Mr. Dedmon, the sheriff often took two or more trusties to the farm in the afternoons to complete small tasks, like spraying weeds, sorting tools or cutting grass.
The farm generates almost 300 tons of waste a year, a mixture of feces, feathers, uneaten feed and bedding. During the annual mucking of the chicken houses, the sheriff would have about six trusties on the farm every day, Mr. Dedmon said.
At 9:29 the night before Halloween in 2020, Mr. Dedmon messaged his then-wife and told her he was covered in chicken waste, a text reviewed by Mississippi Today shows. She told reporters that work would sometimes last until 3 a.m.
After one cleaning, a former trusty recalled, the sheriff took a dozen or so inmates in civilian clothes to Boots & More in Jackson, where he bought them replacements for their ruined boots. That former trusty said he worked 12-hour days every Saturday and Sunday for a month, in addition to several weekday evenings that lasted into the early morning hours. He said he was never paid.
Dan Pacholke, a corrections consultant and co-founder of the Sustainability in Prisons Project, called the use of inmate labor for personal profit 'a huge ethical violation,' because the sheriff 'has the ability to control their destiny.'
Even if inmates were paid, working on the sheriff's family farm could raise ethical concerns, according to Mr. Pacholke and other experts.
'Every decision you make about inmates, their agency is conflicted in some way, because they don't voluntarily live at that jail,' said Mr. McNeal, the criminal justice professor.
Trusties gave different descriptions about their pay, which often depended on the kind of work they performed. But none of them described a formal process in which checks were issued or money was deposited into any account. Experts said that cash payments raised concerns about transparency, as they are impossible to track.
The sheriff's department did not fulfill a records request made early this month seeking any documents related to payments to trusties.
Taxpayer-funded chicken supplies
In addition to relying on inmate labor to supplement the work force at his mother's chicken farm, Sheriff Bailey also used county funds and supplies at the farm, according to Mr. Dedmon, another former deputy and others familiar with the work.
Mr. Dedmon and another person who worked on the farm told Mississippi Today that the sheriff had instructed them to take truckloads of gravel from the Rankin County government's stockpile and use it to resurface roads on the farm.
Mr. Dedmon said he would sneak onto county property at night, sometimes with Sheriff Bailey, to take the gravel. 'I can't tell you how many loads of county gravel I've hauled down there on the weekends or at night with his dump trailer, or rode with him to do so,' Mr. Dedmon said.
According to Mr. Dedmon, the sheriff had magnets made to conceal the sheriff's star on the department vehicle Mr. Dedmon used to pick up the gravel. The magnets, Mr. Dedmon said, were marked with the name of a nonexistent business, derived from the name of a former trusty: 'Cazell's Welding.'
A photo taken last month shows gray gravel on the roads where Mr. Dedmon said the county gravel had been placed.
The skid steer that Mr. Dedmon described using on the farm had been purchased by the department for search and rescue teams with money seized during drug raids, county documents show. Deputies said it was intended to help with storm cleanup.
Mr. Dedmon mentioned the skid steer in a text message to his then-wife on Sept. 16, 2020: 'I just wanted to come home, but damn sheriff just came in here and asked me to run the skid steer to pucket for him.'
County records show that in April 2019, the sheriff's department used $36,000 seized from drug busts to buy a mulching head. Mr. Dedmon said Sheriff Bailey had used it to clear land on the farm.
The sheriff's department also spent about $600 on items typically used in poultry farming. Among them: poultry netting, brooder lamps, which keep chicks warm, and an 'angled house brooder' to house chicks.
Angela English, president of the Rankin County chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., which had called for Sheriff Bailey's resignation over the torture case, said more should be done to hold the sheriff accountable.
'When you provide someone with that much authority and they don't have to answer to anyone,' she said, 'you're asking for trouble.'
Mississippi Today's reporting for this article was supported by a grant from Columbia University's Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights, in conjunction with Arnold Ventures, a nonprofit research foundation that supports journalism.