Earnest Taylor looks the part of a prison warden: burly and stern-faced. But the stereotypes end there for the leader of the new Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility, an 1,100-bed private prison in Tutwiler.
Taylor, a Texan with 21 years of corrections experience, is the voice of modern incarceration - a system that puts as much emphasis on rehabilitation as punishment.
"The days of locking 'em up and throwing away the key are over," Taylor says. "When they get out, you've got a worse person than went in."
Taylor works for Corrections Corp. of America, the Nashville, Tenn.-based firm that runs the Tutwiler prison and another in Greenwood among its 68 adult facilities worldwide. The company's philosophy, preached by Taylor, is simple: Give an inmate a place to sleep and three healthy meals, allow him controlled contact with the outside world and provide him academic and job-skills training. Not only will he be a better behaved inmate while in prison but a more productive citizen when he gets out.
"I firmly believe that," said Taylor, who lives in Clarksdale but keeps close ties to Texas, where his son Chris is a standout wide receiver and All-Big 12 candidate for the Texas A&M football team.
Taylor confessed to some culture shock early this year when CCA executives dispatched him to Tutwiler, which he'd never heard of, much less visited.
His immediate worry was finding employees in a sparsely populated region. Recruitment had never been a problem in east Texas.
"I decided to let God do the staffing," Taylor said, adding, "To this day, we've had no problems staffing this facility."
Employees travel from as far as Memphis, Jackson and even Natchez, filling the void left when western Tallahatchie County couldn't produce enough qualified bodies to meet a quota negotiated by county officials as part of their contract with CCA. Eighty percent of the prison's initial jobs were supposed to be filled by residents of the impoverished county. Sixty-three percent was the best the prison could do after some 150 to 200 applicants failed to meet company standards. CCA requires new employees to have a high school diploma and to pass stringent drug and background checks.
The Tutwiler prison has 209 employees, just nine less than the optimum staffing level for its current inmate population of 338. The handful of vacancies are mainly in the medical field, Taylor said.
The warden's top priority now is finding inmates. Except for a few Tallahatchie County prisoners transferred from county jails in Charleston and Sumner, all of the current occupants are from Wisconsin, which pays CCA $42 a day per inmate to house convicted felons from that state.
Taylor said he's negotiating with Arkansas state officials and the Federal Bureau of Prisons on new contracts that would push the inmate population above 500, in which case he'd hire another hundred or so employees.
Even at half of capacity, the prison would be a long way from profitability, figures state Sen. Bunky Huggins, R-Greenwood, a veteran of corrections oversight during his lengthy career in the state Legislature, including a stint as chairman of the Corrections Committee.
At the CCA-run Delta Correctional Facility in Greenwood, which has a capacity similar to the Tutwiler prison but a much higher occupancy rate, "they need at least 950 inmates to make it," Huggins said.
One source the Tallahatchie County facility won't likely be tapping is the Mississippi Department of Corrections.
Huggins, who was involved in drafting enabling legislation for the Tutwiler prison, said lawmakers specifically forbade it from housing Mississippi inmates. Conversely, the CCA prison in Greenwood has an exclusive contract with the state.
"We've found that you can't mix inmates from other states," Huggins said, citing major discipline problems that arise from regional turf wars.
"If we got in a situation where we needed the beds, we'd want the whole prison," he said of the Tutwiler facility.
That's unlikely, Huggins said, because of what he sees as a shift in the state away from incarceration and toward house-arrest and early-release programs for non-violent offenders.
"I can't see us revisiting it," he said of the state law allowing the Tutwiler prison to operate.
A more promising but less profitable target for Taylor could be prisoners from surrounding counties.
Under terms of CCA's contract with Tallahatchie County, the sheriff can house up to 80 county prisoners in a special unit at the Tutwiler prison at a cost to the county of just $15 per day per inmate.
Taylor said he'd like to spread word of available beds in Tutwiler to other counties in the region.
