Professor: Saga of the Mississippi Five is example of how the state’s parole system is broken
By Reiko Hillyer | Originally published by Mississippi Today
Mississippi Today Ideas is a platform for thoughtful Mississippians to share their ideas about our state’s past, present and future. Opinions expressed in guest essays are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of Mississippi Today. You can read more about the section here. The now six members of the Mississippi Five are incarcerated in prisons in the state, including Central Mississippi Correctional Facility in Rankin County and the Delta Correctional Facility in Greenwood.
Loretta Pierre has spent nearly 40 years in a Mississippi prison, despite becoming eligible for parole after serving 10 years of her sentence for a crime she committed as a 20-year-old pregnant woman. In that time, she has taken every college class available to her, mentored others, completed numerous rehabilitative courses and taken full responsibility for her past.
She is one of the Mississippi Five — Loretta, Evelyn Smith, Lisa Crevitt, Linda Ross, Jacqueline Barnes and Anita Krecic — who together have endured over 200 years of incarceration and more than 50 parole denials. All – now six women – remain imprisoned in the state prison system despite decades of rehabilitation and change.
This January, Loretta once again went before the Mississippi State Parole Board after waiting four years for another hearing and was denied yet again, setting a state-record of being denied 15 times, for a total of 32 years in parole board set-offs or denials. The latest denial signals more than the fate of one woman. It was a test of whether Mississippi still believes in second chances.
Mississippi locks up a higher percentage of its people than any independent democratic country on earth. Since 1970, its jail and prison population has risen by more than 700%.
Since 2022, Mississippi’s Parole Board has paroled significantly fewer people, with the grant rate dropping from an average of 62% to 35%. Hearings have become less frequent, and long set-offs or years of denials have increased, producing the fewest paroles in a decade and keeping more people incarcerated.
How did the state reach this point? Part of the answer lies in how parole once functioned.
In the 1980s, even as the tough-on-crime era took hold and truth-in-sentencing spread, Mississippi still relied on parole as a practical tool. Governors supported it as a commonsense way to manage overcrowding and comply with court orders, not as a threat to public safety.
Before 1995, people in Mississippi generally became eligible for a parole hearing after serving 25% of their sentence or 10 years. Nationally, entries to state parole supervision more than tripled from about 113,400 in 1980 to 349,000 in 1990, showing parole remained widely used even as sentences grew harsher. If it made sense then, there is no excuse for abandoning it now.
Things changed in 1995, just as Loretta and others in the Five were first becoming eligible for parole. That year, Mississippi enacted a truth-in-sentencing law which essentially abolished parole, not just for violent offenses, but for anyone sentenced after its passage. Parole became rare and largely symbolic. As a result, the prison population nearly doubled in just over a decade, rising from about 11,000 in 1994 to more than 21,000 in 2007, while corrections spending tripled from about $109 million annually to $348 million.
But the 1995 law also gutted parole for those sentenced before its passage. Parole is supposed to measure who a person has become while incarcerated. Instead, Mississippi’s Parole Board remains locked on the original crime, turning the process into a second sentence. For Loretta Pierre, it has meant a 15th.
When the judge gave Loretta her sentence, he was communicating that if she did what was asked of her, she would be deemed ready to return to society in 1997. That was almost 30 years ago.
Public safety is the reason most often cited for parole denials, but the data tells a different story. People convicted of violent offenses are often the least likely to reoffend, and in Mississippi fewer than 7% of parolees are rearrested for new crimes. Earned release mechanisms like parole improve public safety by creating incentives for accountability. But even beyond the data, the very definition of parole is misunderstood.
What’s missing in these debates is clarity: Parole isn’t a bonus or “early” release. It is part of a person’s sentence, carried out under state supervision.
Yet in Mississippi, parole increasingly functions as extended punishment. In 2023, nearly two-thirds of parole and probation revocations were due to technical violations such as missing an appointment or breaking curfew, not new criminal conduct. What started as a tool for reintegration has shifted toward surveillance, control and needless reincarceration.
These failures are compounded by a parole process that is neither transparent nor accountable. The five-member board is appointed solely by the governor, with no requirement for expertise in law, social work or corrections. Governors can replace members at will, leaving the board vulnerable to political pressure and abrupt swings in grant rates.
A 2023 review by the Joint Legislative Committee on Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review found the board often denies parole without meeting applicants, fails to document its decisions and offers no clear justification. With one of the lowest grant rates in the nation, parole in Mississippi has become a second sentence, driven by politics rather than public safety.
The Mississippi Five embody what happens when a system designed to recognize growth instead becomes a tool of indefinite punishment. Parole should be what it was intended to be: a path home.
Even when reforms pass, the board resists. Laws passed in 2008 and 2014 expanded eligibility, introduced risk-assessment tools and created presumptive parole, but the board has often ignored these measures, holding unnecessary hearings and blocking eligible people.
It does not have to be this way. Other states are showing what parole can look like when it is rooted in fairness and rehabilitation. Colorado and Vermont have professionalized their boards and made decisions more transparent. Connecticut has streamlined its process to speed release for low-risk individuals. In Oklahoma and Alabama, legislators have expanded parole and post-conviction relief specifically for criminalized survivors of sexual assault and abusive relationships.
For women like the Mississippi Five, whose lives have been shaped by abuse and survival, these reforms point to the justice that is possible.
I asked Loretta for her perspective. She told me:
“I am not the same person I was 40 years ago when I shot and killed the victim in my crime. I have grown into an emotionally and mentally mature woman. I have taken advantage of the rehabilitative programs made available to me, and I have not had a Rule Violation Report in five years. Taxpayers have spent over 8 million dollars keeping me in prison. I can’t understand why the Mississippi Parole Board members don’t think I’ve earned a second chance.”
The Mississippi Five are not asking for their crimes to be forgotten or claiming innocence. They are asking for the justice built into their sentences. That promise has been broken. This is not a legal failure. It is a moral one.
Gov. Tate Reeves and the Mississippi Parole Board can restore parole to its purpose: a structured, evidence-based path home for those who have earned it. This January, Loretta’s hearing tested not just her future but Mississippi’s values
If parole isn’t going to function as it should, Gov. Reeves has the power of clemency, a power designed precisely to provide mercy when the rest of the system has failed. It is time to recognize transformation, honor redemption, keep our word and believe in second chances.
Release Loretta. Release the Mississippi Five. Let them all come home.
Reiko Hillyer is professor of history at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, and author of “A Wall is Just a Wall: The Permeability of the Prison in the Twentieth Century United States” (Duke, 2024). Her work has been featured on CNN and NPR. Her Inside-Out Prison Exchange course, in which 15 undergraduates take class with 15 incarcerated students inside a correctional facility, is the subject of “Classroom 4,” an award-winning documentary film by Eden Wurmfeld, now streaming on PBS.
This article was originally published by Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Source: Original Article
