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 south of Puckett — 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 a thousand pages of county financial records, as well as text messages 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. 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,” 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,” he said.
In a series of interviews conducted over phone and email, Dedmon described how he had transported inmates from the Rankin County Pre-Trial Detention Trusty Work Program to the farm and worked alongside them. At the sheriff’s request, Dedmon said, he and others secretly took gravel from a Rankin County government storage yard at night, and delivered it to the farm.
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.
Dedmon said workers on the farm also used other items that had been purchased by the department, including weed killer, attachments for the skid steer and power tools.
County financial records show that since 2018, the sheriff’s department has purchased skid steer attachments worth more than $50,000 and more than 600 gallons of weed killer worth about $10,000. The records also show that in 2022 and 2023, the department spent hundreds of dollars on heat lamps and other supplies designed to care for poultry.
Reporters provided department officials and county government leaders 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 Dare instead of running it in full. That article quoted much of 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 the sheriff or his deputies. One trusty said he was paid $40 to $50 for those jobs. Another said he spent less time working on county vehicles than he did working on those owned by the sheriff, who earns nearly $120,000 a year, making him one of the highest paid elected officials in Mississippi.
Dedmon said that in 2020, trusties built the back deck of his home, at Sheriff Bailey’s suggestion. He said the sheriff told him he had to pay the trusties, and Dedmon gave each of them about $200 for two days of work.
A photograph shared by Dedmon’s ex-wife and dated Feb. 29, 2020, shows 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 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 and legal studies 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 former trusties said they had no complaints about the work they did, including their work at the farm.
But other former trusties said they had felt intense pressure to do whatever was asked of them without complaint because of the power Sheriff Bailey wielded over them.
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 Jackson-based criminal defense attorney who has represented a number of former trusties.
“The way the sheriff’s trusty program is, you’re his property,” one former trusty said.
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