BY RICHARD MASSEY
DBJ Contributing Writer

  Earnest L. Taylor, the Texas native who will supervise the 1000-bed, medium security Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility in Tutwiler has been busy for the last two months making sure that the prison’s May 15 opening goes off without a hitch.
  In February, Taylor said, “We’re at a point now where we’re really starting to pick up momentum.”
  That was two months ago, and Taylor was already staring at numerous piles of job applications. Now that the grand opening, or grand closing, of the jail is only a month away, Taylor can hardly be found at his office in Sumner. He’s at the prison in Tutwiler, keeping his finger on the pulse.
  The prison will be run by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), a private corrections giant based in Nashville, Tenn. Carothers Construction Inc. of Water Valley built the $33.2 million facility.
  When the prison’s cells open in mid -May, state inmates from Wisconsin will trickle in at the rate of 80 per week, said Taylor, until there are 500 prisoners behind bars.
  The Wisconsin inmates will be held at the prison on a contract basis, and Tallahatchie County will receive a portion of the contract price on a per-inmate basis.
  Before the prison reaches full capacity, the facility will be staffed with 270 employees, 158 of whom will be correctional officers, or  guards. The remining 112 positions  will be filled with support staff and administrative personnel.
  From there, the population will increase in increments until full capacity is reached. At that time, which will probably be some point in the summer, the prison will support 325 full-time positions, including a chaplain, lawyers, vocational instructors, teachers, a librarian, a medical staff and 220 guards, said Taylor.
  Before the prison opens, the guards will undergo six weeks of training. The training will be composed of four weeks of written instruction, and two weeks of instruction inside the prison, said Taylor. Seasoned guards from CCA’s other prisons will administer the training.
  Applicants must have a high school diploma, pass a drug test and a background check. Taylor indicated that the contractual obligation to hire at least 80 percent of the prison’s personnel from Tallahatchie County will probably be realized through the guard staff.
  Taylor has been in corrections for 21 years, three years of which have been spent with CCA. Before moving over to private-sector corrections, Taylor worked in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
  The prison, which contains an 80-bed section that will be used to house Tallahatchie County inmates, is equipped with an enclosed recreation area as well as an outdoor recreation yard.
  Expected to fuel an economic boon for a traditionally poor county, speculation has been that the prison will create more than 200 jobs and deposit at least $400,000 per year into the county coffers.
  The recent growth of private correctional facilities has been powered by widespread adoption of truth-in-sentencing laws, which require inmates to serve a specified percentage of their sentences before release.
  Mississippi, along with at least 28 other states, requires inmates to serve no less than 85 percent of their sentences. Mississippi enacted its truth-in-sentencing law in 1995.
  The prison in Tallahatchie County, sought by a large coalition of Delta politicians, is the result of national trends. But how did it come to be built in Tallahatchie County?
  State Rep. Thomas Reynolds, D-Charleston, U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss, State Sen. Bunky Huggins, R-Greenwood, chairman of  the Senate Penitentiary Committee, State Rep. Robert Huddleston, D-Sumner and State Sen. David Jordan, D-Greenwood and Charleston banker Otey Sherman were all key players in the negotiations to land the prison in Tallahatchie County.
  The political delegation is glad that the prison is coming to Tutlwiler for economic reasons, but not everyone is as optimistic as the political team that snagged the prison.
  Ron Welch, a veteran prison rights attorney in Jackson, is worried about the security problem that could develop at Mississippi’s state penitentiary at Parchman if employees there are lured to the Tallahatchie County prison.
  “They are still having a tremendous turnover problem (at Parchman),” he said in an interview in late December. “My concern is that they will cannibalize — or make it more difficult for — Parchman to keep its staff. Everybody scratches their heads and wonders how they are going to get a staff.”
  The prison itself will consist of one 50,767-square-foot administrative/support building equipped with a commissary, infirmary, dental office, kitchen, laundry and cafeteria that will seat roughly 260 inmates.
  The prison will be a round-the-clock operation, with the 24-hour period likely to be divided into three eight-hour shifts.
  The central control room, which can be used to override the smaller control rooms located in the pod buildings where the inmates are housed, will also be located in the administrative building.