said that MDOC would be making a new contract with a prison management company in 2012, and that it intended to include specific staffing requirements and financial penalties for failure to maintain these. At the time, Commissioner Chris Epps, MDOC, said that the department believed it would be advantageous for the state to solicit a combined bid for all three prisons for which contracts were being offered. It awarded a 10-year contract to Management and Training Corporation of Utah for all three private facilities. The public was not informed of the financial specifics of the contracts. In 2013 MDOC also awarded a 5-year contract to MTC for operation of Wilkinson County Correctional Facility. The value of the contracts was later revealed to be $60 million annually. Epps resigned in November 2014 and pleaded guilty in February 2015 to charges related to Operation Mississippi Hustle, a major corruption investigation by the FBI. He is estimated to have been paid $1.47 million in bribes and kickbacks related to contracts which he had steered to certain prison management and other related companies during the previous decade. As part of his plea bargain, he cooperated with law enforcement in a continuing investigation in which several people have pleaded guilty and others have been convicted. Epps is due to be sentenced in May 2017. MTC was then under contract to the state of Arizona for management of some of its prisons. That state found the company to have been responsible for neglect that enabled the July 2010 Arizona prison escape from the Arizona State Prison – Kingman by three men convicted of violent crimes. Before they were captured, two of them committed a carjacking and two murders while on the run. Months later, the Arizona corrections director said there was little improvement in MTC's operations. Stakeholders in the Walnut Grove federal class action suit questioned MDOC's decision in 2012 to outsource prison management to another troubled operator, given Mississippi's past problems with oversight in privately run prisons. Managing attorney Jody Owens of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), who had led youth justice reform efforts in Mississippi, said the state ... has substituted one bad actor for another. The results are almost guaranteed to be the same. Private prisons have an inherent profit motive to not run facilities in a manner that's safe for the people there, and to shortcut staff and medical and mental