On his first day at work as the sheriff of Hinds County, Victor Mason found the door to his new office locked, and no one could find the keys.
“As funny as it sounds, I told somebody to go upstairs and get a house burglar,” Mason joked, referring to the downtown jail, which the Hinds County Sheriff’s Office runs. In the end, he thought better about using a prisoner and called a locksmith. The point Mason—who did have prisoners repaint the office, which had water damage—was making about the jail is this: “There are some talented people in this building.”
Mason, 59, took over from Sheriff Tyrone Lewis on Dec. 30, becoming the second African American to serve as the top law-enforcement officer in the state’s largest county by population…