Next time you see a loaded school bus, ponder this: Statistically, one of the passengers will be in a Mississippi prison in a couple of years.

But fear not, there’s good news. For one thing, Louisiana’s numbers are worse. For another, more inmates means more inmate phone calls — and, if new allegations are correct, Mississippi leads all states in profiting from that aspect of the corrections industry.

The most recent inmate tallies are in a 25-year growth study by The Pew Center. Its report gives Louisiana top honors in the percentage category, with 1 of every 55 residents of our neighbor state doing time. That’s a 272 percent increase since 1982.

For Mississippi, the number is 1 of every 69 residents in prison or jail. That’s a 256 percent increase since 1982.

Georgia is close behind at 1 of 70; Texas is at 1 of 71; Alabama at 1 of 75; and Florida at 1 of 82.

The surge is not a Southern trend. It’s a national trend. Whether driven by an explosion in narcotics trafficking and other crime or merely by the fact that so many new public and private, for-profit prisons have cell space available, judges in America have now placed 3 million people — equal to the entire population of Mississippi — under guard.

There are signs the rate of growth is slowing, but think about it. Somebody else could do the math, but if the increases did continue it would only be a matter of years before half of us would be prisoners and half of us would be prison guards.

Regarding the telephones, some stinky deals may be revealed though a suit filed last week in Hinds County Chancery Court.

The plaintiff is a magazine, Prison Legal News, and the defendant is the Mississippi Department of Corrections.

Being sought are copies of contracts with the prison telephone service provider, identified as Global Tel-Link of Mobile.

According to the suit, the magazine was preparing an article on prison telephone services. Ron Fraser of the DKT Liberty Project, a Washington, D.C.-based civil liberties organization, wrote that Mississippi officials were the only officials in the nation to refuse. Under state law, the contract is a public record, but MDOC has reportedly responded that Global obtained a pre-emptive protective order requiring MDOC to keep the contract secret.

Fraser indicates there’s a pretty good reason why. He suspects the company isn’t particularly proud of its provisions.

“Pay for display” is not new in American commerce. Schools and universities have exclusivity contracts with sellers of wares such as soft drinks. So do restaurants. In exchange for offering only one brand of soda, there are discounts or rebates the seller provides the school, university or restaurant.

At one time, being in prison meant the only contact with the outside world was through letters or chats on an intercom on visiting day. But courts and rehabilitation experts now agree that the more contact a person on the inside has with those, especially family, on the outside, the better for the inmate and the less likely the inmate will become thoroughly antisocial.

That has given rise to day rooms with banks of telephones from which collect calls to approved numbers can be placed by inmates.

And that has given rise to contracts with phone-service providers that contain exclusivity rewards or rebates to owners of private prisons or to the state treasury. Another word for rebate, though less polite, is kickback.

The Michigan-based Campaign to Promote Equitable Telephone Charges alleges — the real figure would be in the contract — that in-state families and friends of inmates in Mississippi are being charged 32 cents per minute. For collect calls to places outside the state, the rate is believed to be 88 cents per minute.

That compares to an average interstate rate of 6 cents per minute in the free world, according to the Federal Communications Commission. Also, by law, inmates in Mississippi are barred from using debit or calling cards. Mississippi prisoners have to place calls through Global Tel-Link and the charge is four or five times greater than any other prison in America and 10 or more times greater than prevailing commercial rates. Implicit is that Global is paying for the privilege of making that much money.

The magazine is represented by Jackson attorney Robert McDuff, a serious legal scholar and widely known advocate for seemingly lost causes.

No doubt many people are of the opinion that anything bad that happens to a prisoner of a prisoner’s family is fine and that exploiting them financially is fine, too.

McDuff would disagree, and if he can get access to the state contract and records, the information Mississippi and Global are hiding might well shame us all. Legal. But shameful.

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Charlie Mitchell is executive editor of The Vicksburg Post. Write to him at Box 821668, Vicksburg, MS 39182, or e-mail cmitchell@vicksburgpost.com.