As someone who has spent time in all three states, Mississippi and Alabama are worse than Florida. There are parts of Florida that are just as bad as the bad parts of AL and MS, but there are also parts of FL that have positive aspects. AL and MS not so much.
Florida has much more lax reporting laws. More or less, as long as it's anonymized (Florida man/woman, rather than a name) it can/will be reported, versus other states requiring much more stringent care. What goes on behind closed doors is always worse than what you see.
I'm not a huge fan of Florida, but at least it has a large variety of things to offer. Schools, entertainment, sports, amusement parks, national parks, beaches, etc.
Mississippi, generally speaking. Also high on the list, for me, is Bama, Louisiana, SC, Arkansas, West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Idaho. They all have redeeming communities and places, but in general, I don't want to live in any of those states. Before anyone asks, I've been to all of them.
But yeah, those three states clustered together... Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama seem to always be competing with one another for the most impoverished, crime ridden, and poorly educated of the states unfortunately.
Native Mississippian here. I can't speak for Alabama, but parts of Mississippi, like the Mississippi Delta, are among the most impoverished parts of the country. While crime is relatively low apart from gang activity, I do remember seeing a notice at a Mississippi delta Dominos location with a special map on the wall. It showed parts of town they would not deliver to after dark.
My wife is from the Midwest and thought that was the most peculiar thing she had ever seen.
On the flip side, there are pockets of disproportionate wealth peppered across the state. These places are beautiful, but mostly unobtainable due to housing shortages and sky high interest rates. If you're lucky enough to snag a home in or around these nicer areas, the already low cost of living in the state can actually be quite nice.
I live in Louisiana and wouldn’t move to Mississippi or Alabama. I wouldn’t want to move to North Louisiana either but the (historically French) southern part of the state has amazing food and music and a unique culture. New Orleans is a fun, vibrant, interesting city and a major tourism destination for many reasons. It’s a fun place to live.
I've never been to any of those states, but I have a friend who lived in Louisiana for a while. He said they are a strange breed of people, plus there's alligator everywhere.
Anytime you're saying something about an entire state, you have to really generalize or evaluate it on state-level attributes. Both those states have cities with populations over 100 million thousand (Huntsville AL is over 200 million thousand).
Looking at Bureau of Labor Statistics data, it looks like both states have a similar number of counties with weekly average wages below national average.
Uh I think you might be off by a few orders of magnitude, I'm pretty sure that, of the roughly 360 million people in the US, 300+ of them do not live in either AL or MS