At least 2,048 people have died in custody in Mississippi

How deaths in custody are reported in Mississippi

The Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC) runs the state prisons. It publishes no list or report of the people who die in them. Its annual report, which covers the state fiscal year from July to June, counts deaths only as one "exit type" among people leaving custody, with no names, places or causes.¹ Its newsroom puts out a release about a death only now and then. In August 2018 one death was announced on the department's website but never sent to reporters, and Mississippi Today had to file a public records request to get a list of that year's deaths.²³

Under state law, the death of anyone confined in a prison, jail or correctional institution is a death "affecting the public interest" that the county medical examiner must investigate. County coroners are elected and work alongside a State Medical Examiner.⁴ The state crime lab does the autopsies in custody deaths, and in 2018 a backlog there of several years left families waiting for answers.² Inside the prisons, MDOC's own Corrections Investigation Division investigates deaths, sometimes together with the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation (MBI).⁵ In 2022 the U.S. Department of Justice found that the division's reports at Parchman mostly just compiled statements and rarely looked into what had happened.⁶

County sheriffs run Mississippi's jails. No state law requires a jail to track or report deaths, the state does not license or inspect local jails, and the MBI examines only some jail deaths.⁷ No statewide list of jail deaths is published. The Southern Poverty Law Center had to send public records requests to every sheriff for its 2026 database, and it reported that 28 of the state's 82 counties refused to provide data.⁸

For the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act, the Division of Public Safety Planning in the Department of Public Safety collects the data. MDOC sends it a spreadsheet of prison deaths every quarter. But the division's own plan says local and county law enforcement agencies are "not actively participating" and that no state law requires them to report.⁹ In 2023 filings with federal authorities, Mississippi admitted that local jail deaths were largely missing from its reports. Over five years of national records, it was one of four states with locally run jails to report fewer than 10 jail deaths.⁷

Immigration detention in Mississippi includes the Adams County Correctional Center in Natchez, which CoreCivic runs under contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE announces a death in a news release and later posts a detainee death report. When a man died there in December 2025, the first release spoke only of a medical emergency, and the report two months later said he had tried to hang himself.¹⁰ By the Death Penalty Information Center's count, Mississippi has executed at least 25 people since 1976 and at least 351 before then.¹¹

What has changed

1. 1867Mississippi signed its first convict lease, starting about thirty years of renting out people in its custody to private companies. The state penitentiary, known as the Walls, held only those too sick or disabled to be leased out.¹²
2. 1900After years of public outcry over the cruelty of leasing, the state bought the first 14,000 acres in Sunflower County that became Parchman Farm.¹²
3. 1959Masked men took Mack Charles Parker from the Pearl River County jail in Poplarville, using keys from the deputy who served as jailer, and killed him. State and federal grand juries indicted no one, and the Justice Department closed its last review of the case in 2023.¹³
4. 2018More people died in MDOC custody in August than in any month of the previous six years. The commissioner first said the number was "not out of line" with earlier months, then asked the FBI and the Department of Public Safety to help investigate.³¹⁴
5. 2020A riot at Parchman began on December 31, 2019. In January 2020 alone, five people there were killed and three died by suicide. In February the Justice Department opened a civil rights investigation of Parchman and three other state prisons.⁶
6. 2022The Justice Department found that conditions at Parchman violated the Constitution. It cited 10 homicides since 2019 and 12 suicides in three years, and found investigations so thin that one homicide report did not say when or where the man died.⁶
7. 2022A federal judge put Hinds County's Raymond Detention Center under a receiver after twice finding the county in contempt of its 2016 consent decree with the Justice Department. Court documents counted more than five deaths there in 2021.¹⁵ After appeals, the receiver took operational control on October 1, 2025.¹⁶
8. 2024The Justice Department found unconstitutional conditions at three more prisons: Central Mississippi, South Mississippi and Wilkinson County. Officers skipped or faked head counts. At South Mississippi, medical staff found a man cold, with rigor mortis set in, though an officer said he had counted him twice during the shift.¹⁷
9. 2025Mississippi Today, The Marshall Project - Jackson, the Clarion Ledger, the Hattiesburg American and The Mississippi Link counted at least 42 homicides in Mississippi prisons over ten years. Only six had led to a conviction, and three were missing from federal and state reports.¹⁸ Weeks later the corrections commissioner said MDOC would review unprosecuted homicides and deaths ruled undetermined.¹⁹
10. 2025The Marshall Project - Jackson counted at least 46 deaths in county jails since 2020. None of them appear in any official statistics.⁷
11. 2026A bill to have an oversight task force review unexpected deaths of state prisoners and publish a report died on the Senate calendar without a vote. Its sponsor, the House Corrections Committee chair, had said MDOC was in effect reviewing itself.²⁰
12. 2026The Southern Poverty Law Center published a database of deaths in Mississippi jails and prisons from 2019 to 2025. Before that, it had to win a court judgment to get the Hinds County Sheriff's Office to answer its records request.²¹²²

How far the official numbers can be trusted

MDOC's only published yearly figure is the number of people whose release from custody was a death. The 2015 annual report has no deaths line at all, because deaths were folded into "other."²³ Later reports list 68 deaths for fiscal 2024 and 87 for fiscal 2025, with no names or causes.²⁴²⁵ The death lists MDOC releases on request have also lost detail: the records it gave Mississippi Today in 2018 named no specific causes, although its records for 2012 to 2017 had.³

How a death is classified can also be wrong or slow to change. Reporters found three prison homicides missing from federal and state reports.¹⁸ Since 2015, the state medical examiner has ruled another 21 prison deaths "undetermined."¹⁹ When Melvin Cancer died at Central Mississippi Correctional Facility in 2025, officials told his family he had a heart attack. In February 2026 reporters learned that he had died of blunt force trauma, and a state report to the Justice Department described an altercation with officers.²⁶

The jail numbers are weaker still. The state has admitted that its federal reports leave out most local jail deaths.⁷ Its own reporting plan says many agencies call the deaths its staff find through their own research inaccurate and refuse to verify them.⁹ The Southern Poverty Law Center found county records that left out deaths reported by the news media, the Department of Public Safety or the Justice Department.⁸ It also found that the Hinds County sheriff's records did not match the state's.²²