At least 46 people have died in Mississippi’s county jails since 2020, according to lawsuits, news reports and law enforcement records reviewed by The Marshall Project - Jackson. But those lost lives do not appear in any official statistics or records.
Mississippi has long failed to count and report all deaths in local jails that serve the state’s 82 counties, despite a federal requirement to do so. These often dangerous facilities operate virtually free of any state oversight.
Oo, I can do you one better: Nobody knows how many jails there are! You’d think it would be an easy question, but no, jails aren’t a strongly defined thing - every mall, school, sporting venue and major industrial facility has a jail in it and often nobody is aware of that. Every prison has a jail, too, and pretty much every rural gas station has at one point served as a jail. Drug treatment programs, inpatient mental health, troubled youth education, all either count as jails or have jails attached.
The biggest issue in this subject is that people think of jails as a definite institution, when it’s a poorly definied broad categorical term that roughly means “place where a person can be detained without a LEO present”. The reason for this failure in reporting, besides systemic police incompetence, is that there’s no systems in place for reporting of this - nobody knows who to report this information to, nobody knows if they’re the person who should be reporting it, etc.
While there’s absolutely a component of pigs being pigs, the real issue is that we desperately need an overhaul to address the fundemental systemic gaps that go unnoticed. We don’t even know how much of this is “pigs being pigs” and how much is human error and how much is it not being anyone’s job to do this. It’s disgusting.