Why do Mississippi prison officials withhold records about inmate deaths?
As inmates die with disturbing frequency, agency obscures basic facts
How many people have died in Mississippi prisons during the last five years? What caused those deaths? Do vacant guard positions have anything to do with the increasing frequency of inmate deaths?
The Mississippi Independent put those questions to the Mississippi Department of Corrections in February. The agency, which receives roughly $400 million in taxpayer money annually, doubtless has the answers but would not provide them, which is indicative of a problem that bedevils family members of people who die behind bars.
Based on aggregated records compiled by The Mississippi Independent, it appears that an astounding number of inmates—more than 800—have died in state custody since 2015. Yet a definitive number remains elusive due to MDOC’s unwillingness to fully quantify prison deaths.
Outside prison, documenting deaths is usually routine. If a cause is not readily apparent, an inquiry or autopsy is done, after which the results are provided to family members and, when particularly notable, to the media. There are death certificates, coroners’ reports, public databases and official counts of almost every imaginable cause, from cancer and heart disease to extraordinary episodes like shark attacks or being crushed by a vending machine. Families are notified. On paper, the dead are usually accounted for.
That is often not the case inside Mississippi prisons.
“There’s no information that MDOC willingly shares with families or the public about death, injury, medical neglect, or anything that shows people the corruption,” observed Danyelle Holmes, director of the Mississippi Impact Coalition, a Jackson-based criminal justice advocacy group. “They’re very resistant and only give families very minimal information that is sometimes not even factual, if they give them anything at all.” The same is true for media representatives seeking public answers.
The opacity surrounding prison deaths points to a broader problem inside MDOC, where barriers to even basic information appear at nearly every level. Records requests are delayed or answered only in part. Emails and phone calls are ignored. Prison policy punishes inmates for unauthorized communication with the public, the media and, at times, each other. Families struggle to speak with dying relatives, or to obtain a clear clinical explanation of how, exactly, a loved one was injured, became ill, or died in state custody.
Even state Rep. Beckie Currie (R-Brookhaven), chair of the House Corrections Committee, faced resistance when she sought information about prison healthcare systems during a facilities tour in the summer of 2024. “When I went, I realized I wasn’t getting a lot of the information I needed. So, I sat down with inmates,” Currie told Mississippi Today. “When I went to look, I saw no oversight.” The February 2025 interview was part of a joint investigation into dozens of unprosecuted homicides in state prisons.
MDOC commissioner Burl Cain does not appear to welcome media revelations or opening his department to public scrutiny. Cain was accused in investigative reports by the Advocate news outlet of using state correctional employees to renovate several of his homes when he was previously warden at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola—revelations that prompted him to step down, though he admitted no wrongdoing. He also reportedly attempted to ban journalist and author Daniel Bergner from Angola after Bergner asked questions that Cain disapproved of. In his book God of the Rodeo, Bergner claims Cain asked for editorial control of the book and demanded money in exchange for doing research inside Angola. When Bergner refused, Cain had him escorted off prison grounds, after which Bergner filed suit and Cain backed down.
NOLA.com also reported in 2016 that an Angola inmate was moved to another prison and faced other punishments as retaliation for corresponding with an Advocate reporter during the period that the outlet was publishing articles about improprieties in the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections.
When Cain left Angola and Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves hired him to take over MDOC, he brought with him a reputation for treating the media and other public disclosures as potential trouble. In late 2025, Cain flagged an article about an inmate book club podcast at the Wilkinson County Correctional Facility, “Hidden Mirrors,” which prompted warden Tim Delaney to ban further recording of club members’ public commentary (podcast host Alan Huffman is an editor at The Mississippi Independent).
While researching inmate deaths, The Mississippi Independent emailed and called MDOC communications staff numerous times spanning several weeks, most recently to ask for comment about the difficulty in getting a response or full documentation. This included around a dozen emails and as many calls to MDOC officials, including now-former director of communications Grace Fisher, whose departure during the period was not communicated by the agency.
Taken together, inmate death records obtained from MDOC and records gathered from other media sources and the Facebook group “Mississippi Department of Corruption” indicate that at least 847 inmates died between 2015 and April 20, 2026, though the actual number is likely higher because records are available for only nine months of 2025. The Facebook page, an unofficial clearinghouse for inmate deaths and other prison news, has become a place where grieving families find one another and compare notes in the absence of clear information from the state.
Records provided by MDOC are incomplete. The most thorough, unredacted data made available to The Mississippi Independent runs from 2015 through March 2023. The agency sent records covering March 2025 to March 2026, though in each case the cause and manner of death were redacted. After The Mississippi Independent appealed the incomplete records request, MDOC provided a full list of deaths from 2019 to 2024, though the causes of death were redacted.
Even with those gaps, the trend is clear: Deaths in Mississippi’s prisons have risen sharply during the last decade, climbing from 23 in 2015 to 106 in 2025. In 2016, the number of deaths more than doubled, to 50. By 2020, it had doubled again to 99. And by March 3, 2023, according to the partial list obtained through the Facebook group, which is difficult to independently verify, showed 37 inmate deaths already recorded that year. At that pace, the prison system would have been on track for an annualized death toll of 218.
MDOC’s partial figures point in a different direction. According to the death list the agency provided on April 23, 2026, only 17 inmates had died by March 3, 2023. The discrepancy is significant and raises fresh questions not only about how many people are dying in Mississippi prisons, but about whether the state can produce a consistent and reliable accounting of the dead.
As part of its joint investigation with Mississippi Today, The Marshall Project reported that at least 42 people have been killed inside Mississippi prisons during the past decade, leaving “scores of grieving families questioning a system that fails to protect people in its custody or hold anyone accountable.” The organization also noted that MDOC officials “declined multiple requests for an interview about killings across the prison system.”
Reports of inmate deaths often cite staff shortages or inadequate monitoring as contributing factors, with incidents frequently taking place in unsupervised conditions. Nowhere was that clearer than at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in early 2020. In a span of just 25 days, four inmates were killed and three others died by suicide, a burst of bloodshed widely attributed to extreme understaffing and institutional collapse.
CBS reported that two of those inmates, Timothy Hudspeth and James Talley, were stabbed to death on Jan. 22, 2020. The day before, Gabriel Harmen hanged himself. On Jan. 23, Thomas Lee was found to have hanged himself as well. Two other inmates had been stabbed roughly two weeks earlier. The killings and suicides formed part of a grim start of the year, with deadly fights in January and February leaving more than a dozen people dead and prompting the Justice Department to open a civil rights investigation.
The crisis also helped usher in a change in leadership. Mississippi turned to Burl Cain, the longtime former head of the Louisiana State Penitentiary—where he had a dubious history, based on Louisiana media reports. Cain had retired from Angola in late 2015 amid allegations of corruption.
Federal investigators later concluded that the Parchman violence was not aberrational but structural. A preliminary Justice Department report released in 2022 found that conditions and practices at the penitentiary violated the Constitution, including the ban on cruel and unusual punishment and the guarantee of equal protection under the law. A fuller report in 2024 went further, saying MDOC effectively “allows” violence at several prisons, where gross understaffing and poor supervision have enabled gang control and the spread of dangerous contraband.
“These figures also likely underestimate the violence,” the report noted. Detailed within its pages are drug-fueled rapes, serious beatings, homicides and suicides. Investigators also cite reports that correctional staff extorted money from inmates’ family members.
“The MDOC Commissioner took office in May of 2020, pledging change,” the report noted. “But nearly all of the incidents of violence in this report occurred during his tenure.”
In Cain’s first full year running MDOC, the department’s reported homicide count fell to four, according to records obtained by The Mississippi Independent. Yet suicides doubled and overdose deaths remained steady. In the years since, the official numbers for both suicides and homicides appear to have declined, though MDOC’s refusal to release full, unredacted death records makes even that trend difficult to document. Too many deaths remain only partially explained or not explained at all.
Even the presence of guards does not always ensure safety. Melvin Cancer, a 53-year-old inmate at Central Mississippi Correctional Facility, was initially reported to have died of a heart attack on Jan. 22, 2025. An autopsy later ruled his death a homicide. The FBI is still investigating.
The Mississippi Independent asked MDOC for a facility-by-facility list of prison guard vacancies across the system. The department refused to provide the information, saying disclosure could create a potentially deadly situation for correctional staff. An unidentified staffer for the records department wrote: “If MDOC reveals this report and it becomes publicly known, it may endanger the life and safety of correctional officials because it will become publicly known how many specific vacancies there are at the facilities and this could jeopardize institutional safety.”
MDOC did not respond to follow-up questions about what, precisely, that meant.
Given the agency’s reluctance to provide totals, it seems likely that the number of vacancies is high, but it is impossible to say for sure. The reasons for the denial suggest that understaffing can make Mississippi prisons dangerous places for the people who work there and the people confined inside. That potential has surfaced elsewhere in recent weeks. State Auditor Shad White announced a $7.4 million civil demand against Management & Training Corporation, the private Utah-based company that operates the Wilkinson County Correctional Facility, the East Mississippi Correctional Facility and the Marshall County Correctional Facility. White alleged that MTC failed to meet required staffing levels while continuing to receive full state payments. More than $6 million of the demand is tied to Wilkinson alone.
The warden at the East Mississippi facility, the state’s other large private prison, resigned on April 15. MTC confirmed that Angelena Johnson is no longer employed there. “Because this is a personnel matter, we’re not able to provide further details,” Emily Lawhead, the company’s director of communications, wrote in an email.
Understaffing has long been an issue at MDOC, with the 2024 federal report noting that, in mid-2022, the prison guard vacancy rate at the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility in Pearl was more than 50 percent. Vacant supervisory positions at the facility jumped from slightly more than 3 percent to about 35 percent in two months. At South Mississippi Correctional Facility in Leakesville, the guard vacancy rate was more than 30 percent, while the supervisor vacancy rate was more than 50 percent. At the Wilkinson Correctional Facility in Woodville, a human resources employee told DOJ that the guard vacancy rate had been more than 50 percent for about a year. The DOJ report noted that the privately-run prison’s documentation of its staffing numbers contained clear mathematical errors and was unreliable.
Visitors and inmates who spoke with The Mississippi Independent reported frequent lockdowns attributed to staff shortages. During lockdowns, visitors are generally prohibited and inmates are confined to their cells without access to phones, the internet, rehabilitation programs and sometimes each other.
The report’s findings indicate that understaffing has led to an increase in widespread violence, assault, rape, rioting and even instances of male inmates gaining access to a female section of a prison. Though MDOC refused to release figures on staff shortages, its deputy commissioner, Nathan Blevins, told lawmakers in September that about 30 percent of the funded corrections officer positions were vacant.
“No prison can operate safely with that kind of staffing,” said David Fathi, director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project.
This upheaval and resistance to disclosure is familiar to anyone knowledgeable about the Mississippi prison system. There is a vivid disconnect in the way MDOC communicates and how it acts.
Once people are incarcerated, many of the rights and protections that define life outside disappear. Inmates lose the right to vote if they are convicted of one of 23 in-state felonies, ranging from forgery and voter fraud to bribery and murder. They are confined to facilities that, in many cases, federal investigators have described as dangerous and inhumane. They are paid paltry sums for their labor, fed substandard food and offered few opportunities for meaningful rehabilitation to prepare for life after release. Rehab programs that are in place are often interrupted or canceled by lockdowns. The system exercises extraordinary control over nearly every aspect of inmates’ lives while, by many accounts, accepting little responsibility for the quality of those lives or personal safety. In prisons beset by chronic understaffing, inmates can be left for long stretches in housing units with little supervision, where assaults, rapes and killings sometimes occur without intervention, as the 2024 report noted.
Gangs are known to fill the resulting gaps and exert control in some prisons, sometimes with the blessing of officials. “It ain’t right, but it’s the truth,” Wilkinson’s then-warden Jodie Bradley told auditors in 2018, according to emails obtained by The Marshall Project.
Yet when families, journalists, lawmakers or the general public try to quantify what is happening inside, MDOC assumes a defensive stance. Records are withheld or delayed in the name of privacy. Prison safety is used to restrict access to information—a reason that might be better justified if the system itself showed greater regard for people in its custody and employment. Instead, the contradiction has become one of the defining features of Mississippi’s prisons.
“There’s so much corruption and medical neglect that by the time an individual actually even gets seen or gets the help that they need, they are already so critically ill that it’s too late, right?” Holmes, of the Mississippi Impact Coalition said. “And so, they’ve been neglected, and they just die inside the cell. And then families don’t find out. The only way that families immediately find out is by way of those on the inside who are leaking out information or calling home and telling their loved ones that, ‘Hey, reach out to so and so’s family and let them know that their son or brother or whoever is dead,’ right?” Holmes added: “There’s no real system in place where MDOC is reaching out willingly to notify families.”
The secrecy surrounding prison deaths in Mississippi is not just a matter of records or death notifications being withheld. It can begin at the front end, in the process by which those deaths are classified, described and entered into the official record.
When someone dies in a Mississippi prison, the first official account of that death is often shaped by county-level investigators. The local coroner is called to the scene, examines the body and circumstances, and makes a preliminary determination about the cause and manner of death. With inmate deaths, the coroner must also request or order an autopsy. The state medical examiner’s office, working with forensic pathologists and technicians, is responsible for conducting or overseeing deeper investigations into reportable deaths, including those in custody, according to the Department of Public Safety’s website.
The stakes of that first determination are high, yet the level of expertise varies. In Mississippi, as in many parts of the country, coroners wield significant authority over how deaths are initially classified, though they are not required to be physicians, forensic pathologists or medically trained death investigators. In nearly 1,600 counties nationwide, elected or appointed coroners, some with no formal medical training beyond a high school diploma, have the authority to initially decide whether a death was a homicide, suicide, accident, natural death or of undetermined cause, according to a CDC factsheet.
Heather Burton, for example, is the coroner in Sunflower County, Mississippi, the location of Parchman. Her primary job is as a funeral home director; she studied psychology at a community college for two years in 1996. David Ruth, the coroner in Rankin County, where the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility is located, previously worked as an investigator for the sheriff’s department and has no formal medical training. Ladd Pulliam is another funeral director and embalmer who serves as Greene County’s coroner, where the South Mississippi Correctional Facility is located. In eight states, county coroners must be physicians because the role is effectively that of a medical examiner. In some neighboring Louisiana parishes, the coroner must be a doctor. The same is true in Kansas and Ohio. In Mississippi, qualifying as a coroner requires only a 40-hour, $825 online course.
The state medical examiner’s office will not release decedents until the county coroner has provided the state with the name of the funeral home handling the case, according to state instructions. More than half of the state’s coroners work at or own funeral homes.
On April 9, 2026, when MDOC finally replied to The Mississippi Independent’s Feb. 25, 2026, request for a list of inmate deaths since 2020, the agency provided only one year of partially redacted records. In the time it took MDOC to respond, 13 more inmates had died, with some noted in the MDOC data and others reported on social media or in the news.
The runaround was revealing: The fact that a news reporter could not get timely, complete answers through the state’s formal public-records process illustrates the difficulties grieving families face when attempting to find out how a loved one was injured or died in custody. It is also difficult to obtain records from private corporations such as MTC and the state prison healthcare provider, VitalCore, as Rep. Currie discovered (Currie did not respond to emailed questions and calls regarding her experiences with MDOC).
MDOC is required to issue a news release when an inmate dies in custody, but according to a 2022 report by The Appeal, the frequency of such releases did not match the number of deaths reported in statistical publications.
What emerged instead of a coherent accounting was a grim patchwork of unevenly reported deaths. More recent deaths include Jamie Roberson, who died at East Mississippi with no public cause given; N’Kosi Parris, stabbed at Tallahatchie a day after a Virgin Islands senator tried to visit him; Alexander Davis, who died at Marshall County with the cause still pending; Norman Tate, a reported suicide at Walnut Grove; Charles E. Reed, who died at Wilkinson, and whose case is reduced to a vague assurance that no foul play was suspected.
For some families, the wait for crucial information stretches on for years.
“So why is this any different?” asked Sydney Miller, whose brother, Gregory Emary, was reportedly stabbed to death at the Chickasaw County Regional Facility in Houston, Mississippi, in 2020. “Just because it was committed inside prison walls?”
Miller, who spoke with Mississippi Today in September as part of the outlet’s extensive joint investigation, said her family had not heard from prison investigators or prosecutors during the five years since her brother’s death. They still do not know what led to it, nor whether anyone will ever be prosecuted.
Angel Readus feels the same sense of futility. Her brother, Monquel Nason, died at age 29 inside the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility from an infection of the heart, according to the unredacted Mississippi Department of Corruption records.
Readus believes medical neglect may have contributed to his death. In MDOC records, however, his death is attributed to a natural cause.
“I don’t think I’ll ever know,” Readus told The Mississippi Independent in March. Recalling that her brother had expressed concern about the medical care he was receiving, she added, “I see other families in the same situation. I’ve written to everyone I can think of. What can I do?”
The partial records MDOC provided The Mississippi Independent cover deaths from March 2025 to March 2026. The names of the dead are included but the manner and cause of death are not.
That is an unusual inversion. If the department’s concern is for the privacy of the dead, the names would seem the more obvious detail to redact. Instead, MDOC left in the most personal information and blacked out the very facts that would help the public understand what happened and judge the safety of the prison system.
The department’s rationale for withholding older death lists is similarly hard to square with its own practices. MDOC said it could not release records from before 2025 because those deaths were still under review. Yet beyond the cause and manner of death, the remaining information is largely biographical: name, age, gender and location. Those details are unlikely to change when the review is finished.
In practical terms, the explanation changes little about what the public would receive. If the cause and manner of death are withheld, the review serves mainly to delay the release of information that is already skeletal. It creates the appearance of active process without producing meaningful transparency. When asked about the contradiction, MDOC’s online query messaging system responded: “I am checking.”
Following the Mississippi Today joint investigation, corrections commissioner Cain agreed to audit inmate deaths deemed undetermined or where there was an unprosecuted homicide. MDOC told The Mississippi Independent the information could be requested when the audit is done, but offered no timeline.
The National Association of Medical Examiners recommends a full public disclosure of cause and manner of death and/or the full autopsy report upon completion, according to a position paper regarding deaths in custody. It also suggests that autopsies in prison deaths should be completed by a fully independent organization.
The records th Mississippi Department of Corruption Facebook page provided to The Mississippi Independent contain a separate list of inmate deaths spanning mid-2015 to early 2023, making it possible to assemble a broader accounting than the state was willing to provide on its own, though that information has been only partially verified.
The group’s Facebook page, which was initially used for exploring prison rumors and grievances, is now used to share information and search for answers. At times, extended relatives and friends appear to learn of a prisoner’s death on the site before they hear it clearly from official channels. Current and former inmates also use the page to trade information, add context and provide details about incidents or conditions in specific facilities. Anonymous former MDOC employees sometimes weigh in as well.
That, too, is part of the story. In a functioning prison system, families would not have to piece together the circumstances of prison deaths through social media pages, advocacy groups or reporters’ requests for records.
In Mississippi, that seems to be the only way.
Image: Photo montage of (l-r) Monquel Nason (courtesy Angel Readus); Corrections Commissioner Burl Cain (via MDOC); Gregory Emary (via his Facebook page)
 | A guest post by
|