‘Catastrophic Failures’: Why Dozens of Killings In Mississippi Prisons Go Unanswered

This article is part of the “Dying Behind Bars” series.

At least 42 people have been killed inside Mississippi prisons in the past decade, leaving scores of grieving families questioning a system that fails to protect people in its custody or hold anyone accountable.

There are sisters wracked with guilt, mothers with depression, and children struggling to fill the voids in their lives. Former prison employees talk about lying sleepless in bed, replaying the killings they’ve witnessed but could not stop.

In Mississippi, prison homicides are the culmination of long-documented festering problems: chronic understaffing, lax oversight, gangs that rule by violence and delays in treating life-threatening injuries, an investigation by a statewide reporting team found.

Murders signal “catastrophic failures” of prison administrators, whose number one job is to keep incarcerated people safe, said David Fathi, director of the ACLU National Prison Project.

The perpetrators haven’t faced justice in most cases. Just six of the 42 homicides have led to convictions. 

And the killings show no sign of ending. In the first half of this year, there were five homicides in three Mississippi prisons.

Sydney Miller said her family was given almost no details by prison officials after her elder brother, Gregory Emary, was stabbed to death at the Chickasaw County Regional Facility in Houston in 2020. 

Over the past five years, they have received no contact from prison investigators or prosecutors about what happened or if someone would be held responsible. Miller did not know Emary’s death had been deemed a homicide by a medical examiner until a reporter told her. She wonders if her family would have been treated the same way if her brother had been killed on the outside. 

“So why is this any different?” Miller asked. “Just because it was committed inside prison walls?”

‘No one deserves to die like this’

Uncovering the toll of Mississippi’s prison homicides took a team of reporters from five news organizations: The Marshall Project – Jackson, Mississippi Today, the Clarion Ledger, Hattiesburg American and The Mississippi Link. The team scoured thousands of pages of court records, corrections documents, federal and state government death records, and interviewed families, formerly incarcerated people, former guards, attorneys and corrections experts. 

The investigation found that the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman, which holds about 2,500 people, has had the most killings in the past decade. At least 19 people died in homicides at Parchman from 2015 through 2024.

For most of this time period, the homicide rate among people inside Parchman was five times higher than the state as a whole, which already had the highest rate in the country in 2023.

Lack of consistent and accurate reporting nationwide makes a state-by-state comparison of prison homicides difficult. The reporting team identified three Mississippi homicides that were not listed in federal and state reports.

Most of the 42 killings throughout the state prison system involved beatings or stabbings, sometimes involving multiple assailants. Three in five victims were Black. The age of the victims ranged from 23 to 62.