‘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.

Mississippi Department of Corrections officials declined multiple requests for an interview about killings across the prison system, but released an emailed statement. “MDOC remains committed to ensuring the safety of inmates in its custody,” the agency wrote.

Many of the people who were killed in Mississippi’s prisons were sent there after being convicted of offenses that included parole and probation violations, as well as more serious crimes, including robbery and murder. At least a quarter were serving life sentences. Although prison officials have a legal duty to protect all incarcerated people from harm, they could not protect them from death at the hands of cellmates, rival gang members or other incarcerated people.

In one case, a corrections officer pleaded guilty to accessory after the fact in a 2021 murder.

Detrick Munford, who served as deputy warden of Parchman until 2022, said the number of unprosecuted homicides doesn’t surprise him.

Mississippi officials didn’t install many of the cameras at Parchman until after 2020, so in many cases, there was no way to prove who was responsible for a death, he said. Anyone who witnessed a killing “is not going to talk,” he said, alluding to the prison culture of violent retribution, “because he knows what might happen to him.”

MDOC often shares sparse details about prison homicides, if any at all, even with the families of the victims. Nearly all internal investigations into the killings are hidden from the public because the state’s open records law exempts all law enforcement investigative files.

Although many of the recent homicides were filmed by security cameras and some of those responsible are known to corrections officials based on internal reports, local prosecutors filed charges against suspects in 36% of the homicides in the past decade.

MDOC officials responded in their email that prison officials take “every death of an inmate in its custody seriously. Each suspected homicide is investigated…The remaining investigations that are closed did not support a referral (for prosecution).”

In one criminal case, a charge was filed, but the Marshall County District Attorney’s office essentially forgot to prosecute the suspect nearly four years after the prison killing. The indictment had gotten lost in the bureaucracy, District Attorney Ben Creekmore later acknowledged in an interview. It was reactivated only after a reporter from the news team called him about the case.

The prospect of criminal prosecution, however, is likely of little concern to someone already serving a multi-decade sentence. The continued killings show how the prison system has not significantly addressed its failures to prevent homicides. The reporting team identified one person who pleaded guilty to manslaughter for a killing in one prison, then allegedly went on to kill again in another prison. He is awaiting trial on the second homicide charge and is currently serving a 40-year sentence.

DeAndre Davis was serving a life sentence when he was stabbed to death in 2017 in the Wilkinson County Correctional Facility in Woodville, months after he was stabbed in another attack at the same prison. At the sentencing hearing for the man convicted of the killing, Davis’ mother, Victorra Williams, said she didn’t understand why her son died, because he was supposed to be in isolation after he received a death threat.

“No one deserves to die like this,” she told the judge.

“I understand that they are in prison, and I understand that they are (caged), but I don’t understand you are in prison and you are steady killing each other for no reason,” Williams said. “That’s just — that’s crazy.”

Punishment after killing: loss of privileges

Growing up, Marcie Harper protected her baby brother, Joshua Odom. He was smaller than the other kids, so she fought his fights. She called him her Cabbage Patch Kid because of his big blue eyes and bald head. Her brother grew into a wiry man who loved to fish, gaining him the nickname Catfish.

“I was always there for him,” Harper said.

But Odom developed a drug problem that landed him in and out of prison, locked away from his big sister, who couldn’t always afford to visit or talk to him on the phone.

She could not be there to protect her brother on Jan. 12, 2025.

He died, a casualty of prison violence, lax security and questionable medical care that gave superficial treatment to a head wound that would prove fatal.

Odom was incarcerated at South Mississippi Correctional Institution in Leakesville. His friend Shelby Peevyhouse, who has a pacemaker, had just gotten into a fight and been kicked in the chest. As Odom came over to check on his friend, Peevyhouse said later, another incarcerated person punched Odom, knocking him to the ground, where he hit his head and fell unconscious.

When Odom came to, guards were restraining him, Peevyhouse said from prison.

“Don’t kill him. He needs your help,” Peevyhouse pleaded with the guards as they wrestled Odom. Both men were taken to the medical wing.

“Catfish was laying there screaming for help in a medical gurney to the left of me, calling for his mama,” Peevyhouse said.

Guards declined to call an ambulance and went home, as their shifts were ending, Peevyhouse said. Instead, he said, a medical staffer glued Odom’s head wound shut and sent both injured men back to their housing unit.

Odom, though, was dazed. He couldn’t even say his name. Peevyhouse tried to keep his friend awake.

“I did not know what to do,” Peevyhouse said. “I was so scared.”

As Odom began vomiting a “pink foam,” Peevyhouse banged on a window. He says he told a guard coming around for a count to call medical or else he would start a fire.

A medical worker took Odom away in a wheelchair. “Hey, smile a little,” Odom said before being wheeled off. Peevyhouse lit a cigarette for his friend, told him he loved him, and that he would be there when Odom got back. This time, an ambulance was called. It was too late.

The next morning, Peevyhouse found out Odom was dead.

“He was my best friend. This is really hard for me,” Peevyhouse said repeatedly.

The state medical examiner ruled Odom’s death a homicide by blunt force trauma. Because his alleged attacker was never criminally charged, the reporting team is not naming him. Imprisoned on a domestic violence conviction, he is scheduled for release by 2028.

The suspect was issued a disciplinary citation for assaulting another person. Prisons use a rules violation book that outlines dozens of actions that are prohibited inside prison walls, from hoarding food to attacking others. According to a rule violation report obtained by the reporting team, guards used security camera footage to confirm the assault.

The suspect’s punishment was the loss of 180 days of earned time — time that would have reduced his sentence for good conduct — as well as lost phone and visitation privileges for 60 days, and he was held responsible for Odom’s medical costs, which were not listed. He did not receive a higher violation for causing Odom’s death. The next day, he was transferred to another facility, which is MDOC’s standard procedure.

State Rep. Becky Currie, a registered nurse, has publicly criticized VitalCore, the company contracted to provide medical care in the state’s prisons, after meeting and receiving letters from incarcerated people who claim they were not getting care for treatable illnesses and injuries.

“It is hard for me to hear that (MDOC) feels that they provide adequate care,” Currie told Mississippi Today.

A spokesperson for VitalCore told Mississippi Today that the company provides “comprehensive and competent health care services in accordance with prevailing standards of care.”

After Odom’s death, his sister said the family could not get a clear story from prison officials.

The official who called their mother said Odom had been found hurt and died at the hospital. It wasn’t until someone connected to Peevyhouse sent her a Facebook message that she found out that her brother died waiting for an ambulance.

The 40-year-old Odom, incarcerated since 2018 after being convicted of burglary and credit card fraud, was supposed to be released in a few weeks, his family said.

“I just wish I had something of his,” Harper said. Instead, all she has left are memories and his ashes, which the family plans to scatter in the Gulf, where he loved to fish, on his birthday.

Soon, she’ll also have a tattoo of a catfish on a hook with a phrase he always told her: “Keep your head up.”

Constitutional violations, few answers

Odom’s death came less than a year after the federal Department of Justice found that three Mississippi prisons — including the South Mississippi prison where he had been held — violated the constitutional rights of the more than 7,400 people housed in them by failing to protect them from widespread violence. The investigation listed numerous failures: gross understaffing, assaults that are likely undercounted because of this lack of staff supervision, gang brawls involving dozens of people, violent incidents that go uninvestigated, and bungled investigations that lead nowhere.

The Justice Department had found similar violations in a 2022 investigation of the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman.

What Odom’s family experienced is common. The reporting team found that the families of other incarcerated people killed in prison were often left without answers. Many of those interviewed learned details about their loved ones’ deaths through a whisper network of incarcerated people, insiders, advocates, and, in some cases, from journalists.

Some families contacted lawyers, attempting to file civil suits, only to find out that no one would take their cases.

“I literally just gave up on it,” said Dale Graham, whose brother was killed in the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility in 2021. “Nothing happened.”

Currie, a Brookhaven Republican, who chairs the state’s House Corrections Committee, has raised questions about how the prisons are run, including the health and safety of the incarcerated.

She said prison killings show that violence is rampant inside the state’s prisons, and that it’s amplified by issues such as contraband and gangs.

“Whatever the cause of death is, I think the families are owed an answer,” she said. “Was my loved one killed? Was it that their diabetes wasn’t tended to? What was the cause of death?” Currie asked. “And I do not know of one family that's ever received that answer.”

She has wondered how seemingly healthy men die in Mississippi’s prisons. Currie said she plans to introduce legislation to create a group of lawmakers and prison officials to look into all prison deaths, which can serve as a guide on how to prevent future deaths.

In a written response to reporters’ questions, MDOC said the department has taken several corrective measures since the Justice Department began investigating the prison system in 2020, including improved training, facility upgrades and increased staffing.

MDOC said the Justice Department’s investigation is ongoing, and both sides are engaged in confidential settlement negotiations.

A deadly prison economy

Violent deaths in Mississippi prisons tend to lead back to the same factors: understaffing, poor training, and gang control, according to lawyers, experts, former corrections staffers interviewed, and the Justice Department reports.

Prison guards, many of whom are young and female, are poorly trained and sometimes left alone to oversee units holding as many as 180 men, according to Catina Washington, a former MDOC case manager who said she was assaulted in December 2020 by an incarcerated person at the South Mississippi prison. Her attacker was charged with simple assault, but the charge was later dropped due to conflicting witness testimony.

Guards make decisions on whether a sick or injured person can see a prison nurse or even go to a hospital.

“We don’t realize how much trust of another person’s life we put into the hands of correctional officers,” said Greta Kemp Martin, formerly the litigation director of Disability Rights Mississippi. “They literally hold your life in their hands.”

Poor oversight allows gang members to take advantage of the security gaps, buying and selling illegal drugs and cellphones, sometimes with the help of prison guards whom they recruit to smuggle contraband in. The reporting team identified several criminal cases in which corrections officers were charged with bringing in drugs or cellphones. Martin said some incarcerated clients have told her about correctional officers who share gang affiliations with them.

The gangs run a brutal underground economy. A debt to the wrong person can cost a life, as it did for 31-year-old Jeremy Irons, who was killed over $40 in Parchman, federal and state reports showed.

The Justice Department’s investigations found that the facilities operated at dangerously low staffing levels. In 2022, the Central Mississippi prison was operating with 44% of the employees needed to run the facility. At the South Mississippi prison, where Odom was later killed, the facility ran with 36% of the necessary employees. And in Wilkinson County’s prison, a human resources manager told investigators that the officer vacancy rate hovered around 50%.

Chronic understaffing is a key factor in prison homicides across the nation, said Fathi, of the ACLU National Prison Project. And what staff there is may be poorly trained to handle violence.

Former MDOC staffers reported that their training was rushed, leaving them unprepared for the dangers of the job.

“Parchman is all about ‘We're gonna hurry up and get you out of class, throw your ass out there, because we need people to watch the inmates,” a former correctional officer, who did not want his name used for fear of retaliation, told a reporter. “Many times I’ve seen people get killed right in front of me, and it really wasn’t nothing you could really do, because you ain’t but one person.”

Chuck Mullins, a lawyer who has represented Mississippi families in wrongful prison death cases for decades, said in many of the death cases he has litigated, he found that staff were either not present or poorly trained.

Chronic understaffing and poor training endanger both the incarcerated people and corrections staff, leaving many who remain fearful to do their jobs. The Justice Department’s reports cited multiple instances of staff failing or refusing to do security counts and falsifying count sheets.

Disciplinary reports reviewed by the reporting team show corrections officers being overpowered, beaten, choked, stabbed, spit on and sprayed with human waste.

Fatal beating overlooked for five hours

Army veteran Ronnie Graham survived combat in Iraq. He survived cancer.

He did not survive nine days inside the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility in Pearl.

In the early hours before dawn in December 2021, prison security camera footage captured a man attacking Graham near his bunk, choking and kicking him in the head, according to federal and state records reviewed by the reporting team.

Throughout the night, Graham passed in and out of consciousness. Later, another person punched him in the face. More than five hours later, an officer found Graham and called for help. By then, his body was rigid, and he was foaming at the mouth. Graham died soon after help arrived.

For at least five hours, Graham suffered. And for most of that time, guards were nowhere to be found. An investigative report noted that an officer turned the lights off in the unit about 45 minutes after Graham was attacked, but no officer walked through to check on the welfare of the men held there.

“If someone would have done their job that night, he would still be alive today,” his brother, Dale Graham, said. “But because someone didn't do their job, my brother is now dead.”

No one was charged in Graham’s death.

Lawsuits and internal prison reports show that, on multiple occasions, guards did not find a dead person for hours.

Earlier this year, Jonathan Havard was strangled in the Wilkinson County Correctional Facility. A parent, who found out about the death through unknown means, notified the prison that someone in Havard’s cell was dead, according to an internal MDOC report.

Last year, a group of roughly 10 people beat and stabbed 28-year-old Edward Boyd to death at East Mississippi Correctional Facility in Lauderdale County, according to a lawsuit his family filed against the private prison company that operates the lockup, Management & Training Corp. The suit stated that the attackers killed him “in plain view of surveillance camera” and then “dragged (Boyd) into a cell, where they left him to die.”

He was found covered in blood during a morning count. The lawsuit alleges that a correctional officer wrote in a report that they had last seen Boyd alive and well during a 4 a.m. count. However, there was no evidence of a count being conducted at 4 a.m., according to the lawsuit.

In response to the lawsuit, MTC denied any negligence or wrongdoing. The case is pending in federal court.

Dead-end investigations

When someone is killed in a Mississippi prison, typically, the department conducts an investigation. It interviews staff, witnesses, sometimes confidential informants, people it believes to be complicit in the death, and reviews camera footage.

MDOC sometimes requests help from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation.

However, the U.S. Justice Department found many investigations by the department were incomplete, failed to answer key questions or were mishandled.

Investigations of homicides that stemmed from fights over drug debts routinely ignored the source of the drugs or failed to conduct follow-up interviews.

During the 2022 Parchman investigation, a supervisor in MDOC’s investigative division told Justice Department officials that the caseload was too heavy and staffers were too overworked to conduct comprehensive investigations.

For example, after Jeremy Irons was stabbed to death in 2019, the internal investigation concluded that one incarcerated person stabbed him and flushed the weapon down the toilet.

The investigation into Irons’ death relied on one written statement from a trainee officer. No other staff was interviewed. However, several other people took part in the fight, which stemmed from Irons’ $40 debt to another person, according to the Justice Department.

After MDOC concludes its investigations, it may pass its findings along to local county district attorneys, who can then seek an indictment from a grand jury.

In an August 2019 case, Samuel Wade was strangled to death at Parchman. The Justice Department’s investigation references an incarcerated person strangled with a bedsheet that month. The victim’s cellmate allegedly confessed to the killing, and MDOC referred the case to the Sunflower County district attorney, according to the investigation. After six years, however, no charges have been filed.

Sunflower County District Attorney Dewayne Richardson has not responded to multiple interview requests.

Criminal charges have only been filed in five of the 19 killings in Parchman over the past decade. Four of those cases are pending in the courts. The fifth was dismissed after the defendant died by suicide.

Other district attorneys with prisons in their counties did not respond to requests for comment or declined to comment on open cases.

Experts said secrecy around prison operations and the lack of oversight, coupled with the general public’s lack of concern toward incarcerated people, allow the long-documented abuses and civil rights violations to continue.

Reforms to reduce deaths in custody have been hampered by “the secrecy that pervades prisons and jails,” said Andrea Armstrong, a Loyola University New Orleans law professor and leading researcher on deaths behind bars.

Many of the prison incident records the reporting team obtained came with scant narratives or with entire sections blacked out, even though such records are public under the state’s open records law.

In the past decade, at least five families of people killed in Mississippi prisons have filed civil lawsuits against the Department of Corrections or Management & Training Corp. However, documents in these lawsuits, such as evidence and settlement details, are often sealed or protected by confidentiality agreements.

For the incarcerated people who have been killed, their families are left with little, other than despair.

“This (is) an unimaginable pain you all gave me. This grief will last forever,” one victim’s mother wrote in a court statement for the upcoming trial of the prison murder of her son.

“People talk about justice. They say it’s blind. But justice shouldn’t be silent. It shouldn’t turn away when someone dies in state custody,” she wrote. “If the state takes responsibility for a person’s life, it should also be held accountable when that life is lost.”