A key Mississippi lawmaker has passed a major hurdle on a bill that calls for tougher oversight of deaths inside the state’s notorious prisons, following an investigation by The Marshall Project - Jackson, Mississippi Today, Clarion Ledger, Hattiesburg American and The Mississippi Link..
On Monday, Rep. Becky Currie, a Brookhaven Republican who chairs the House Corrections Committee, steered legislation out of that committee to require that an oversight task force review the deaths of state prisoners and make recommendations to prevent future deaths.
“There just needs to be another set of eyes,” said Currie, who has authored a slew of accountability and reform bills this year aimed at the Mississippi Department of Corrections. If the bill is passed by the House, it will go to a state Senate committee for review.
Three people died in state prison custody just last week, said Currie, who also said bereaved families are often left in the dark.
“There’s people nine years later, they have no idea how their loved one died,” Currie said.
Currie proposed oversight of prison deaths in response to the investigation into prison homicides by the news outlets. The news team found that prison understaffing and gang violence likely led to the killings of nearly 50 people since 2015. Only eight cases resulted in criminal convictions.
Many family members of those who died behind bars said they had little communication with prison officials. Some learned details through a whisper network of incarcerated people, insiders, advocates, and, in some cases, from journalists.
At the committee meeting, Currie reiterated that she wants to get to the bottom of why people are dying — whether it’s from drug overdoses, access to medical care or violence — so the state can prevent future deaths.
Following the news investigation, prison Commissioner Burl Cain said in October that the department would review unprosecuted homicides and deaths ruled to be of undetermined causes.
Yet nearly four months later, there have been no additional indictments or convictions in open homicide cases.
Currie’s bill would overhaul a task force that already has oversight of state prisons and require it to investigate all deaths in state prisons that were “unexpected.” Unexpected is defined in the bill to mean deaths not linked to a previously diagnosed serious or terminal illness. Under the proposed law, the task force must issue a public report describing the committee’s findings and any recommendations needed to prevent future deaths. It must also propose a public implementation plan for those recommendations.
The oversight task force would also have access to reports and data related to parole, prison programming and sentencing.
The bill would also limit the number of corrections department employees who can sit on the committee. She says too many such employees sit on the task force now.
“I don’t feel like all the employees of the Department of Corrections should be voting on oversight of themselves,” Currie said.
The current oversight committee would be replaced by the newly created Corrections Overview Task Force, which would have 13 members:
- The chairs of the House and Senate corrections committees, or their designee. Any designees must be members of the Corrections committees.
- The chairs of House and Senate Accountability, Efficiency, and Transparency committees, or their designees. Any designee must be a committee member.
- The corrections commissioner, or a designated deputy commissioner.
- A state public defender appointee.
- A circuit court judge appointed by the chief justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court.
- The director of the Joint Legislative Committee on Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review, or a designee.
- The chair of the Parole Board or a designee from the board.
- The Department of Public Safety commissioner or a designated deputy commissioner.
- A crime victim appointed by the state attorney general.
- An advocate for offenders and families appointed by the speaker of the House.
Currently, there is little oversight of Mississippi corrections officials and the system.
The Corrections and Criminal Justice Oversight Task Force was established in 2014 and would be overhauled by Currie’s bill. It makes policy recommendations, but it has essentially no authority, state public defender André de Gruy, who is also a member, has said.
Examples of oversight exist in other prison systems, including Virginia, which has an ombudsman office that received over 500 complaints in a few months' period in 2025, and New York, whose state prisons are monitored by an independent agency that issues reports and publishes data online.
Currie’s bill must be passed by the House of Representatives before moving to the state Senate for consideration. If both chambers pass the bill, it will either need the governor’s approval for it to become law, or for him not to veto it before it becomes law.