Amid the 2020 pandemic, Andrew Jones suffered a series of crises.
The one-time youth cheerleading coach in Mississippi’s Pine Belt entered an addiction treatment facility. There, he was diagnosed with several mental health disorders.
Then, another troubling diagnosis: He had HIV, the virus that can cause AIDS.
He had never been in trouble with the law before, but was arrested in December 2020 on a burglary charge and booked into the Jones County jail.
A month later, Jones was dead. He died from HIV, the state medical examiner ruled.
The jail never gave him the lifesaving medication he’d been prescribed, his family’s lawsuit claimed.
Jones was one among a wider but mostly unknown number of jailhouse fatalities across the state.
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.
“If we don’t understand why people are dying, we can’t prevent it,” said Andrea Armstrong, a law professor at Loyola University in New Orleans and a widely recognized authority in the study of deaths behind bars.
Under the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act, states must report all deaths in state prisons and local jails, as well as people who die in the process of being arrested.
Across the country, these reports are often incomplete. After obtaining five years of unredacted death records maintained by the Justice Department, The Marshall Project found hundreds of deaths were missing and others were inaccurately or incompletely described. In a sample of 1,000 death records, The Marshall Project found that 75% did not meet the Justice Department’s own standard for an acceptable level of detail.
A key source of data gaps in many places? Local jails.
Even so, Mississippi still fares worse in its reporting than most of the country. It was one of only four states with locally managed jails to report fewer than 10 deaths in those jails across five years of national records reviewed by The Marshall Project.
Of those states, Mississippi, North Dakota and South Dakota all acknowledged in 2023 filings submitted to federal authorities that local jail deaths are largely absent from their reporting.
Within the last year or so, state officials have begun more concerted attempts to collect records of local deaths even when local agencies don’t report them, according to leaders at the Mississippi Department of Public Safety, the state agency responsible for reporting obligations under the federal DCRA requirements.
“I think everybody sees the value in the data,” said DPS Commissioner Sean Tindell, but he said many of the state’s hundreds of local law enforcement agencies find the reporting requirements burdensome.
Mississippi does report state prison deaths, which have drawn scrutiny, including federal investigations that in 2022 and in 2024 found constitutional violations.
Without that same data at the local level, solutions can be scarce to problems like the ones that allegedly led to the death of Jones. His family’s lawsuit claimed better healthcare could have saved his life.
That lawsuit’s allegations described the jail’s medical treatment “orders of magnitude below typical care,” said Dr. Anne Spaulding, who reviewed the lawsuit’s claims for The Marshall Project - Jackson. She is a professor of public health at Emory University and a former medical care administrator for prison systems in Georgia and Rhode Island.
A nurse at the Jones County jail failed to obtain lifesaving drugs for Jones in December 2020 and January 2021, the lawsuit claimed. The county and other defendants, including the nurse, denied wrongdoing in court filings. In February 2025, a judge dismissed the lawsuit after key defendants settled. The settlement terms were kept confidential.
In 2021, Jones County brought in outside healthcare. The county first contracted with a local hospital and later with a Gulf Coast-area medical firm. The change in medical staffing followed the deaths of three detainees that occurred in less than a year, including that of Jones.
To stop local jail deaths, broader solutions must be based on data from those jails, said Madalyn Wasilczuk, a law professor in South Carolina who spearheads a transparency initiative there around in-custody deaths.
That’s because local jail deaths tend to occur for different reasons than prison deaths. The Justice Department, for example, has found that jail deaths are most commonly linked to suicide or drug and alcohol intoxication.
To tackle these problems, Mississippi must first count deaths that occur inside local jails, Wasilczuk said. Otherwise, Mississippi “is missing an entire piece of the puzzle.”
A Death in Jones County
When a sheriff’s deputy found Andrew Jones leaving the deputy’s home on Dec. 7, 2020, his family contends that Jones was drunk and confused about where he was.
Now facing burglary charges, Jones was held in jail on a $15,000 bond while waiting for an indictment. Jones wasn’t accused of taking anything from the deputy’s home.
When he was booked into the Jones County Adult Detention Center, near the small town of Ellisville, Jones allegedly listed his health problems: mental health disturbances that included suicidal thoughts, high blood pressure and his recent HIV diagnosis.
At the time, medical care at the jail was provided by a full-time staff nurse, Carol Johnston, with visits from a nurse practitioner by appointment, according to the lawsuit. Johnston was a licensed practical nurse and was providing care at the jail without the supervision required by her license, alleges the lawsuit over Andrew’s death. The county and other defendants, including Johnston, denied this claim in court filings.
Johnston has not worked at the jail since June 2021, Jones County Administrator Danielle Ashley told The Marshall Project - Jackson. The county now contracts with Health Corr LLC, which must provide nurses and medical staff at the jail throughout the week, according to the county’s contract with the Picayune-based medical company.
Ashley declined on behalf of the county to answer other questions about the lawsuit’s allegations. Johnston did not respond to questions about those allegations. Public records from the state’s nursing board show that Johnston has no disciplinary history.
During Jones’ month in jail — the last month of his life — there were repeated opportunities to avert his death, the lawsuit claimed.
Johnston arranged for Jones to visit a clinic in nearby Hattiesburg for an appointment scheduled before his arrest. Nine days after his arrest, on Dec. 18, a doctor prescribed Jones a pair of drugs to keep his HIV in check, Descovy and Tivicay.
Regular access to these pills, or similar medications used to suppress HIV, is “bare minimum” care, said Dr. Tara Vijayan, a professor of medicine at UCLA who specializes in infectious diseases. Ideally, she said, Jones would have begun taking these medications soon after his diagnosis.
However, Jones never got those medications in the jail, the family’s lawsuit alleged.
The county’s current contract with Health Corr requires that its staff administer prescribed medications.
At subsequent appointments, tests showed concerning results related to Jones’ liver and that his untreated HIV had become full-blown AIDS, meaning his immune system was significantly compromised, and he was now vulnerable to infections that would not otherwise be dangerous.
Careful monitoring of such a patient would be required to watch for dangerous infections, Vijayan said. However, antiretroviral medications can still bring the disease under control.
Still, Jones’ prescription for the lifesaving drugs allegedly went unfilled, and Jones began to decline rapidly.
His last day was painful, according to the lawsuit’s recounting of video surveillance from the isolation cell where Jones was confined because of his November bout with coronavirus.
Throughout Jan. 9, 2021, Andrew moved in spastic and increasingly disoriented ways, apparently losing control of his own body. He became weaker and slower.
He lay on the floor as guards placed food on the ground next to him.
Finally, later that day, guards found Andrew dead. The state medical examiner ruled his death was caused by an HIV-linked infection, exacerbated by high blood pressure.
No Oversight for Mississippi Jails
Jones’ death is one among a string of jailhouse fatalities that have been linked to allegations of abusive jail conditions that haven’t been reported to the federal government.
Ten years earlier, at the same jail, Albert Graham died from heart problems.
A lawsuit over his 2010 death dragged on for years before a judge found that even if Johnston, the same nurse who treated Jones, provided slow, untimely care, it wasn’t bad enough to be considered “deliberate indifference” — the legal term for the high threshold that must be met to sue in federal court over medical care in jail.
An hour-and-a-half up the road from the Jones County jail, Kemper County has faced several lawsuits over jail deaths, settling one in 2022 over the 2018 jail suicide of a man allegedly held 52 days past his release date. On the day of his death, other detainees warned that Robert Wayne Johnson was trying to strangle himself with a shoelace. Guards allegedly placed the man into an isolation cell with the shoelaces anyway.
In George County, a nurse was convicted of manslaughter in 2017 and sentenced to 15 years in prison for failing to provide insulin to a diabetic man facing drug charges who died in 2014. Jail staff testified that she accused the prisoner of faking his symptoms of distress. A 2022 settlement in a civil lawsuit totaled $2.5 million — half the annual budget of the rural county.
That George County settlement was among at least 10 settlements within the last five years involving Mississippi jail deaths.
But litigation and criminal prosecutions can also take years to resolve, letting problems linger and yielding — at best — only piecemeal accountability for local officials tasked with jail safety.
There is no state-level law requiring local jails to track and report deaths in custody, one barrier identified in the state’s memo.
Rather than relying on a sprawling network of more than 360 law enforcement agencies to report local in-custody deaths, Tindell, the DPS commissioner, suggested a statewide system relying on county coroners to identify these deaths might be more effective. However, he said he believes the amount of data requested by the U.S. Justice Department can be “burdensome,” especially for many local officials to administer. He said collecting less information about each death could improve compliance.
Another key DPS official, Public Safety Planning Director Josh Bromen, said he has made an online system available for local officials to report deaths and plans to ramp up outreach efforts to local officials about the DCRA requirement.
Bromen also said he has begun to collect records of jail deaths from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, which sometimes examines those deaths.
Federal law allows the DOJ to withhold federal funds from law enforcement agencies that don’t comply with reporting requirements, but that penalty has never been enacted.
The lack of transparency or oversight of jail deaths in Mississippi is part of a broader failure in the state to oversee local jails.
There are no jail licensing requirements in Mississippi, except for spaces used to house certain mental health patients. State officials don’t tour or inspect local jails. Grand juries routinely tour the jails, but their reports are rarely seen by anyone outside the county, are often ignored and lack an enforcement mechanism.
And when jail deaths occur, policymakers and advocates aren’t the only ones kept in the dark. The families and loved ones of those who died often have unanswered questions, said Marquell Bridges, an activist based in Mississippi and Alabama who has worked with survivors and families impacted by police and prison violence across the country.
“That transparency is important for the families. It’s important for the community,” Bridges said. “The only way this system works is if people believe in it.”
