Amid the 2020 pandemic, Andrew Jones suffered a sequence of crises.
The one-time youth cheerleading coach in Mississippi’s Pine Belt entered an dependancy remedy facility. There, he was recognized with a number of psychological well being issues.
Then, one other troubling analysis: He had HIV, the virus that may trigger AIDS.
He had by no means been in bother with the legislation earlier than, however was arrested in December 2020 on a housebreaking cost and booked into the Jones County jail.
A month later, Jones was lifeless. He died from HIV, the state health worker dominated.
The jail by no means gave him the lifesaving treatment he’d been prescribed, his household’s lawsuit claimed.
Jones was one amongst a wider however principally unknown variety of jailhouse fatalities throughout the state.
At the least 46 folks have died in Mississippi’s county jails since 2020, in accordance with lawsuits, information experiences and legislation enforcement information reviewed by The Marshall Mission – Jackson. However these misplaced lives don’t seem in any official statistics or information.
Mississippi has lengthy didn’t depend and report all deaths in native jails that serve the state’s 82 counties, regardless of a federal requirement to take action. These usually harmful amenities function just about freed from any state oversight.
“If we don’t perceive why persons are dying, we are able to’t forestall it,” stated Andrea Armstrong, a legislation professor at Loyola College in New Orleans and a widely known authority within the examine of deaths behind bars.
Beneath the federal Demise in Custody Reporting Act, states should report all deaths in state prisons and native jails, in addition to individuals who die within the technique of being arrested.
Throughout the nation, these experiences are sometimes incomplete. After acquiring 5 years of unredacted dying information maintained by the Justice Division, The Marshall Mission discovered lots of of deaths had been lacking and others had been inaccurately or incompletely described. In a pattern of 1,000 dying information, The Marshall Mission discovered that 75% didn’t meet the Justice Division’s personal customary for an appropriate degree of element.
A key supply of information gaps in lots of locations? Native jails.
Even so, Mississippi nonetheless fares worse in its reporting than a lot of the nation. It was considered one of solely 4 states with regionally managed jails to report fewer than 10 deaths in these jails throughout 5 years of nationwide information reviewed by The Marshall Mission.
Of these states, Mississippi, North Dakota and South Dakota all acknowledged in 2023 filings submitted to federal authorities that native jail deaths are largely absent from their reporting.
Throughout the final yr or so, state officers have begun extra concerted makes an attempt to gather information of native deaths even when native businesses don’t report them, in accordance with leaders on the Mississippi Division of Public Security, the state company answerable for reporting obligations beneath the federal DCRA necessities.
“I believe everyone sees the worth within the information,” stated DPS Commissioner Sean Tindell, however he stated most of the state’s lots of of native legislation enforcement businesses discover the reporting necessities burdensome.
Mississippi does report state jail deaths, which have drawn scrutiny, together with federal investigations that in 2022 and in 2024 discovered constitutional violations.
With out that very same information on the native degree, options might be scarce to issues like those that allegedly led to the dying of Jones. His household’s lawsuit claimed higher healthcare may have saved his life.
That lawsuit’s allegations described the jail’s medical remedy “orders of magnitude beneath typical care,” stated Dr. Anne Spaulding, who reviewed the lawsuit’s claims for The Marshall Mission – Jackson. She is an affiliate professor at Emory College and was a former medical care care director for the jail and jail system of Rhode Island earlier than holding the same place in Georgia.
A nurse on the Jones County jail didn’t receive lifesaving medicine for Jones in December 2020 and January 2021, the lawsuit claimed. The county and different defendants, together with the nurse, denied wrongdoing in court docket filings. In February 2025, a decide dismissed the lawsuit after key defendants settled. The settlement phrases had been stored confidential.
In 2021, Jones County introduced in outdoors healthcare. The county first contracted with a neighborhood hospital and later with a Gulf Coast-area medical agency. The change in medical staffing adopted the deaths of three detainees that occurred in lower than a yr, together with that of Jones.
To cease native jail deaths, broader options have to be based mostly on information from these jails, stated Madalyn Wasilczuk, a legislation professor in South Carolina who spearheads a transparency initiative there round in-custody deaths.
That’s as a result of native jail deaths are inclined to happen for various causes than jail deaths. The Justice Division, for instance, has discovered that jail deaths are mostly linked to suicide or drug and alcohol intoxication.
To sort out these issues, Mississippi should first depend deaths that happen inside native jails, Wasilczuk stated. In any other case, Mississippi “is lacking a complete piece of the puzzle.”
A Demise in Jones County
When a sheriff’s deputy discovered Andrew Jones leaving the deputy’s dwelling on Dec. 7, 2020, his household contends that Jones was drunk and confused about the place he was.
Now dealing with housebreaking expenses, Jones was held in jail on a $15,000 bond whereas ready for an indictment. Jones wasn’t accused of taking something from the deputy’s dwelling.
When he was booked into the Jones County Grownup Detention Middle, close to the small city of Ellisville, Jones allegedly listed his well being issues: psychological well being disturbances that included suicidal ideas, hypertension and his current HIV analysis.
On the time, medical care on the jail was offered by a full-time workers nurse, Carol Johnston, with visits from a nurse practitioner by appointment, in accordance with the lawsuit. Johnston was a licensed sensible nurse and was offering care on the jail with out the supervision required by her license, alleges the lawsuit over Andrew’s dying. The county and different defendants, together with Johnston, denied this declare in court docket filings.
Johnston has not labored on the jail since June 2021, Jones County Administrator Danielle Ashley advised The Marshall Mission – Jackson. The county now contracts with Well being Corr LLC, which should present nurses and medical workers on the jail all through the week, in accordance with the county’s contract with the Picayune-based medical firm.
Ashley declined on behalf of the county to reply different questions concerning the lawsuit’s allegations. Johnston didn’t reply to questions on these allegations. Public information from the state’s nursing board present that Johnston has no disciplinary historical past.
Throughout Jones’ month in jail — the final month of his life — there have been repeated alternatives to avert his dying, the lawsuit claimed.
Johnston organized for Jones to go to a clinic in close by Hattiesburg for an appointment scheduled earlier than his arrest. 9 days after his arrest, on Dec. 18, a physician prescribed Jones a pair of medicine to maintain his HIV in examine, Descovy and Tivicay.
Common entry to those tablets, or related medicines used to suppress HIV, is “naked minimal” care, stated Dr. Tara Vijayan, a professor of drugs at UCLA who focuses on infectious ailments. Ideally, she stated, Jones would have begun taking these medicines quickly after his analysis.
Nevertheless, Jones by no means acquired these medicines within the jail, the household’s lawsuit alleged.
The county’s present contract with Well being Corr requires that its workers administer prescribed medicines.
At subsequent appointments, exams confirmed regarding outcomes associated to Jones’ liver and that his untreated HIV had turn into full-blown AIDS, that means his immune system was considerably compromised, and he was now susceptible to infections that may not in any other case be harmful.
Cautious monitoring of such a affected person could be required to look at for harmful infections, Vijayan stated. Nevertheless, antiretroviral medicines can nonetheless carry the illness beneath management.
Nonetheless, Jones’ prescription for the lifesaving medicine allegedly went unfilled, and Jones started to say no quickly.
His final day was painful, in accordance with the lawsuit’s recounting of video surveillance from the isolation cell the place Jones was confined due to his November bout with coronavirus.
All through Jan. 9, 2021, Andrew moved in spastic and more and more disoriented methods, apparently shedding management of his personal physique. He grew to become weaker and slower.
He lay on the ground as guards positioned meals on the bottom subsequent to him.
Lastly, later that day, guards discovered Andrew lifeless. The state health worker dominated his dying was attributable to an HIV-linked an infection, exacerbated by hypertension.
No Oversight for Mississippi Jails
Jones’ dying is one amongst a string of jailhouse fatalities which have been linked to allegations of abusive jail situations that haven’t been reported to the federal authorities.
Ten years earlier, on the similar jail, Albert Graham died from coronary heart issues.
A lawsuit over his 2010 dying dragged on for years earlier than a decide discovered that even when Johnston, the identical nurse who handled Jones, offered gradual, premature care, it wasn’t dangerous sufficient to be thought of “deliberate indifference” — the authorized time period for the excessive threshold that have to be met to sue in federal court docket over medical care in jail.
An hour-and-a-half up the street from the Jones County jail, Kemper County has confronted a number of lawsuits over jail deaths, settling one in 2022 over the 2018 jail suicide of a person allegedly held 52 days previous his launch date. On the day of his dying, different detainees warned that Robert Wayne Johnson was attempting to strangle himself with a shoelace. Guards allegedly positioned the person into an isolation cell with the shoelaces anyway.
In George County, a nurse was convicted of manslaughter in 2017 and sentenced to fifteen years in jail for failing to offer insulin to a diabetic man dealing with drug expenses who died in 2014. Jail workers testified that she accused the prisoner of faking his signs of misery. A 2022 settlement in a civil lawsuit totaled $2.5 million — half the annual price range of the agricultural county.
That George County settlement was amongst no less than 10 settlements inside the final 5 years involving Mississippi jail deaths.
However litigation and legal prosecutions can even take years to resolve, letting issues linger and yielding — at greatest — solely piecemeal accountability for native officers tasked with jail security.
There is no such thing as a state-level legislation requiring native jails to trace and report deaths in custody, one barrier recognized within the state’s memo.
Moderately than counting on a sprawling community of greater than 360 legislation enforcement businesses to report native in-custody deaths, Tindell, the DPS commissioner, steered a statewide system counting on county coroners to determine these deaths is perhaps simpler. Nevertheless, he stated he believes the quantity of information requested by the U.S. Justice Division might be “burdensome,” particularly for a lot of native officers to manage. He stated amassing much less details about every dying may enhance compliance.
One other key DPS official, Public Security Planning Director Josh Bromen, stated he has made a web-based system out there for native officers to report deaths and plans to ramp up outreach efforts to native officers concerning the DCRA requirement.
Bromen additionally stated he has begun to gather information of jail deaths from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, which typically examines these deaths.
Federal legislation permits the DOJ to withhold federal funds from legislation enforcement businesses that don’t adjust to reporting necessities, however that penalty has by no means been enacted.
The shortage of transparency or oversight of jail deaths in Mississippi is a part of a broader failure within the state to supervise native jails.
There aren’t any jail licensing necessities in Mississippi, apart from areas used to accommodate sure psychological well being sufferers. State officers don’t tour or examine native jails. Grand juries routinely tour the jails, however their experiences are not often seen by anybody outdoors the county, are sometimes ignored and lack an enforcement mechanism.
And when jail deaths happen, policymakers and advocates aren’t the one ones stored at midnight. The households and family members of those that died usually have unanswered questions, stated Marquell Bridges, an activist based mostly in Mississippi and Alabama who has labored with survivors and households impacted by police and jail violence throughout the nation.
“That transparency is necessary for the households. It’s necessary for the group,” Bridges stated. “The one manner this method works is that if folks imagine in it.”
