Hundreds of calls for help: What 911 logs reveal about the Hinds County jail

By Ivy Scott, Brittany Hailer and Daja E. Henry, The Marshall Project | Originally published by Mississippi Today

When local officials try to block the public from seeing what goes on in a jail, the calls they make to 911 can offer a view into how people there are being treated, and which problems jail employees struggle to address on their own. 

A surge in emergency responses to a jail can reveal patterns of medical neglect or widespread drug use, as well as other chronic issues, from detainees starting fires to fights or suicide attempts.

Corrections officers and medical personnel in jails are considered first responders, said Michele Deitch, a former Texas prison monitor and director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas-Austin. When a jail consistently makes emergency calls for outside help, she added, it suggests that larger, systemic problems are likely going unaddressed. 

“If there’s a crisis going on, whether it’s a fight or a medical situation, they’re supposed to have the people on-site to deal with that. It just seems odd to me that they need to reach outside the jail to have someone deal with an emergency,” Deitch noted. 

Local governments have a constitutional obligation to protect and care for anyone they hold in custody, Dietch said. Even if jail administrators outsource their responsibility to care for people to another agency, the cost still falls on the county. “Either they’re paying for better care in the jail,” Deitch said, “or they’re paying for emergency services that get sent to the jail.”  

When disability rights lawyers sued a South Carolina jail in 2024 alleging that it violated the constitutional rights of people with mental illness held there, they pointed to a 50% surge in 911 calls over the previous three years. Calls related to substance abuse had more than quadrupled in that time, and reported stabbings and puncture wounds also jumped.

To see how local jails are handling emergencies, The Marshall Project’s teams in Cleveland, Ohio; St. Louis, Missouri; and Jackson, Mississippi, analyzed months of 911 records. Listening to calls and reviewing emergency medical logs revealed patterns of substance abuse and mental health crises in the jails, violent assaults and a staff culture that neglects detainees until tensions among people inside escalate into a crisis. 

Jackson

The Raymond Detention Center in Hinds County, Mississippi, called 911 for help twice a day last year, on average. According to Hinds County Sheriff’s dispatch logs obtained by The Marshall Project – Jackson, the office received 740 calls in 2025 from the jail, which is staffed by its own officers. 

A former county jail administrator said that she was disturbed by the frequency of calls at the facility.  

“That number alone is alarming, and speaks to a much broader systemic failure,” said Kathryn Bryan, who oversaw the jail until 2022. “Staffing levels, training, command support, almost every core competency in jail operations has to fail in order to come up with an annual number as exorbitant as that.”

Nearly half of the 911 calls to the sheriff’s department were coded as “jail walkthrough.” Hinds County Sheriff Tyree Jones declined to explain what a jail walkthrough is, saying he would not comment on security measures at the jail. 

“That’s just cover-up language. I have never heard of that in my whole career,” Bryan said. “What they’re doing is trying to obscure what’s really going on.” 

The frequency of 911 calls from the jail, which regularly holds around 500 people with only about 70 corrections officers, according to a federal monitoring report from last year, speaks to the broad dysfunction that has plagued the facility for more than a decade. 

The logs show 150 calls about assaults and dozens related to contraband or medical emergencies.

“When there’s a jail that’s fully staffed or well-trained, usually they handle business in-house,” Bryan said. 

The Marshall Project – Jackson has reported on this dysfunction: multiple preventable deaths, broken cell locks, an extortion system that has exploited detainees by forcing them to pay to use toilets, and overcrowding that leaves people to sleep on filthy floors.

Since October, the jail has been under the control of a federal receiver, the result of a U.S. Department of Justice investigation and a decade-long court battle. 

Understaffing has been one of the most persistent issues at the jail.

“We will never reach a constitutional, sustainable jail if we don’t increase the staff,” said the receiver, Wendell M. France, in a February court hearing.

Both the quality and the quantity of officers worry Bryan, the former jail administrator, who noted that the officers are “sickeningly undertrained” and ill-equipped to handle problems that arise. 

Staff levels have declined every year since 2021. This has affected the county’s ability to provide basic services to detainees and keep people in the facility safe, France said in the court hearing. He described a facility that had fallen into disrepair after being ripped apart by unsupervised detainees. 

The county is building a new jail in Jackson that is scheduled to be completed in 2028. Some detainees may be moved there as early as this fall, when the first phase of construction is completed. 

However, Bryan said she worries that the county will lean too heavily into the new jail as a fix-all solution to the problems illustrated by the 911 calls. 

“[The new jail] is not going to solve their staffing problems; it’s not going to solve their lack of training,” Bryan said. “It’s just going to get worse in a pretty facility.” 

Cleveland

Workers at the Cuyahoga County jail in Cleveland called 911 for emergency assistance 845 times last year, according to data provided by the city. Many of the calls were for overdoses, chest pains or other medical emergencies typical for a facility that houses about 1,500 people at a time. But there were also calls triggered by people detained at the jail ingesting batteries or bleach, and others were for “near hanging, strangulation or suffocation.” Other calls pertained to people dealing with psychosis, catatonia or altered mental status from alcohol or drug withdrawal. 

Cuyahoga County spokesperson Kelly Woodard declined to comment on 911 calls to the jail and operations, citing legal counsel from the county’s law department and the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office.

People are transported to the hospital for issues that were once handled internally, including psychiatric calls, said Adam Chaloupka, general counsel for the Ohio Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, which represents the jail’s corrections officers. The jail has shifted care away from in-house nurses and doctors to its county-owned medical provider, MetroHealth, Chaloupka said. And, while some medical workers remain at the jail during business hours, the facility no longer provides the same level of on-site care — such as having a doctor on duty overnight — on weekends or holidays. 

Chaloupka said that when someone held in the jail has to go to an outside hospital, a corrections officer must accompany them, and these frequent transports strain the already-limited staffing inside the facility. 

A county-commissioned staffing analysis of the jail, published in October 2025, found that emergency transports to the hospital resulted in the jail shutting down posts due to a lack of officers. When this happened, one officer had to oversee multiple housing units. As a result, men and women were locked in their cells for hours at a time, Chaloupka said.

When workers at the jail call 911, records suggest they do not always know how to respond to an emergency or even accurately identify their location to dispatchers. 

In one call to 911, following an apparent suicide attempt by a 42-year-old woman in December, the jail employee who called for help didn’t know the address of the facility or its phone number. In some cases, 911 wasn’t called until the person was already cold to the touch. Jennifer Wade, 41, entered the jail in September 2024 because a state psychiatric hospital refused to admit her due to her frail physical health. In February 2025, jail workers found her unconscious on the floor of her cell and called 911. By the time they discovered her, she was cold and was later pronounced dead from congestive heart failure. 

Chaloupka said corrections officers are not permitted or trained to call 911. He recalled jail deaths where “the COs were accused of not providing medical care,” but he said they are trained to call for the facility’s medical workers and then wait for help. 

“It might sound inhumane, but the policies don’t require them to. The policies are like, they just hit the button … to alert the medical staff,” Chaloupka said. 

St. Louis

Assaults were one of the most common reasons that emergency medical personnel were called to the St. Louis city jail over a three-month period between September and December last year, according to records provided by the city’s Bureau of Emergency Medical Services. Emergency calls for help give a rare view into the jail’s dependence on first responders to both break up fights and provide aid after an attack. 

There were nine emergency medical responses attributed to assaults, representing roughly 1 out of every 6 calls. They were the most frequent reason for emergency calls after the broad category of “sick person.” Although the 911 records do not specify whether the assaults were directed at incarcerated people or jail employees, people who have been detained in the jail and their lawyers said in interviews with The Marshall Project – St. Louis that both are widespread. 

“It’s pretty constant that people are getting jumped, jumping other people, getting stabbed,” said Erin Moore, a state public defender in St. Louis who often represents people held in the jail. 

The jail’s commissioner, Nate Hayward, declined to answer questions from The Marshall Project – St. Louis about violence in the jail and why guards frequently are forced to call 911 for assistance. 

Based on their conversations with clients, attorneys said brawls can stem from arguments that started on the outside, but people also often fight over who gets access to the jail’s limited supply of resources, such as digital tablets, soap or detergent. According to city reports, the St. Louis jail houses hundreds of people with mental health challenges, and those conditions can be exacerbated by being locked up without adequate treatment.

“They don’t have enough medical staff. They don’t have enough COs,” said Moore. “I had a client who, anytime they would try and move him between cells, [officers] would call the police to help them do it [because] he was volatile. They couldn’t even move him themselves.” 

Moore and other lawyers said that some of the jail’s housing units are chronically on lockdown because there aren’t enough officers working to let people out during scheduled recreation hours. Locking people in their cells for 23 or 24 hours a day heightens tensions, attorneys said, making people more agitated and itching to fight when they are let out. 

At the same time, in other units, some officers allow people out and about in the common areas or leave cell doors unlocked, which is another way fights can happen. 

For months, the jail has been operating with roughly half the budgeted number of officers, even as the detainee population climbs. The jail’s average daily population hovers just under 800 people, with fewer than 80 corrections officers spread across three shifts. 

“There’s just way more people in the jail than there are adequate staff to provide time out [of cells] or help people get showers or take people to get medical care,” said Maureen Hanlon, an attorney with the legal advocacy organization Arch City Defenders. “People are coming in in such a rough state, and then once you’re there, it’s such a terrible experience that it’s only predictable that tensions would escalate.” 

Hanlon said the responsibility to ensure the safety of detainees is shared between jail administrators and circuit court judges, noting that both fall short of their legal obligation to ensure the well-being of people in the jail.

In a routine quarterly grand jury report on the jail from last fall, jurors who visited the facility reported that conditions were “concerning for daily living of the inmates,” adding “we were only shown the portions they wanted us to see.” 

When asked whether the court has an obligation to respond to concerns raised about conditions in the jail, the judges who oversaw the grand jury last fall — Judges Madeline Connolly and Jason Sengheiser — declined to comment, as did Presiding Judge Christopher McGraugh. A spokesperson for the circuit court in St. Louis City said he did not know whether the court had any protocol for responding to reports of poor conditions at the jail and said he “won’t speculate about what the court would do in certain situations, but if there’s an emergency at the jail, police/fire/EMS would be asked to respond.”

In October, a circuit judge noted that understaffing in the jail was leading to increased violence and ordered the St. Louis sheriff’s office to oversee the transportation of detainees to the hospital instead of the city’s corrections officers.

Attorneys stressed that for the jail to properly care for people, it would need to dramatically decrease its population and dramatically increase mental health and other resources. 

“There’s not enough food, there’s not enough rec. There’s not enough tablets. There’s not enough to do,” said Moore, the public defender. “If they had half the number of people in there, I think some things could change.”

This story was published in partnership with Mississippi Today. Marshall Project – Jackson, a nonprofit news team covering Mississippi’s criminal justice systems. Sign up for their Jackson newsletter, and follow The Marshall Project on Instagram, Reddit and YouTube

This article was originally published by Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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