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, St. Louis 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, Mississippi
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.”
