The State Line
Three questions decide how much of this record a resident can get without a lawyer: does anybody inspect the jail, does the law require a death in custody to be reported, and is the result published. We have not yet established the answers for Mississippi.
Not yet researched. When it is, the answer goes here and nowhere else — one law layer per state, so the county pages stay about the county.
Compare all fifty states →That is the one thing every county in America has in common. The jail belongs to the people of the county and is paid for out of their taxes. The sheriff who runs it is elected. The judge who decides who sits in it is elected or appointed. Three offices, enormous power, and almost nobody watching.
How much is your sheriff — and your judge — costing you?
Nationally, almost 77% of the people who died in local jails in 2019 had not been convicted of anything, and suicide was the leading single cause of those deaths. The Justice Department is required to count deaths in custody and does not do it properly — a Senate investigation found it failed to identify more than 990 such deaths in a single year. MoBetta is building the county-by-county record instead.
Your VOTE is POWERFUL.
The sheriffs who run these jails are elected. So are the commissioners who pay for them.
Deadlines, ID rules and Mississippi’s own election office, from vote.gov — the official U.S. government voter site. Where you vote on the day is set by your county election office.
Mississippi — all 82 counties open. Click any county on the map, or see the transparency scoreboard below.
This is our jail
Every county in Mississippi was checked against the same ten questions on 2026-09-29. This measures disclosure, not conduct — what a county publishes about a building its taxpayers own. A county can raise its score in an afternoon by posting a document.
Not scored: Not examined (29) — the county's and sheriff's own sites could not be read, a gap in the research rather than a finding: Amite County, Benton County, Carroll County, Chickasaw County, Choctaw County, Clay County, Coahoma County, Franklin County, George County, Greene County, Grenada County, Hancock County, Issaquena County, Jefferson County, Lawrence County, Leflore County, Lowndes County, Marion County, Noxubee County, Oktibbeha County, Panola County, Perry County, Pontotoc County, Rankin County, Simpson County, Tallahatchie County, Tate County, Union County, Webster County.
Mississippi has no state agency that inspects county jails: the State Department of Health's jail inspections ended when the Legislature stopped funding them in 2017. The sheriff is the jailer of every county by law (Miss. Code § 19-25-71). Fifteen counties also run regional correctional facilities that hold state prisoners under contracts with the Department of Corrections. Many Mississippi counties publish little or nothing about their jails online, and a sheriff's Facebook page is not counted as the county publishing. Counties shown as not scored are ones whose own pages could not be read or could not be found, not ones found to publish nothing.