At least 42 people have been killed inside Mississippi prisons in the past decade, leaving scores of grieving families questioning a system that fails to protect people in its custody or hold anyone accountable.

There are sisters wracked with guilt, mothers with depression, and children struggling to fill the voids in their lives. Former prison employees talk about lying sleepless in bed, replaying the killings they’ve witnessed but could not stop.

In Mississippi, prison homicides are the culmination of long-documented festering problems: chronic understaffing, lax oversight, gangs that rule by violence and delays in treating life-threatening injuries, an investigation by a statewide reporting team found.

Murders signal “catastrophic failures” of prison administrators, whose number one

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