Ivy Scott

Why America’s Jails Are So Disgusting Understaffing, outdated facilities and poor management have led to filthy conditions in jails in St. Louis, Cleveland and Hinds County, Mississippi.

Despite legal challenges, jails across the country are still filthy with plumbing issues, vermin, feces-covered walls, & limited access to basic hygiene products [ @ivyscott.bsky.social @brittanyhailer.bsky.social @dajaehenry.com @themarshallproject.org ]
www.themarshallproject.org/2025/10/09/j...

Text reads "Your $10 donation pays for the cost of one incarcerated reader's annual subscription. This Giving Tuesday, our goal is to fund 150 News Inside Subscriptions." The image features three issues of The Marshall Project's News Inside print edition.

👋 This #GivingTuesday, your donation of just $10 pays for one subscriber's annual News Inside subscription — delivering powerful stories and helpful resources they can't get anywhere else in prison or jail: www.themarshallproject.org/donate?via=7...

How We Got Comprehensive Death Data From the Missouri DOC After repeated questions about missing deaths in the state’s existing logs, the department shared annual counts for the first time.

🧵ends here, with my P.S. that Missouri's department of public safety apparently does collect prison deaths from the DOC, but DPS (1) closed that data to the public, and (2) “does not review, compile, evaluate or analyze the submitted reports.”

So yeah, that's how things are going.

Dr. Roger Mitchell Jr. put it succinctly: the lack of year-end death data is “extremely concerning.”

“You need the [total] number, and not just the number,” said Mitchell. "Not just to hold people accountable for things that weren't done correctly, but so that if things can improve — we improve.”🧵

The same question applies to state research: if the Missouri department of public health wanted to look into, say, drug overdoses in MO prisons, wouldn't that be challenging to do if they were missing some of the data?

(This ofc raises the question of how many missing deaths is "many": 5? 15? 50?)🧵

The research team's goal was to create "a tool for the public and researchers to better understand the drivers of deaths in custody and assist policymakers in developing strategies to reduce their occurrence."

But if no agency actually tracks how many people are dying, do researchers have a chance?

While we as journalists of course take personal offense to being misinformed, I was struck by the fact that the person whose prison death numbers (for 2023) were farthest from the truth was a national researcher, not an activist or reporter.

Here's why this matters:🧵

1. If you asked the DOC how many people died in prison in any given year, the number you got was maybe (probably) wrong

2. If your friend then asked the same question, the DOC would maybe give them a completely different number

3. Neither of you would know who was right, or if you were both wrong🧵

For years, the public had no way to know just how many people died in Missouri’s prisons because (surprise!) the state DOC wasn’t counting. Instead of annual totals, the DOC responded to records requests with partial counts, cobbled together from multiple sources.

Here's what this means:🧵

There Was No Way to Know How Many People Died in Missouri Prisons — Until Now For years, the state’s Department of Corrections cobbled together death records from multiple sources. New data reveals annual totals for the first time.

There was no way to know how many people died in Missouri prisons — until now.

Emerging on Bsky to share this latest installment in @themarshallproject.org's death-in-custody coverage + a few thoughts from my reporting on MO's flawed records system 🧵👇🏾

www.themarshallproject.org/2025/11/18/s...

I Logged One of My Hottest Days in Prison During a Missouri Heat Wave Lawyers requested swift cooling measures in a prison with no A/C. One man shares the dangerous conditions inside while people await a judge’s ruling.

Algoa Correctional Center, is one of four Missouri prisons with no air conditioning in any of the housing units. A first person account of what it’s like there during a heat wave [ @ivyscott.bsky.social @themarshallproject.org ]
www.themarshallproject.org/2025/09/08/m...

🕊️ What does it mean to be a “last responder”?
In this deeply personal essay for The Marshall Project, Shamari Jackson shares how restoring the bodies of those lost to violence became a form of therapy and connection.
www.themarshallproject.org/2025/10/17/m...
@ivyscott.bsky.social

What Being a Mortician to Homicide Victims Taught Me About Grief St. Louis native Shamari Jackson began studying mortuary science after her boyfriend was fatally shot. Now she uses her work as a form of therapy.

Shamari Jackson, a St. Louis mortician, came to the job after gun violence took her boyfriend’s life. In her work, she’s compassionately cared for the bodies of friends and classmates, as well as strangers [ @ivyscott.bsky.social @themarshallproject.org ]
www.themarshallproject.org/2025/10/17/m...