by Chuck Sharman

Missouri has made clear its disregard for its state prisoners as much through what it doesn’t do as what it does, according to new research that found dozens of unreported deaths, as well as a pending suit in state court challenging excessive heat in solitary confinement.

Nearly 3,000 of the state’s 24,454 prisoners are held in isolation on any given day, according to a 2023 report by the nonprofit Solitary Watch, which said that only Arkansas, Florida and Nevada held a higher percentage of their prisoners in “the hole.” In Missouri, 11.9% of the prison population is in solitary confinement, nearly twice the 6% nationwide average. That figure did not include those held in immigration or juvenile detention facilities. See: Calculating Torture – Analysis of Federal, State, and Local Data Showing More Than 122,000 People in Solitary Confinement in U.S. Prisons and Jails, Solitary Watch (May 2023).

The new lawsuit says that conditions for those held in solitary in Missouri are particularly dangerous when heat and humidity climb in summer months, especially in the four state lockups lacking air conditioning, including the century-old Algoa Correctional Center. There, even those not held in solitary report frightening heat. “If you want to know what Hell is like, it is summer at Algoa,” wrote prisoner Arnez Merriweather in his sworn statement that accompanied the suit.

Prisoner Kenneth Barrett said in his sworn statement that he was held in solitary at Algoa for over half the summer—46 days—in 2024. Confined in a tiny cell for 23 hours a day, he had only occasional access to ice, but no outlet in which to plug a fan. Three times a week he got a shower, but the water was warm or hot, offering no relief. “When medical emergencies like heat stroke occurred, we had to kick on the doors and scream for help,” Barrett wrote, adding that it often took “over an hour for anyone to come.” Even then, he said, guards would write them up for making too much noise.

The complaint was filed in May 2025 by six Algoa prisoners on behalf of a putative class of all those held in solitary confinement at the lockup. The prison has no air conditioning and no heat policy, the suit alleged, only “flimsy and ineffectual practices that bring no relief to people struggling to survive the inhumane conditions.” In Jefferson City, where Algoa is located, the summer was forecast to have “at least 70 days above 90 degrees Fahrenheit and 25 days above 100 degrees Fahrenheit,” the suit noted. At the prison itself, the heat index “regularly reaches and surpasses the hazardous threshold of 88 degrees Fahrenheit and [sometimes exceeds] 120 degrees Fahrenheit.”

Yet the prison relied on nothing more than “informal heat-mitigation practices,” the suit recalled, including “providing incarcerated people with limited access to ice in a cooler; access to warm showers; the option to purchase one small, personal fan; and unreliable, highly limited access to a few cooler rooms.” As the suit concluded: “These practices are grossly inadequate.” Plaintiffs are represented by attorneys from the Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center. See: Hamilton v. Foley, Mo. Cir. (Cole Cty.), Case No. 25AC-CC04135.

Fuzzy Death Numbers
Brought into Focus

Neglect of prisoners in the state Department of Corrections (DOC) extends even to reporting their deaths, another investigation by The Marshall Project (TMP) found. As reported in conjunction with the Missouri Independent in November 2025, TMP researchers uncovered prisoner deaths that were never made public, giving the lie to a statement from DOC Communications Director Karen Pojman that “[d]eaths are reported as they occur.”

Part of the problem can be traced to the apparent indifference of state lawmakers, who have never adopted any requirement for the DOC to keep track of deaths and report them. The state Department of Public Safety (DPS) collects death reports from the DOC, but its records are not required to be made publicly available. The federal government also requires the state to report prisoner deaths to the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, but separate TMP research found those reports riddled with errors and omissions. See: Why Doesn’t the U.S. Government Know How Many People Die in Custody? TMP (Aug. 2025).

The DOC changed its procedures in 2024 and began collating death reports from the DOC into a weekly report. But the change was not retroactive, leaving it up to TMP researchers to plug reporting gaps from prior years. The nonprofit used coroner reports in some cases. That also revealed critical discrepancies like cause of death; at least two cases ruled homicides by a coroner were attributed by the DOC to “unknown” causes. In reporting a prisoner suicide in 2023, the DOC neglected to report that the coroner found his mental health medication had been discontinued two months earlier.

“You need the [total] number, and not just the number,” National Medical Association Pres. Dr. Roger Mitchell Jr. told the Missouri Independent. “It’s the cause, it’s the circumstances, it’s the level of treatment. It’s full reviews of those deaths.”

Conveniently for DOC officials, the fuzzy reporting leaves family members in the dark when a loved one dies in prison, potentially jeopardizing any litigation they might want to file. “It’s just so unconscionable to me,” said state Rep. Gregg Bush (D-Jefferson City), that these families “hav[e] to piece these things together, contextualizing the death of somebody who’s in our custody, who we’re responsible for their wellbeing.”

The 844 deaths counted by TMP investigators exceeded the number reported by the DOC, but the details also revealed just how deadly state prisons are: The average age at death of all men in Missouri was 71, while in the DOC it was only 53. The cause splits sharply by age, with 68% of those under 50 dying from drug overdose, compared to just 5% of those 50 or over, who were overwhelmingly killed by cancer or heart disease. Given that the state’s prison population is rapidly graying, this presents important policy considerations for the DOC and its healthcare contractor, Centurion. That the state shows so little interest in collecting the data does not indicate that those policy considerations are taking place. See: There Was No Way to Know How Many People Died in Missouri Prisons — Until Now TMP (Nov 2025). 

Additional source: St. Louis NPR

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