What 911 Calls Reveal About Jail Operations
by Michael Dean Thompson
The Marshall Project analyzed 911 calls in several cities in order to get a better glimpse into how people are being treated within the jails and which problems the jail employees are struggling to address. The same technique was used by Florida’s Citrus County to uncover underreported overdose challenges in the CoreCivic-run county jail. [See: PLN, Sep. 2026, p.35.]
According to Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas-Austin and a former Texas prison monitor, consistent emergency calls requesting help suggest that there are much larger, systemic problems that are likely not being addressed.
At the Cuyahoga County Jail in Cleveland, Ohio, administrators have shifted away from in-house medical care to the county-owned provider, MetroHealth. Although medical personnel remain available within the jail during business hours, there is no medical support during nights, weekends, or holidays. Whether or not emergency medical needs at those times require outside help may, therefore, be determined by jail staff who are keenly aware of the strain a medical transport will put on the facility. The jail is already experiencing limited staffing and sending a guard on a transport with the detainee to the hospital may mean multiple units within the jail may be locked down for hours.
Yet, according to Adam Chaloupka, general counsel for the Ohio Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, guards are not permitted or trained to call 911. Instead, they are trained to push a button and wait for help. Records accordingly “suggest that jail workers do not always know how to respond to an emergency or even accurately identify their location to dispatchers,” The Marshall Project reports.
The second most common source of an emergency request in St. Louis originates with assaults, which only just fell behind the broad category of “sick person.” Nine assaults between September and December 2025 accounted for roughly one out of every six calls. Interviews by The Marshall Project - St. Louis indicate that both assaults against incarcerated persons and jail employees are common. Erin Moore, a state public defender in St. Louis, told The Marshall Project, “It’s pretty constant that people are getting jumped, jumping other people, getting stabbed.” The St. Louis city jail’s lack of medical staff and guards also meant that staff would call police for help just to move a particularly volatile client of Moore’s.
Mississippi’s Raymond Detention Center, which holds just 500 people and employs about 70 guards, generated an average of two calls per day with 740 calls over a two-year period. Almost half those calls were tagged as “jail walkthroughs,” a code intended to obfuscate its actual cause. Hinds County Sheriff Tyree Jones accordingly refused to explain the term to The Marshall Project, citing security concerns. Kathryn Bryan oversaw the jail until 2022 and worries about the understaffed and “sickeningly undertrained” conditions that lead to the calls. “When there’s a jail that’s fully staffed or well-trained, usually they handle business in-house,” Bryan said.
The jail, which is also experiencing maintenance issues, has been under receivership since the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi issued the sanction in 2022, a ruling largely affirmed two years later by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Aug. 2025, p.24.] . The county is building a new jail in Jackson they expect to be completed in 2028, though they will begin moving people this fall. Bryan points out, “It’s only going to get worse in a pretty facility” if they do not address the challenges.
Source: The Marshall Project
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