Death Behind Bars

JAILS ARE PLACES OF DANGER AND DESPAIR, AND EVEN prisoners with short $ sentences do not always get out alive. Yet that hardly explains a strange string of deaths in Mississippi. During the past six years, 47 men, 24 of them black, have left local jails in body bags. In all but one case, authorities said the men had hanged themselves in their cells. (One 28-year-old man's death was said to have been caused by a heart attack.) After listening to testimony last week from relatives of some of these prisoners, Bobby Doctor, the interim chairman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, called for a federal inquiry into the deaths. No one has yet presented proof that any of the inmates were killed by authorities, but there were plenty of suspicious cases. Last year Andre Jones, 18, was brought into the Simpson County Jail in Mendenhall. That night Jones hanged himself with his own shoelace, police said. Jones' parents, however, claimed he was murdered. They said he was scheduled to leave for college the next day, something he had looked forward to for a long time.