Mississippi Prisons | DOC | Prison Inmate Search

Clicking on any of the Mississippi facilities below will direct you to an information page with Inmate Search, Visitation, Mail, Phone, Email, Most Wanted and FAQ for families and friends.

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Mississippi Department of Corrections - Prisons & Inmate Search

Mississippi State Prisons and Juvenile Facilities

For more than a century, Mississippi prisons have meant one place above all: Parchman. The Mississippi State Penitentiary opened in 1901 as a working cotton farm on about 18,000 acres of Delta land in Sunflower County. It is still the state’s oldest prison and the home of its death row. Today the system is run by the Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC), which on September 1, 2026, had 21,982 people in its custody, including 2,056 women. Mississippi has long had one of the highest incarceration rates in the country.

How the prison system is organized

Fewer than half of MDOC’s prisoners live in a state-run prison. The rest are spread among private prisons, county-owned regional facilities and approved county jails, so it’s worth confirming exactly where someone is held:

State prisons: Mississippi State Penitentiary (Parchman), Central Mississippi Correctional Facility (Pearl), which includes the Mississippi Correctional Institute for Women, South Mississippi Correctional Institution (Leakesville), Walnut Grove Correctional Facility, Delta Correctional Facility (Greenwood) and Marshall County Correctional Facility (Holly Springs)
Private prisons: East Mississippi Correctional Facility (Meridian) and Wilkinson County Correctional Facility (Woodville)
Regional correctional facilities: about 15 county-run facilities, such as those in Washington County (Greenville) and Yazoo County, that hold state prisoners under contract
Community work centers, restitution centers and technical violation centers for people near release or returned for parole and probation violations

Central Mississippi Correctional Facility is the largest prison, holding more than 3,800 people. It is also the only prison that houses young people under 18 who were convicted as adults, in a separate Youthful Offender Unit.

Where new prisoners go first

Most people sentenced to MDOC begin at Central Mississippi Correctional Facility in Pearl, near Jackson, for orientation and classification. Staff review the person’s record, health and needs, set a custody level and assign a facility. Some people may wait in a county jail first until a bed opens. MDOC does not post visitation forms online; the person in prison mails the application to the people they want on their visiting list.

Finding someone in Mississippi’s prisons

The Inmate Search box is on the MDOC home page. You can search by name or by MDOC number, and the results show the person’s current location. Because so many state prisoners are housed in regional facilities and county jails, the location may not be a state prison.

Parchman under federal scrutiny

Parchman drew national attention in January 2020, when a wave of gang violence across several prisons left multiple people dead and exposed broken locks, flooding and severe understaffing. The U.S. Department of Justice opened an investigation, and in 2022 it found that conditions at Parchman violated the Constitution, citing violence, inadequate mental health care and heavy use of solitary confinement.

Death row and executions

Mississippi has the death penalty. MDOC reports 35 people on death row: 34 men, held at Parchman, and one woman. All executions take place at Parchman. The state has carried out 25 executions since 1976 and about 351 before that. After a long pause, executions resumed in 2021, and the most recent, Charles Crawford, was put to death on October 15, 2025. Lethal injection is the main method, but a 2022 law lets corrections officials choose electrocution, a firing squad or nitrogen gas instead. Mississippi was the first state to use a portable electric chair, carried from county to county starting in 1940. Curtis Flowers, tried six times for the same crime, was freed in 2020 after 23 years on death row.

Mississippi juvenile facilities

Young people adjudicated delinquent in a Mississippi youth court for a felony can be committed to the Mississippi Department of Human Services, Division of Youth Services (DYS). DYS runs one secure facility, the Oakley Youth Development Center in Raymond, in rural Hinds County. It serves boys and girls ages 12 to 17, and its own accredited school, the Williams School, teaches grades 5 through 12. Oakley has operated under a federal settlement agreement, with outside monitors reporting on its compliance. Before a case is decided, youth are held in county-run juvenile detention centers, and DYS also provides probation and aftercare in all 82 counties. Juvenile records are confidential, so families should contact DYS or the youth court directly.

To search for an inmate or juvenile, or to learn how to visit, call, write or send money to someone in the Mississippi Department of Corrections or Division of Youth Services, choose a facility from the list below.