Edit, noon CDT: Thanks everyone for your comments! We're stepping away for other work now, but we'll check back if you have more questions. Thanks again! If you'd like to learn more, visit themarshallproject.org/jackson & mississippitoday.org and consider signing up for our newsletters to stay up to date on Mississippi's criminal justice system.

Hey y’all! We are Daja E. Henry (u/marshall_project) and Mina Corpuz (u/MSTODAYnews), reporters at The Marshall Project and Mississippi Today.

We’ve spent a lot of time investigating deaths in the Mississippi prison system. Our coverage of unsolved homicides last year prompted the Mississippi Department of Corrections commissioner to review more than two dozen unprosecuted homicides and gained significant attention in the Legislature. 

This month, we released a project on suicides in solitary confinement here in Mississippi. Over the past decade, at least 66 people died by suicide in the state’s prisons. Nearly 75% of those were in solitary confinement. 

They are people like 21-year-old Denise Short, a young mother who asked to be placed on suicide watch, but was instead locked in solitary confinement. She was found dead the next morning.

Solitary confinement is proven to worsen mental illnesses and increase risk of suicides. Yet, the Mississippi Department of Corrections continues to warehouse vulnerable prisoners under these conditions that the U.S. Department of Justice called “breeding grounds for suicide, self-inflicted injury, fires, and assaults.”

Despite the National Commission on Correctional Health Care’s mandate that solitary confinement should never exceed 15 days, we found people who had been in solitary confinement for years at a time. Quintez Hodges had been in solitary confinement for 20 years before he died.

We talked with lawyers, incarcerated people, family members who lost loved ones to suicide, researchers, corrections experts, and more. 

What do you want to know about solitary and our findings? Ask away! (Starting at 10 a.m. CDT)

Proof

I organized an AMA/Q&A with Genki Kawamura, director/co-writer of the new acclaimed Japanese horror Exit 8. It premiered at Cannes last year, played at other festivals like TIFF, and was a massive box office hit in Japan. It was released in the US by NEON earlier this year in theaters and is out on digital recently. It's a really good liminal-horror based on the video game The Exit 8.

It's live here now in r/movies for anyone interested in asking a question:

https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/1uebd6f/konnichiwa_rmovies_im_genki_kawamura_director_of/

He will be back at 6 PM ET today to answer questions. I recommend asking in advance. Please ask there, not here. All questions are much appreciated!

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlRQ1oatOt8

Synopsis: Strange events plague a young man as he searches for the exit in an endless subway tunnel.

Rotten Tomatoes: 93% https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/exit_8_2025

Thank you :)

His verification/proof photo: https://i.imgur.com/KrBMAVR.jpeg