Over 100 People Die in Missouri Prisons Each Year. Othel Moore Was One of Them.

It’s been almost eight months since a prisoner in Missouri’s Jefferson City Correctional Center (JCCC) frantically phoned Oriel Moore to let her know that guards had killed Moore’s 38-year-old brother, Othel, during a routine drug sweep.

But this was no routine death, it was murder. Those charged were members of a special unit contracted from another Missouri prison two hours away in Potosi. They’d been brought in to conduct the military-style operation in the massive prison complex where nearly 2,000 men are incarcerated in the state capital.

The atrocities enacted against the Black man by five white correctional officers wielding pepper spray, taser gloves, a spit hood and restraining devices since banned by state officials, are the subject of an unsparing CNN report. The video segment, aired on June 30, featured a first-person eyewitness account of the assault on Othel Moore, who’d been incarcerated at JCCC for 17 years and had survived dozens of such raids. It brings to life in excruciating detail the extreme cruelty recounted in the family’s civil rights lawsuit.

Michelle Smith, co-founder of Missouri Justice Coalition, a prisoner rights advocacy nonprofit based in St. Louis, whose partner is also incarcerated in JCCC, told Truthout that while brutality is a standard feature of these raids, racism underlies the ongoing human tragedy of mass incarceration in Missouri.

“We have a very solidified good old boys network in the state,” Smith said.

On July 8, all five officers pleaded not guilty and were released on $50,000 bond, to which Smith observed, “Only certain people with murder cases can get bond.”

After viewing video surveillance evidence not yet released to the public, the Missouri Department of Corrections (MODOC) terminated the COs’ employment last March, along with five other employees involved in the incident. The warden was replaced in mid-June.

“Energy Doesn’t Die, It Just Transfers”

While some processes toward accountability have been initiated, Oriel Moore, Othel’s sister, younger by a year, told Truthout she’s still processing this trauma, and it’s not getting easier.

“I’ve never had to do this,” she said through tears. “I felt protected with my brother, even with him being in there. I felt like I’m not really concerned with nothing because when my brother comes home, I’ll be okay.”

Moore recounts how, when Othel was only six and she five, he figured out how to eat when they were hungry. Once he battered and fried some fish in oil on a hot plate because they were too scared to use the stove; and another time, he scooped up pennies dropped in the garage and alley to buy soda, candy and chips from a neighbor who accepted the heaps of coins without looking down her nose at the children.

The siblings had talked about Othel’s expected release in six years and their plan for him to join Oriel in Colorado, where she cares for their mother and her five children.

“He wanted to come here and open a coffee shop and a food truck too. So, I was supposed to be taking the steps now to prepare for when he’d come home,” she said. “I knew as long as he had a plan he could not fail.”

Since December 8, the gravity of Moore’s loss weighs heavy on her most mornings. When she opens her eyes, sorrow washes over her and the horror at what Othel suffered in his last hour on earth loops in her imagination.

“They don’t look at us as human beings,” she said. “They didn’t see my brother as a person…. I think about turning stuff up all day. Like all day, I have little moments where I could just smack all of this stuff off the wall and keep walking.”

On June 28, Moore family attorney Andrew M. Stroth filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the Missouri Department of Corrections, the Jefferson City Correctional Center and the officers responsible for killing Othel Moore. On July 30, Stroth filed an additional lawsuit under the Sunshine Law to obtain the video surveillance footage. Stroth, a civil rights attorney and the founder of the Truth, Hope, Justice Initiative, a nonprofit platform designed to mobilize and support mothers who’ve lost loved ones to police violence, who has watched countless disturbing videos of attacks, told Truthout he dreads having to view the recording of Moore’s killing. Nevertheless, he expects to receive it within 30 days.

Also steeling herself to face that reality, Moore says she’s leaning on God and the strength and spirits of her brother and deceased father, “because energy doesn’t die, it just transfers.”

“I’ve been trying to figure out what am I here for? What is my purpose? God, like can you show me?” Moore said. “But I realized I already had the assignment; I just didn’t know how far it was going to go.”

She said she’s willing to fight for Othel as she always has, but it’s different now.

“Fighting for him, without him — it’s so hard,” Moore said.

Fighting the Normalization of Death in Prison

Smith said she created the “Triple Digit Deaths” campaign to get people, media and policy makers talking about the dramatic rise in deaths in MODOC prisons from 2014 to 2023. The goal is to create the momentum to reverse the trend through meaningful legislative oversight. A report by the Missouri Independent on Smith’s efforts noted that “annual deaths have gone up more than one-third — and the death rate has almost doubled — in the past decade, even as prison populations have been cut by 25 percent.”

“Right now we’re averaging 13 a month. The day the officers in Othel’s case were charged, somebody died in JCCC that morning,” Smith said. Two more deaths have been reported in JCCC since then, one man was only 33 years old. No cause of death was listed.

“If we keep this up, we’ll be at 156 deaths at year end” across all MODOC prisons, Smith said. “These high rates are being normalized.”

Three attempts in the legislature to secure better oversight over the state’s prison administration have stalled out.

“It’s a dire situation. I’m really trying to figure out how can we get something done to get that accountability,” Smith said. “But I know for the elected officials to care, we need the community to show that it cares.”

With all the publicity the Moore case will garner when the video is made public, and with Oriel Moore’s blessing, Smith is hoping when it’s released the media will feel compelled to investigate unreported dimensions of the story.

She says stopping the “excess death” inside MODOC is the least the public can demand of its elected officials on behalf of this captive population.

“Our system and our government really pushed this thing about punishment so hard on people in this state, that they don’t understand that punishment doesn’t fix anything,” Smith said.

She says her organizing has taken her to places in Missouri where almost everybody in the town has been to prison.

“They’re poor and they’re struggling, and we’ve got to figure out as a society how to deal with that,” she said. “You can’t incarcerate it.”

Cutting through the policy jargon, Smith lays out just what’s taking place in the state’s prisons: “In Missouri, ‘mass incarceration’ is a nice name for taking people out of their community and putting them in a place where every day their odds at making it to the next are 50-50.”

Ending the Terror

Joy James, Ebenezer Fitch Professor of the Humanities at Williams College, is a political philosopher who works with organizers in abolitionist spaces.

“It’s a demonic fairy tale,” James told Truthout. “I mean, I could handle Grimm’s, but what happened to Othel Moore is real. People who are captured in these zones are really dealing with emotional, psychological as well as physical terror. That becomes the prime directive, the reason why we have to engage in abolition in more fierce ways.”

For James, the logic of abolition is simple. One, “since the state has legitimized the constant peril of people in their so-called care or custody,” and two, “since the state cannot function without murdering people,” then three, “we have to make it stop in this function.”

She believes the imperative is to respond with material struggle, meaning “to the extent that we can or cannot stop the building of prisons, we have to stop the killing and the violence within them.”

“We do that by taking them apart,” she said. “This, in my brain, is basic.”

Editor of Beyond Cop Cities: Dismantling State and Corporate-Funded Armies and Prisons, a forthcoming collection of essays from Pluto Press, James says prisons have become militarized — and just like in the military, the officers see themselves at war against the local population.

Whether it’s Palestine, Sudan or Jefferson City, Missouri, “it’s the same playbook,” she says. “The state is modeling not the quelling of violence, but the escalation of it.”