About this project

This project hopes to build a comprehensive account of everyone who has died in custody in the United States: in jails, prisons, immigration detention and police lockups. It draws on local news and public records, so each death is counted and each person is remembered. I am adding to it state by state, toward a national picture. Once a state is covered, its local news is checked every day, so new deaths are added as they are reported.

Who is included

Anyone who died while held in a jail, prison, police lockup, immigration detention center, juvenile facility or similar place, including people executed by the state. Deaths during an arrest, before a person reaches a facility, are not included here, although many of them also involve unwarranted force by police and other agents of the state.¹

There is no starting year. Today’s deaths in custody belong to a long history of carceral violence by the state, so historical deaths are included too, among them people seized from jails and killed by lynch mobs while in the state’s custody.

How records are found

Local news often reports deaths that never appear in official counts.² For each state I search local news coverage county by county and year by year, and record each death with the details each report gave. Reports about the same person are combined into one record that keeps every source, so every detail can be traced to where it was published.

This site continues the first version of this project, and includes every death recorded there, each with the news report it came from.

Where they exist, other sources fill in what the news misses: official records, such as the lists and yearly counts of deaths that some state corrections departments and federal agencies publish, and records kept by other organizations. Every record credits the sources it draws on, from 2,278 news outlets. Every source is listed on the Methodology page, and the organizations whose work this builds on are on the Resources page.

What these records show

At least 94,081 people have died in custody in the records gathered here, from 53 states and territories. 36,016 of them are named here; the rest appear only in states’ official counts, without names.³ They go back as far as 1639 and are current as of October 16, 2026. Coverage varies by state, and this is an undercount: many deaths are never made public, and older records are hard to find.

These deaths have cost taxpayers at least $379 million: the amount governments have agreed or been ordered to pay the families and estates of at least 116 people, in settlements and court awards reported in the news, and private contractors at least $26 million more. Most deaths never lead to a lawsuit, and many settlements are kept confidential, so the true figure is higher.

Why an independent count is needed

Federal law already calls for this count. The Death in Custody Reporting Act of 2013⁴ requires states that receive certain federal justice grants to report deaths in jails and prisons, and during arrests, to the U.S. Department of Justice every quarter. In practice it has never worked as intended. A 2022 U.S. Senate investigation found the Justice Department missed at least 990 of these deaths in fiscal year 2021 alone, that 70 percent of the records it did collect were incomplete, and that it had failed to carry out the law despite warnings from its own inspector general.⁵ Deaths in custody have gone uncounted for decades.⁶

Limits

This too is an undercount. Some deaths are never made public, some articles are behind paywalls or no longer online, and before about 2005 few local stories are online at all. Causes of death are what officials, families or lawsuits said at the time, not findings of mine. Records may change as reporting is reviewed.

Contact

If you have questions, know of a death that isn’t here, or see something that needs correcting, especially if you knew the person, please email me at orion.j.taylor@gmail.com.