Research
Death rates in prisons and jails, state by state, from the federal government’s own counts: who dies in custody, where, and how that has changed. The memorial pages count people; this page compares places, so each rate here rests on an official count and the number of people held.
The death rate in state prisons rose from 242 to 330 per 100,000 people held between 2001 and 2019.
In local jails it rose from 151 to 167 per 100,000 between 2000 and 2019.
From 2015 to 2019, Louisiana’s prisons had the highest death rate, 779 per 100,000 a year; Minnesota’s the lowest, 111.
The federal counts end in 2019. Since 2020, at least 16,974 deaths in custody are recorded on this site, which no federal count published by state includes.
State prisons
Deaths per 100,000 people held in each state’s prisons, as the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics counted them. Executions are not included. Alaska, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Rhode Island and Vermont run prisons and jails as one system, so their rates include jail deaths.
Highest 10 2015–2019
All states, each year
Local jails
Deaths per 100,000 people held in each state’s local jails, from the same federal collection. The rates can rest on BJS’s own published figures or on jail populations from other counts, which differ in how they count people held.
Highest 10 2015–2019
All states, each year
By county
No official count of jail deaths is published by county. This map divides the jail deaths recorded here by each county jail’s average population, so it shows where reported deaths cluster.
Loading the county map…
What official counts leave out
The share of each state’s official prison deaths that this site has recorded, one by one. Where it is low, people died whose names never appeared in the news or in any public record found here.
Built on the records here, not an official count: it shows what this site has found, not how often deaths happen.
Highest 10 2015–2019
Explore
Any measure on this page, for any year or span of years. Choose a state on the map or in the list to see its trend.
Every state 2015–2019
All states, each year
Methods and sources
Rates are deaths per 100,000 people held. Where the Bureau of Justice Statistics publishes a rate, it is used as published; a rate over several years divides all the deaths in those years by all the people held in them, so a large state’s years weigh as they should. Rates resting on fewer than 10 deaths are hatched on the maps and starred in the lists: a single death can move them a great deal.
Deaths: U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, Mortality in State and Federal Prisons, 2001–2019 (NCJ 300953) and Mortality in Local Jails, 2000–2019 (NCJ 301368), statistical tables. Federal prisons are counted nationally, not by state. People held: BJS National Prisoner Statistics and Census of Jails; the Vera Institute of Justice’s Incarceration Trends.
Measures marked as recorded here rest on this site’s records, gathered from local news and public records. They are an undercount that varies by state with how much was reported, so they are never ranked against the official rates.