At least 242 people have died in custody in Alaska

How deaths in custody are reported in Alaska

Alaska has a unified corrections system: the Department of Corrections runs both the state's prisons and its jails, and it holds people awaiting trial as well as people serving sentences.¹² It runs 13 facilities. Fifteen cities, among them Utqiagvik, Dillingham, Kotzebue and Sitka, run small jails of their own, and there are six juvenile correctional facilities.³ The Division of Juvenile Justice, in the Department of Family and Community Services, runs the secure youth facilities.⁴ The federal tables of deaths in Alaska's prisons count only the state-run prisons and jails and leave out the 15 city jails.⁵

State law requires that the State Medical Examiner be notified of every death in a state corrections facility, and the Alaska State Troopers investigate every death that is unexpected, unattended or not natural.⁶ Since 2019 the department has posted short press releases about deaths in its custody, giving the person's name and age, the date and time of death and the facility where the person was last held. The releases give no cause of death and cite federal medical privacy law.⁶⁷⁸ Each January it also posts a table of deaths by year since 2015, by manner of death and sex, without names. That table counts at least 133 people who died in its custody from 2015 through 2025, at least 35 of them by suicide.⁶

No state law requires any agency to report a death in custody to the state. For the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act, the Major Crimes lieutenant of the Alaska State Troopers emails the larger police departments and the Department of Corrections every quarter for their deaths, and the troopers report for the small departments whose deaths they investigate. The Department of Public Safety has written that it has no way to penalize an agency that does not report, and that Alaska has no website for the data.³

From 2016 to 2018 the department had its own internal investigations unit, the Professional Conduct Unit, which Commissioner Dean Williams created after a series of deaths. Commissioner Nancy Dahlstrom dissolved it in December 2018, citing cost savings.⁹ The department has said it has no plans to bring it back, and that an internal review team responds to every critical incident.¹⁰¹¹ The state ombudsman takes complaints from people in the department's custody; in 2015 Ombudsman Linda Lord-Jenkins said her office received hundreds of complaints against the department every year.¹² In 2025 Rep. Andrew Gray, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, said there was "not really any organized official oversight happening."¹¹

In June 2025 the department held 40 men for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at the Cook Inlet Pretrial Facility in Anchorage, flown in from outside Alaska under what state officials called a longstanding arrangement with the federal government. Local immigration lawyers and the ACLU called the conditions inhumane.¹³ On June 30 the department said it had handed the remaining 35 men back to ICE.¹⁴ ICE publishes its own report on each death in its custody.¹⁵

What has changed

1. 1869-1957Records before 1900 are poor, but at least 7 people are believed to have been hanged in Alaska from 1869 to 1900, when miners' courts handled most legal matters. From 1900 to 1957 the territory hanged at least 8 people: two of the men were white, three were Alaska Native, two were Black and one was an immigrant from Montenegro.¹⁶ Legal historian Averil Lerman found that after 1903 the territory executed only people who were not white, or whom the white majority saw as not white.¹⁷
2. 1948-1950The territory hanged Austin Nelson on March 1, 1948, and Eugene LaMoore on April 14, 1950, at the federal jail in Juneau. Both were Black. Lerman found extreme prosecutorial misconduct in both trials and no reliable forensic evidence. The prosecution's eyewitness against Nelson had been held in the city jail for a month to make her testify, and Nelson's lawyers never filed an appeal. LaMoore, who had testified as an alibi witness for Nelson, was then held in solitary confinement for months and questioned without a lawyer; at his own trial he testified that the confession he had signed was false, made to try to save Nelson's life.¹⁷
3. 1957The Territorial Legislature abolished the death penalty, two years before statehood. Legislator Vic Fischer later wrote that Warren Taylor, who asked him to co-sponsor the bill, told the legislature that only two of the eight men hanged had been white, and described the shoddy evidence and procedures that had sent them to their deaths.¹⁷¹⁶
4. 2014Davon Mosley, 20, who had bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, died in April in a segregation cell at the Anchorage jail. A later state review found he had received "very little in the way of mental health care": he was naked for days, guards pepper-sprayed him, a camera recorded guards throwing food at him, and he washed with water from his toilet. The paperwork for his release had been lost, and he was still held when he died.¹⁸¹⁹ The mother of his three children said the state settled the family's lawsuit for $625,000.²⁰ Amanda Kernak, 24, died on April 10 on the floor of her cell, after days in which her cellmate said she had been violently ill.¹⁹ After five deaths from April to June, Joe Schmidt, head of the Department of Corrections, told legislators, "We didn't find anything anomalous."¹⁹
5. 2015Larry Kobuk, 33, died in January at the Anchorage jail, minutes after four guards held him face down to cut off his sweatshirts while he yelled that he could not breathe; he had told a nurse at booking that he had a heart condition. The department's own investigation found no excessive force.¹⁸ In August, Joseph Murphy, 49, an Army National Guard veteran, died of a heart attack in a cell at Lemon Creek Correctional Center in Juneau after he yelled about chest pain and banged on his door; one staff member reported hearing another tell him, "you could die right now and I don't care."¹⁸ In November a review ordered by Governor Bill Walker found that dysfunction in the department had contributed to at least six deaths, and that the force used on Kobuk was not warranted. Commissioner Ron Taylor resigned.¹⁸⁹
6. 2016Kellsie Green, 24, died in January after six days in the Anchorage jail, weighing 80 pounds; her death certificate listed malnutrition, dehydration and kidney failure. Her father's lawsuit said staff did not treat her drug withdrawal and did not answer other prisoners' repeated calls for help. The state paid him $400,000 in 2019.¹
7. 2018Commissioner Nancy Dahlstrom dissolved the Professional Conduct Unit; three of its staff were let go and six were moved to other jobs.⁹
8. 2022At least 18 people died in Department of Corrections custody, a record, and at least 7 of them died by suicide, all of them people awaiting trial; in June four people took their lives in four prisons.²¹ Kitty Douglas, 20, from White Mountain, died on June 11 in the acute mental health unit at Hiland Mountain Correctional Center; guards made seven wellness checks on her cell and did not notice for three hours that she had died.²¹²² In October, at Goose Creek Correctional Center, a guard checked William Ben Hensley III and then did not return for 43 minutes, during which he took his life.²¹ Governor Mike Dunleavy said that none of the people who had died that year had "died as a result of others," and Acting Commissioner Jen Winkelman called the deaths not "unusual." The ACLU of Alaska asked the governor for an independent review.²³
9. 2023Yad Duu Quay Mark Cook Jr., 27, a Lingít dancer, died after he hanged himself at Lemon Creek Correctional Center in April. His family said he had spent about three weeks in solitary confinement in constant pain from a back injury, and his father said a trooper told him it was 30 minutes before staff found him.²⁴ In August the ACLU of Alaska sued over the death of James Rider, 31, who had told staff at Mat-Su Pretrial in Palmer that he was suicidal, was taken off suicide precautions and was placed alone in a cell, where he hanged himself in September 2022. Cook's family sued as well.²¹²⁵
10. 2024On March 26, four Republican members of the House Community and Regional Affairs Committee canceled a hearing at which the ACLU of Alaska and former commissioner Dean Williams were to present on deaths in custody, citing pending litigation.¹⁰
11. 2025William Farmer, 36, died on January 6, nearly three weeks after a cellmate beat him at the Anchorage Correctional Complex. Both men had schizophrenia; they had been put in a crowded intake cell, outside the jail's mental health unit, less than a day before.²⁶²⁷ In May the ACLU of Alaska and the ACLU National Prison Project filed a federal class action, Vail v. Dunleavy, over medical, mental health and dental care in every state prison and jail.²⁸ Jeffrey Foreman, 53, died on July 11 at the Anchorage Correctional Complex after officers forced him face down on the concrete floor during what his cellmate called an obvious mental health episode, and an officer knelt on him as he said he could not breathe. His mother had posted his bail the afternoon before.⁸²⁹ At least 18 people died in the department's custody during the year, tying the record.⁶
12. 2026In March the state's Office of Special Prosecutions found that Foreman died of asphyxia from the force officers used to restrain him, and declined to charge them.²⁹ On March 31 a judge entered a $500,000 judgment for Rider's family, which the department offered without admitting fault.³⁰ By September 21, the department had announced the deaths of at least 8 people in its custody during the year.⁷

How far the official numbers can be trusted

The department's count depends on whom it counts. William Farmer is not in its count for 2025; the department says that is because he was released on bail after he was taken to the hospital.³¹¹¹ In a 2024 report to legislators, the ACLU of Alaska said that three people who died in 2023 had been released from custody while they were in the hospital and unconscious, just before they died.¹⁰

The department's first word on a death is not a finding. When Joshua Zimmerman, 33, died at the Anchorage Correctional Complex on January 12, 2024, the department announced that no foul play was suspected.³² Two months later the Alaska Bureau of Investigation said his death might be suspicious and was investigating it; an ACLU investigator said she was the one who told his father that he had been killed, after the family had been told he died of natural causes or an overdose.¹⁰ The department's release on Jeffrey Foreman also said no foul play was suspected. The medical examiner found that he died of asphyxia, with ribs broken by compression of his chest during the restraint or by CPR, and the state's prosecutors wrote that the officers' force resulted in his death.⁸²⁹

The official counts also disagree with each other. The department's table counts 115 deaths from 2015 through 2024, among them a man who died in 2024 in a prison in Indiana where Alaska had sent him; the data its officials presented to legislators in 2025 counted 114.⁶³³² For 2019 the department counts 4 deaths and the federal tables 3, and for 2005 the department's records released to the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project list 6 people while the federal tables count 4.⁶⁵³⁴ For 2020 the department's table counts 14 deaths, but it issued press releases for only 9 of them.⁶⁷ The federal tables count at least 179 people who died in Alaska's state-run prisons and jails from 2001 through 2019, at least 36 of them by suicide; the 15 city jails are not included.⁵

How people died is mostly kept from the public. The department and the Department of Law say federal medical privacy law bars them from giving details of any death.²³ The Anchorage Daily News learned the circumstances of the deaths in 2022 only from trooper investigation reports and medical examiner records, and the Department of Public Safety withheld six reports on cases not yet closed.²¹ When the paper asked for the files on the more than 130 people who died in the department's custody from 2000 to 2012, it was told the request would cost more than $4,000 and take over 100 hours, because the files were scattered among medical records, lawyers' files and incident reports in institutions and warehouses around the state.¹⁹