At least 1,987 people have died in custody in Arizona

How deaths in custody are reported in Arizona

The Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry (ADCRR) posts a death notice on its website for each person who dies in a state prison, giving the person's name, age, department number, date of death and the prison or hospital where they died. The notices on its current site go back to May 2022.¹² Each notice says that every death is investigated in consultation with the county medical examiner.² The department's Monthly Data Report adds a yearly table of deaths by fiscal year (July to June) and manner of death: natural, suicide, accident, homicide, execution, undetermined, or pending the medical examiner's findings. The department warns that the figures can change once the medical examiner's reports arrive. In fiscal 2025-26 the table counted 132 deaths.³⁴

Arizona law requires anyone who learns of the death of a person in a custodial agency to tell the nearest peace officer, who must notify the county medical examiner and investigate.⁵ County jails are run by the sheriffs. The Maricopa County Sheriff's Office, which runs five jails and an intake facility in the Phoenix area, lists each death in its jails by name, age, booking number, jail and date, from 2023 onward.⁶⁷ I have not found a similar list from any other Arizona sheriff.

The Arizona Criminal Justice Commission (ACJC) collects reports of deaths in jails, lockups, prisons and during arrests for the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act. About 200 agencies are asked to report every quarter, including quarters with no deaths, and ADCRR sends the commission its prison deaths in quarterly batches.⁸ ACJC publishes a dashboard with yearly totals and counts by agency and ZIP code from 2020 on, but no names: it cites federal law that protects information identifying any person.⁹¹⁰ By that dashboard, at least 194 people died in custody in Arizona in 2025, 161 of them in state prisons.¹⁰

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) also holds people in Arizona, including at the Eloy Detention Center. ICE publishes a report on each death in its custody.¹¹ Detention Watch Network and the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project have counted at least 16 deaths at the Eloy Detention Center, including five suicides, and called it the deadliest immigration detention center in the country.¹²

What has changed

1. 1873On August 8, a crowd in Tucson took four men, John Willis, Leonard Cordova, Clemente Lopez and Jesus Saguaripa, from the county jail and hanged them in front of the jail door. A coroner's jury praised those who did it.¹³
2. 1884On February 22, a mob made up mostly of miners pushed aside the Cochise County sheriff and his deputies in Tombstone, took John Heath from the jail and hanged him from a telegraph pole.¹³
3. 1930-1934Eva Dugan was hanged at the state prison in Florence on February 21, 1930, and the rope tore her head from her body.¹⁴¹⁵ Arizona replaced hanging with the gas chamber, first used on July 6, 1934.¹⁶¹⁴
4. 2002-2004At least three young people took their own lives at the Adobe Mountain School, a state juvenile prison in Phoenix, between April 2002 and March 2003. In January 2004 the U.S. Justice Department found unconstitutional conditions at Adobe Mountain and two other state juvenile facilities, including poor suicide prevention.¹⁷
5. 2014Joseph Wood died nearly two hours after his execution began on July 23, with his lawyers saying he was gasping and snorting for more than an hour. Governor Jan Brewer ordered a review of the state's execution process.¹⁸¹⁴ Arizona carried out no other execution until May 2022.¹⁵¹⁹
6. 2020Under the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act, Arizona jails and prisons began reporting their deaths to ACJC instead of to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.¹⁰
7. 2022On June 30, a federal judge ruled in Jensen v. Shinn, the prison health care class action first filed in 2012 as Parsons v. Ryan, that health care in Arizona's state prisons was "plainly grossly inadequate" and violated the Constitution; the evidence showed preventable deaths.²⁰²¹ Arizona executed at least three people that year, starting with Clarence Dixon on May 11, when staff spent 25 minutes trying and failing to set an IV in his arms.¹⁹¹⁴
8. 2023Governor Katie Hobbs created an Independent Prison Oversight Commission in January and paused executions pending an outside review.²²²³ In April the federal court issued an injunction ordering ADCRR to fix its health care and appointed monitors to track compliance.²⁰
9. 2024An Arizona Republic investigation found that the Maricopa County jail system had one of the highest death rates in the country: at least 43 people died in its jails in 2022 and 43 more in 2023, up from 11 in 2019.⁶²⁴ In November, Hobbs fired the retired judge she had hired to review executions.²³
10. 2025The court's monitors wrote in January about Arizona's prisons: "And patients are dying. Unnecessarily."²⁵ On March 19, Arizona carried out its first execution since 2022, of Aaron Gunches.²⁶
11. 2026On February 19, the federal judge ordered a receiver to take over health care in the state-run prisons, finding that the state's approach had failed. The receiver was appointed in July.²⁷²¹²⁰

How far the official numbers can be trusted

The statewide count misses many jail deaths. ACJC's dashboard, compiled as of January 2026, shows 33 deaths in custody outside the state prisons in all of Arizona in 2025.¹⁰ The Maricopa County Sheriff's Office's own list names 39 people who died in its jails that year alone, and a criminologist who checked medical examiner records counted 41.⁷²⁴ The dashboard attributes only nine deaths that year to the sheriff's office.¹⁰

The sheriff's own list is not complete either. For 2024 the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office listed 27 deaths, but a review of medical examiner records found seven more deaths attributable to the jails, for a total of at least 34.²⁴ In Pima County, the sheriff disputed reports that deaths in the Tucson jail were unusually high by dividing deaths by bookings rather than by the jail's daily population, the method the federal government uses. Measured the federal way, the jail's death rate in 2021 was about 619 per 100,000, more than three times the national rate for 2019.²⁸

For state prisons, the yearly totals are more consistent. The numbers ADCRR reported to ACJC for 2021 and 2022, 146 and 154, match the department's own death records obtained by the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project.¹⁰²⁹ What the counts do not show is how many of these deaths could have been prevented. The federal court found in 2022 that the evidence showed preventable deaths caused by the state's failure to provide health care, and in 2026 it took health care out of ADCRR's hands.²⁰²⁷