At least 8,780 people have died in custody in California

How deaths in custody are reported in California

Since 1961, California law has required every law enforcement agency and every state or local correctional facility to report each death in its custody in writing to the Attorney General within 10 days, and those reports are public records.¹² The law now also requires an agency to update its report within 10 days when new information comes in, such as the manner and means of death.¹ The California Department of Justice's Criminal Justice Statistics Center keeps the reports and publishes them on its OpenJustice site as the Death in Custody and Arrest-Related Deaths dataset. It has one row for each death since 2005, giving the reporting agency, county, the person's race, gender and age, custody status, date of death, where the death happened, and the manner and means of death.³⁴ The published file does not include names.⁵ Records back to 1980 are kept in an archive file.²⁶

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) runs the state prisons. Medical care in them has been under a federal receiver since 2006, and the receiver's agency, California Correctional Health Care Services, reviews every death in a state prison and publishes a yearly analysis with counts by cause. It counted 409 deaths in 2024.⁷ CDCR announces in news releases the deaths it is investigating as homicides and the deaths of people under a death sentence, and it keeps a named list of every person under a death sentence who has died since 1978, with the date and cause.⁸⁹ I have not found a CDCR list that names everyone who dies in its prisons.

California's county jails are run by sheriffs, in 57 jail systems.¹⁰ Since January 2023, Penal Code section 10008 has also required the agency in charge of a jail or prison to post on its own website, within 10 days of a death, the agency, county, facility and place in the facility, the person's race, gender and age, the date, the custody status, and the manner and means of death. It does not require the person's name. Since 2025 the section has explicitly covered juveniles, and deaths in medical facilities while a person is in custody.¹¹¹²¹³ The Board of State and Community Corrections links to the death postings of 33 sheriffs' offices.¹⁴ Its In-Custody Death Review Division, created by Senate Bill 519, reviews the local investigation of each jail death since July 1, 2024, once that investigation is finished. It makes public recommendations, but it cannot make a sheriff follow them.¹⁵

People held by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in California are covered by ICE's own death reports, which it posts by name for each death in its custody.¹⁶ Since 2017, state law has also allowed the Attorney General to inspect immigration detention facilities in California and report on their conditions.¹⁷

What has changed

1. 1933On the night of November 26, a crowd of thousands broke into the Santa Clara County jail in San Jose, dragged out Thomas Thurmond and John Holmes, and hanged them in St. James Park across the street. Governor James Rolph publicly approved of the lynching.¹⁸ A historical marker in the park calls it California's last lynching.¹⁹
2. 1961California began requiring agencies to report every death in custody to the Attorney General.²
3. 1992-2006California resumed executions on April 21, 1992, and executed at least 13 people at San Quentin through January 17, 2006.⁹ From 1893 through 1967 the state had executed at least 501 people, at San Quentin and Folsom.²⁰
4. 2006In April, a federal court put medical care in California's prisons under a receiver. At the time, roughly one person a week was estimated to die from malpractice or neglect.⁷
5. 2011On May 23, in Brown v. Plata, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld an order to reduce crowding in California's prisons, citing the uncontested finding that a person in them "needlessly dies every six to seven days" because of failures in medical care.²¹
6. 2019On March 13, Governor Gavin Newsom ordered a moratorium on executions for the 737 people then on death row and closed the execution chamber at San Quentin.²²
7. 2020-2021California Correctional Health Care Services counted 141 COVID-19 deaths in state prisons in 2020 and 90 in 2021.⁷ At San Quentin, at least 28 people died of COVID-19 in the three months after 122 people were moved there from the California Institution for Men in Chino on May 30, 2020; the state Inspector General called the transfers "deeply flawed."²³
8. 2022On February 3, the California State Auditor reported that at least 185 people died in San Diego County's jails from 2006 through 2020 and that the Sheriff's Department had failed to prevent and respond to the deaths; it also found that some of the failures came from statewide jail standards too weak to keep people safe.²⁴ By the Department of Justice's count, at least 215 people died in California's county jails that year, the most since its current records begin.¹⁰⁵
9. 2023The law requiring jails and prisons to post each death on their websites took effect in January.¹²¹³ On July 1, the state's Division of Juvenile Justice closed its last facilities and youth custody passed to the counties.² Governor Newsom signed Senate Bill 519, creating a state office to review deaths in local jails.¹⁵
10. 2024By May 28, everyone held on San Quentin's death row had been moved to other prisons.²⁵ On July 1, Senate Bill 519 took effect, and deaths in local jails from then on became subject to review by the Board of State and Community Corrections.¹⁵
11. 2025-2026At least three men held at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center died between September 2025 and February 2026. In a July 2025 inspection, the Attorney General's office had found inadequate medical care and too few staff, after the number of people held there rose from seven in 2023 to 1,570 in 2025.¹⁷

How far the official numbers can be trusted

The statewide dataset is only as complete as agencies' own reports. The Department of Justice says it collects the reports but does not investigate them, and that the data are complete only to the extent that agencies met their duty to report.⁴ In 2023 it wrote that it had no monthly zero-reporting process, so it learns of a death only if an agency reports it, and that agencies were not then required to send follow-up information when a first report gave a detail as unknown or pending.² The number of recent deaths still listed as pending has grown: in the May 2026 file, the manner of death was pending for 177 of the 710 deaths in 2025 and 191 of the 731 in 2024, against three in 2014.⁵

The dataset also misses deaths the state carried out itself. CDCR lists 13 executions at San Quentin from 1992 to 2006, but the Department of Justice's files record an execution on only nine of those dates; they show none for the executions of January 2002, January 2005, December 2005 and January 2006.⁹⁶⁵ For state prisons as a whole, the Department of Justice's yearly counts and the receiver's are close but not the same: 462 and 452 deaths in 2018, 499 and 492 in 2020, 396 and 409 in 2024.⁵⁷

Public posting by sheriffs has been uneven. A Senate committee analysis cited an audit by community groups that found at least 174 deaths in custody made public in 2023 by sheriffs' offices or the news; 21 of them had not been reported to the Attorney General, and another 19 that were reported to the Attorney General had never been made public. Many postings left out the location of death, the person's race or their custody status.¹³ The author of the 2022 posting law also cited research finding that about half of deaths caused by law enforcement officers were misclassified in the state's death records.¹²