At least 644 people have died in custody in Connecticut

How deaths in custody are reported in Connecticut

Connecticut has no county government and no county jails. The Connecticut Department of Correction runs every prison and jail in the state, 15 facilities and a secure hospital ward at the University of Connecticut Health Center, and it holds people awaiting trial as well as people serving sentences.¹ On October 14, 2026, it held 10,845 people, 3,253 of them awaiting trial.²³ The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics counts Connecticut's prisons and jails as one integrated system.⁴

Department policy requires staff to report a death to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, to call the Connecticut State Police at once if the death was unexpected, and to telephone the next of kin immediately, at any hour.⁵ State law requires the Chief Medical Examiner to investigate any death that is not clearly natural of a person in the custody of the Commissioner of Correction, a police officer or a law enforcement agency, and it bars the medical examiner from denying anyone the records of a person who died in state custody.⁶ Under the Police Accountability Act of 2020, the Inspector General, a prosecutor within the Division of Criminal Justice, must investigate every death in Department of Correction custody to decide whether it may have resulted from a crime, and every death in police custody to decide whether officers used force and whether it was justified.⁷⁸

The department does not publish a list or a count of the people who die in its custody. It issues press releases about some deaths, giving the facility and the time of death but not the person's name.⁹¹⁰ By the end of August 2026 it had posted four such releases for the year, in which at least 14 people had died in its custody.⁹¹¹ The Inspector General's annual reports for 2022, 2023 and 2024 give the number of deaths the department reported to that office and name the people whose deaths were suicides, overdoses or homicides; people who died of natural causes are counted but not named, and people who died on parole are counted but not investigated.⁸¹²¹³ The office also publishes reports on some individual deaths.¹⁴ The Correction Ombuds, moved out of the department into the independent Office of Governmental Accountability by a 2022 law, gave yearly totals in its first report on conditions of confinement, in January 2026.¹⁵¹⁶

For the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act, the Criminal Justice Policy and Planning Division of the Office of Policy and Management collects the department's records of deaths in prison and on parole, and the medical examiner's records of deaths in police custody, each quarter. It also asks the Mashantucket Pequot and Mohegan tribes, the Judicial Branch Marshal Service, and the Judicial Branch's Court Support Services Division, which runs the state's juvenile detention centers in Bridgeport and Hartford; in 2023 it reported that none of them had had a reportable death since it took over the collection in 2022.¹ I have found no state publication of these quarterly data.

What has changed

1. 1786Hannah Ocuish, 12, was hanged in New London. She may have been the youngest person ever executed in the United States. Before 1976, Connecticut executed at least 126 people.¹⁷
2. 2005On May 13, Connecticut executed Michael Ross by lethal injection at Osborn Correctional Institution in Somers, New England's first execution since 1960.¹⁸ He had given up his appeals. His former public defenders and a death-row expert argued that years of harsh confinement had driven that choice, and two psychiatrists testified that he was not competent to make it, but a judge found him competent.¹⁸¹⁹
3. 2012-2015In 2012 the legislature abolished the death penalty for future crimes, leaving 11 men on death row. In 2015, in State v. Santiago, the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled 4-3 that the death penalty violated the state constitution, which ended those sentences.¹⁷
4. 2018J'Allen Jones, 31, died on March 25 at Garner Correctional Institution in Newtown after a struggle with officers that involved pepper spray and restraint. The medical examiner ruled his death a homicide. In January 2019 the state's attorney for Danbury closed the criminal investigation, finding the death "not criminal in nature."²⁰²¹
5. 2020The Police Accountability Act required the Chief Medical Examiner to investigate deaths in police and correction custody that are not clearly natural, and gave the new Office of the Inspector General the duty to investigate every death in custody.⁶⁷ The first Inspector General was sworn in on October 8, 2021; from then through December 2022, the department reported 73 deaths to the office, 30 of them of people on parole.⁸
6. 2020-2023By the time the department stopped updating its COVID-19 figures in June 2023, it counted 30 deaths of incarcerated people who had tested positive for the virus.²²
7. 2024The Inspector General reported that at least nine people died by suicide in Department of Correction custody during the year, and met with department officials about suicide prevention.¹³ In September, the Office of the Correction Ombuds was re-established, with a single staff member.¹⁶
8. 2025In April, Disability Rights Connecticut released a 31-month investigation of the death of a man who died at Bridgeport Correctional Center on June 25, 2022, less than 24 hours after he arrived. It found that he did not get adequate medical care, that officers recorded safety checks that never took place, and that about 19 minutes passed before a nurse began CPR.²³²⁴
9. 2026In January, the Correction Ombuds reported that the department had recorded 22 deaths in custody in 2025, and 387 lockdowns.¹⁶ In June, after a long court fight in which the state opposed release, a Hartford Superior Court judge ordered the video of J'Allen Jones's death unsealed.²¹ By August 28, at least 14 people had died in Department of Correction custody during the year.¹¹

How far the official numbers can be trusted

Connecticut's official sources do not agree on how many people died in custody, or how. For 2024, the Correction Ombuds, citing the department, reported 33 deaths in custody, five of them suicides.¹⁶ The Inspector General counted 50 deaths reported by the department that year, 29 of them of people in prisons or halfway houses, and named nine people who died by suicide.¹³ The department's own list of 2024 deaths, released to the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project, has 32 deaths and records six of them as suicides. One man the Inspector General lists as having died by suicide at Corrigan Correctional Center in September 2024 does not appear on the department's list at all.²⁵¹³

Overdose counts differ as well. Medical examiner data reported by the CT Mirror show three fatal accidental overdoses in department custody in 2023 and nine in 2024; the Inspector General lists four suspected overdoses for each year, and names only three people for 2024.²⁶¹²¹³ One 2023 death that the Inspector General describes as an overdose, ruled accidental by the medical examiner, appears on the department's list as a natural death, at a different facility and a week later.¹²²⁵

For earlier years the sources match: the yearly totals Connecticut gave the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics for 2015 through 2019, from 14 to 28 deaths a year, are the same as the totals on the department's list, which does not name the people who died in those years.⁴²⁵ The state itself has written that the department's aging records system cannot always capture a person's race and ethnicity, and that updates to cases once investigations close are not consistent.¹

Deaths ruled natural are the least visible. The Inspector General closes them on the strength of an autopsy or a death certificate and does not name the people who died.⁸ A ruling does not settle what happened: the man who died at Bridgeport in 2022 was found by the medical examiner to have died of complications of opioid use, and only a separate investigation by Disability Rights Connecticut, more than two years later, found the falsified safety checks and the delayed CPR.²³