At least 5,380 people have died in custody in Georgia

How deaths in custody are reported in Georgia

In state prisons, a state rule tells the warden to notify the Commissioner of Corrections, the county coroner or medical examiner, the State Crime Laboratory, the Director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) and the next of kin after a sudden or violent death. The state's own plan for federal reporting says this is the only death-in-custody reporting Georgia law sets out, and that it covers only facilities under the State Board of Corrections.⁵ The GBI performs autopsies in prison deaths but does not usually investigate them; the department's own investigators do.⁶

County jails and city lockups report to no state agency. Under the Georgia Death Investigation Act, the death of anyone held in a state, county or city penal institution must be reported to the county coroner or medical examiner,⁷ but no state law requires the state's roughly 800 law enforcement and corrections agencies to report custody deaths to any central office.⁵ The GBI looks into a jail death only when the local sheriff asks, and Georgia is one of 17 states with no system of oversight for local jails.⁸

For the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act, the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council (CJCC) gathers records itself. Since 2019 it has collected them monthly from the Department of Corrections, quarterly from the GBI, the Department of Juvenile Justice and four metro Atlanta medical examiners, and monthly from state death certificates, then sent them to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance. By the council's own account, staff turnover delayed reporting from almost every agency, and the Gwinnett County Medical Examiner had stopped reporting.⁵ Nationally, a 2022 U.S. Senate investigation found that the Justice Department missed at least 990 prison and arrest-related deaths in fiscal year 2021.⁹

Deaths in immigration detention are counted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, not the state. Congress requires ICE to publish a report on each death within 90 days.¹⁰ Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin recorded its 13th death since 2006 in June 2025, and of 15 deaths in ICE custody nationwide in 2025 through September, ICE posted public notice within two days for only six.¹¹ The Folkston ICE Processing Center, owned by The GEO Group, was set in 2025 to more than double its capacity.¹²

What has changed

1. 1868–1908Georgia leased people from its prisons to private companies, starting with a railroad on May 11, 1868. Sixteen people died in the first year. The legislature outlawed convict leasing in 1908.¹³
2. 1905On June 29, a mob broke into the Oconee County jail in Watkinsville, took eight men from custody and shot them to death; no one was ever charged. Historians count 458 lynching victims in Georgia from 1882 to 1930.¹⁴
3. 2001The Georgia Supreme Court ruled the electric chair unconstitutional, and the state turned to lethal injection. Georgia executed at least 950 people before 1976, and at least 77 since.¹⁵
4. 2019The Criminal Justice Coordinating Council began collecting death-in-custody records for federal reporting, without any state law requiring agencies to send them.⁵
5. January 2021After Reuters documented 272 deaths in Georgia's 13 largest jails from 2008 to 2019, state legislators held a hearing and proposed requiring the GBI to examine every jail death.⁸
6. May 2021The Department of Homeland Security ordered ICE to stop using the Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla.¹⁶ ICE reopened it in 2025.¹⁷
7. September 2021The U.S. Department of Justice expanded its investigation of Georgia's state prisons. The department refused to hand over most records until mid-2023, after a court enforced a subpoena.⁴
8. June 2022The Department of Corrections issued its last press release announcing a death in a state prison.²
9. 2024The department's monthly mortality reports stopped giving its assessment of how each person died, leaving that to death certificates that can take months.³ In August the commissioner told legislators that 981 people had died in state prisons since 2021, 98 of them of unknown causes.¹⁸
10. October 2024The Justice Department found that conditions in Georgia's prisons violate the Eighth Amendment, and that the state's mortality data undercount homicides.⁴
11. November 2024The Justice Department found unconstitutional conditions at the Fulton County Jail,¹⁹ where it had opened an investigation in July 2023. A proposed consent decree with an independent monitor followed in January 2025.²⁰
12. December 2024A legislative study committee on prison deaths declined to recommend that the GBI investigate them, and rejected a proposal for an independent oversight committee.⁶

How far the official numbers can be trusted

The Department of Corrections reported 142 homicides in its prisons from 2018 through 2023, after never more than nine a year from 2011 through 2018. The Justice Department found even these totals too low. The mortality data listed deaths the department's own incident reports called homicides as "unknown" until a death certificate arrived. For January to May 2024 it showed 6 homicides when incident reports showed at least 18, and seven deaths from 2022 were recorded as undetermined or natural until 2024.⁴

Independent counts run higher. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution counted 38 homicides in state prisons in 2023,³ three more than the department reported.⁴ The department told the newspaper it investigated 66 deaths as homicides in 2024 and 42 more in the first six months of 2025.²¹

The yearly totals do not match the department's own lists of names. For 2015 it reported 150 deaths as releases,²² while its mortality list for that year, obtained by the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project, names 143 people.²³ For county jails there is no state count to check; Reuters found 272 deaths in Georgia's 13 largest jails from 2008 to 2019 by gathering records itself.⁸