At least 2,838 people have died in custody in Illinois

How deaths in custody are reported in Illinois

The Illinois Department of Corrections runs 29 prisons and 17 other facilities, such as transition centers. The Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice runs the state's youth centers, and counties run their own juvenile detention centers.¹ Most county jails are run by the sheriff.² The department's Jail and Detention Standards Unit monitors every county jail, and state law requires a sheriff to report each death in the jail to that unit within 30 days, with the person's name and age and a brief description of the causes and circumstances.³

The Illinois Reporting of Deaths in Custody Act, part of the SAFE-T Act and in force since July 1, 2021, requires every police department, sheriff, jail and prison to investigate each death in its custody, and each death caused by an officer's use of force, and to report it to the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority (ICJIA) within 30 days. The report must give the person's race, age, gender, sexual orientation and gender identity, the causes and circumstances of the death, and whether emergency care was requested. The reports are public records, and ICJIA must post the individual reports every quarter and publish an annual report. ICJIA had to begin collecting the reports by January 1, 2022.⁴⁵ ICJIA receives prison deaths from the Department of Corrections, jail deaths from its Jail and Detention Standards Unit, youth center deaths from the Department of Juvenile Justice, and deaths during arrests and police use of force from the Illinois State Police.² It publishes the records as one spreadsheet, a row for each person, with the agency, dates, age, sex, race, manner of death and a redacted narrative, but no names. The July 2026 edition held 1,518 records, from 2016 through June 2026.⁶

The Department of Corrections also counts deaths in its monthly Operations and Management Reports, which sort them only as "expected" or "unexpected" and count suicides separately.⁵⁷ For July 2025 through June 2026 the reports count 127 deaths in the department's custody, 74 of them unexpected and 7 of them suicides, with no names.⁷ The Illinois Deaths in Custody Project, which files Freedom of Information Act requests about deaths in Illinois prisons, publishes the names, dates, prisons and causes of death of at least 1,200 people who died in them from 2010 through 2021.⁸

For the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act, ICJIA sends the same records to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance each quarter. It checks them against news reports and against lists kept by The Washington Post and Injustice Watch, and asks agencies for missing reports. ICJIA has written that compliance among the state's 982 law enforcement agencies "appears good except for training issues," and that smaller agencies and juvenile detention centers report less consistently.¹

Illinois has held no one for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in its county jails since February 2022, under the Illinois Way Forward Act.⁹ ICE still holds people at its processing center in suburban Broadview.¹⁰ ICE publishes its own report on each death in its custody.¹¹

What has changed

1. 1893On June 3, about 500 white people gathered at the Macon County Jail in Decatur, and 25 men broke in and took Sam Bush from his cell. The jailers on duty did nothing to stop them. A crowd of 1,500 hanged him on the courthouse lawn.¹²
2. 1903On June 6, a crowd battered down the doors of the St. Clair County jail in Belleville with a sledgehammer, broke open the cell of David Wyatt, a Black schoolteacher and principal from Brooklyn, Illinois, dragged him toward the courthouse square, hanged him from a pole and burned him. Belleville police stood by under orders not to fire on the crowd, and no one was punished.¹³
3. 1909On November 11, a crowd from Cairo caught Alexander County Sheriff Frank Davis, who had fled with William James near Karnak, took James from him, brought him back to Cairo and hanged, shot and burned him before thousands of people. Late that night a crowd took Henry Salzner from the Cairo jail and hanged him from a telegraph pole.¹⁴¹⁵ Governor Charles Deneen removed Davis from office on November 18 under a 1905 law against mob violence, and on December 6, after Ida B. Wells came to Springfield to oppose him, refused to reinstate him. The Illinois Supreme Court upheld the law in 1911.¹⁶¹⁷
4. 1990-1999Illinois, which executed at least 348 people before 1976, executed at least 12 more people by lethal injection, starting with Charles Walker in 1990.¹⁸ Girvies Davis was executed on May 17, 1995. The main evidence against him was a confession he said he signed only because police threatened to kill him, and his appeals lawyer later wrote that he was certain Davis was innocent.¹⁹
5. 2000-2003Shortly after Anthony Porter was exonerated and freed in 1999, after nearly 17 years on death row, Governor George Ryan halted executions. On January 11, 2003, finding the death penalty "fraught with error," he commuted the death sentences of all 167 people on death row, and pardoned four men who said Chicago police under Commander Jon Burge had tortured them into false confessions.¹⁸
6. 2005Hassiba Belbachir, 27, an Algerian woman held in immigration detention at the McHenry County jail, died there on March 17. Three days earlier a jail social worker had recorded that she was suicidal; her family's lawyers said the social worker then had no further contact with her. In 2014 the family won a seven-figure settlement.²⁰
7. 2011On March 9, Governor Pat Quinn signed the law abolishing the death penalty and commuted the sentences of the 15 men left on death row. Illinois has exonerated at least 23 people who had been sentenced to death.¹⁸
8. 2018On May 17, officers at Western Illinois Correctional Center in Mount Sterling took Larry Earvin, 65, handcuffed behind his back, to a spot the cameras did not cover and beat him, breaking his ribs. He died of his injuries on June 26. The officers filed reports that left out the beating. One pleaded guilty, and federal juries found the other two guilty in 2022.²¹ In November, court-appointed experts in the Lippert case, a class action over medical care in Illinois prisons, reported that they had reviewed 33 of the 174 deaths in the prisons in 2016 and 2017 and found 12 of them preventable and 7 more possibly preventable, with care "either no better or in fact worse" than in 2014.²²²³
9. 2019On May 9, a federal judge approved a consent decree in the Lippert case that requires the department to improve medical and dental care in its prisons, under a court-appointed monitor.²⁴ Roberto Rodriguez-Espinoza, 37, died on September 10, less than a week after ICE took him into custody and held him at the McHenry County jail.²⁵
10. 2020During the COVID-19 pandemic, at least 168 people died in Illinois prisons, according to the ICJIA records, up from 94 the year before.⁶
11. 2021-2022The Illinois Way Forward Act ordered counties to end their contracts to hold people for ICE. By February 5, 2022, ICE had moved the last people it held at the McHenry County jail and the Jerome Combs Detention Center in Kankakee to jails in other states.⁹
12. 2023At least 18 people died in the Cook County Jail, its highest death rate since at least 1995. Injustice Watch found failures of supervision or medical care before at least half of the deaths. Daniel Colon died less than a day after he arrived, in the jail's detox unit, after he sat in a bathroom for seven hours in withdrawal; footage showed that no officer entered the bathroom between 3:30 and 6:45 a.m.³
13. 2024Cory Ulmer, 41, died in the Cook County Jail on June 21, minutes after officers beat him and slammed him to the floor while he was handcuffed, and a nurse injected him with sedatives. His family was told he had died of a medical emergency.²⁶
14. 2025ICE held people for days and weeks at its Broadview processing center, a site meant for stays of hours, where people slept on concrete floors and in plastic chairs. On November 5, U.S. District Judge Robert Gettleman ordered ICE to give the people held there bedding, three full meals a day, water when they asked, and a shower at least every other day.¹⁰
15. 2026In September, Cook County Commissioner Tara Stamps sponsored a resolution calling for an independent review of the Cook County Jail, which was under federal court oversight from 1974 until 2017.²⁷

How far the official numbers can be trusted

ICJIA's counts change from one publication to the next. Its report for 2023 counted 140 deaths in custody in 2021, 141 in 2022 and 134 in 2023; its report for 2024 gave 148, 126 and 140 for the same years, and 129 for 2024. The July 2026 spreadsheet has 148, 125, 135 and 132.²²⁸⁶ For a third of the deaths in 2023, the manner of death was listed as unavailable.²

ICJIA has found deaths that were never reported to it. When the Bureau of Justice Assistance audited its 2023 submissions, it pointed to deaths during arrests that ICJIA had no record of; most had been reported to the State Police only as uses of force, and ICJIA found two more deaths that appeared to have gone unreported. Agencies also did not consistently file reports for quarters without a death.² When ICJIA surveyed 894 agencies about their policies on withdrawal, medication and notifying families in 2024, 30% of sheriff's offices completed the survey, and the Department of Corrections answered after the deadline.²⁸

What agencies do report can say little. Injustice Watch obtained every death report the Cook County Sheriff's Office filed with the state's Jail and Detention Standards Unit from December 2006 on, and found that each of the reports for the 18 deaths in 2023 left out the required description of the circumstances. For Daniel Colon, the sheriff's office reported only his time of death. The sheriff publishes no list of the people who die in his jail.³

The prison counts agree more closely. For 2023, the Department of Corrections' monthly reports and the ICJIA records both count 81 deaths in state prisons, and the John Howard Association, which compares the two sources, counted at least 766 people who died in the department's custody from 2019 through 2025.²⁹⁶³⁰