At least 1,557 people have died in custody in Indiana

How deaths in custody are reported in Indiana

County sheriffs run Indiana's jails, and the Indiana Department of Correction (IDOC) runs the state prisons. IDOC's Jail Services Division must inspect every county jail at least once a year against standards written with the sheriffs, and its policy says inspection dates are announced in advance.¹ The Indianapolis Star found that the findings of these inspections are not published.²

In its 2023 plan for the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act, the Indiana Criminal Justice Institute (ICJI) wrote that no Indiana law required state or local agencies to report a death in custody to a state agency, and that it was proposing one to the legislature.³ ICJI has collected the federal data since the end of 2019. Police departments, jails and prisons are to report each death through an online form within 20 days of the end of each quarter, giving the person's name, date of birth, gender, race and ethnicity, the date, time and place of death, the agency involved and the manner of death.⁴ IDOC enters the deaths in its prisons into the same form.⁵ Because agencies do not report consistently, ICJI staff find many deaths through Google news alerts and other media searches.³⁵

ICJI publishes the results on a dashboard as counts by year, county, type of facility, manner of death and demographics, with no names. It counts at least 1,330 people who died from 2019 on, including people who died during arrests and other encounters with police; at least 784 of them died in state prisons, at least 220 in county jails and at least 2 in a state-run boot camp. It sorts every death into one of those types or police, with no category for juvenile facilities, although the federal law covers them.⁶⁴ ICJI also published annual reports on the data for 2020 through 2023.⁷⁵

I have found no IDOC publication that lists or counts the people who die in its prisons. The department's own records of deaths from 2015 through 2024, released to the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project, list at least 922 people by facility, date and general cause, without names.⁸ The Ombudsman Bureau, created in 2003, takes complaints from people in IDOC facilities and their families.⁹

Since October 2025, IDOC has held people for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at Miami Correctional Facility in Bunker Hill, under an agreement between the state and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.¹⁰ ICE publishes its own report on each death in its custody.¹¹ The federal government carries out its executions at the federal prison complex in Terre Haute.¹²

What has changed

1. 1878On October 11, a mob overpowered the guards at the Posey County jail in Mount Vernon and broke through a cell door with crowbars, chisels and a sledgehammer. It killed Dan Harris Sr. in his cell and hanged Jim Good, Jeff Hopkins, Ed Warner and William Chambers from a tree on the courthouse lawn.¹³
2. 1900On December 16, a crowd of white people rammed the jail in Rockport with sledgehammers and a telegraph pole, took Bud Rowland from his cell and hanged him by the courthouse, then shot Jim Henderson in his cell and hanged him beside Rowland. The next night, people from Rockport broke into the jail in Boonville, where Spencer County sheriffs had taken John Rolla, and hanged him in front of the courthouse.¹⁴
3. 1913Indiana replaced hanging with the electric chair. Before 1976, the state executed at least 131 people; the last of them was Richard Kiefer, in 1961.¹⁵
4. 1930On August 7, a white mob broke into the Grant County Jail in Marion with crowbars and hammers, getting past the sheriff and three deputies. It pulled Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, both 19, from their cells, beat them and hanged them in the courthouse yard before a crowd of about 5,000 to 10,000. The mob also seized James Cameron, 16, and beat him; he survived. All-white juries acquitted the mob's leaders. America's Black Holocaust Museum names at least 26 people lynched in Indiana from 1845 to 1930.¹⁶¹⁷
5. 1985-1996William Vandiver was still breathing after the first 2,300-volt jolt of his electrocution in 1985. In 1996, the state's first execution by lethal injection, of Tommie Smith, took one hour and nine minutes.¹⁵
6. 2017Joshua Devine, 30, burned to death in his cell at Indiana State Prison in Michigan City on April 7. Other prisoners shouted for help for about 30 minutes, and a judge found that at least 15 minutes passed before any of the three officers on duty acted. The cell house had no sprinklers and too few fire extinguishers. The warden's press releases suggested Devine had tampered with the outlet; the fire was ruled accidental, and no employee was disciplined. The state later paid his family $3,925,000 while denying the allegations.¹⁸
7. 2018Jerod Draper, 40, died at the Harrison County Jail on October 4, about six hours after he arrived. Jailers strapped him into a restraint chair with a spit hood and a helmet and left him for hours; Sgt. Matt Hulsey and nurse Michael Gregory shocked him repeatedly with Tasers while he was restrained, and Gregory stepped on his bare feet.¹⁹²⁰ The coroner ruled the death an overdose.¹⁹ Prosecutor J. Otto Schalk called the treatment "objectively reasonable" and prosecuted no one; in October 2021, the defendants and their insurer settled the family's lawsuit for $1 million.²⁰
8. 2020-2021From July 2020 to January 2021, after 17 years without a federal execution, the federal government executed 13 people at Terre Haute.²¹¹² Brandon Bernard, executed on December 10, 2020, had been 18 at the time of the offense; his lawyers said prosecutors had portrayed the Black defendants as gang members to a nearly all-white jury. An autopsy found that Corey Johnson suffered pulmonary edema, a painful condition akin to drowning, during his execution.²¹ Lisa Montgomery, 52, executed on January 13, 2021, was the first woman the federal government had executed since 1953. A federal judge in Indiana had found that she was likely mentally ill and could not understand that she would be put to death, and her lawyers said she had suffered "sexual torture" as a child; an appeals court lifted that ruling.¹²
9. 2020-2022ICJI recorded at least 53 people who died of COVID-19 in Indiana's state prisons, most of them in 2020.⁶
10. 2021Joshua McLemore, 29, was held for about 20 days in a windowless padded isolation cell at the Jackson County Jail in Brownstown and lost 45 pounds. Jail video showed him rolling in trash and eating paper. He died in August. The autopsy gave the cause as "multiple organ failure due to refusal to eat or drink with altered mental status due to schizophrenia." The county prosecutor concluded that he "most likely died due to a prolonged lack of attention by Jackson County Jail staff as a group."²²²³ In December, The Indianapolis Star reported that at least 300 people had died in Indiana's county jails since 2010, about one every two weeks, that the state had let 84% of jails repeatedly violate safety standards, and that no one in government accurately tracked jail deaths.² At least 42% of the people in its count died by suicide, against a national jail average of 30%, and nearly half died within a week of entering jail.²⁴
11. 2023Jackson County and its sheriff paid Joshua McLemore's estate more than $7 million, which the estate's lawyers called the largest settlement for the death of an incarcerated person in Indiana.²²²³
12. 2024On December 18, Indiana executed Joseph Corcoran, 49, by lethal injection at Indiana State Prison, its first execution since 2009.²⁵ At least five doctors had diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia and found him incompetent to waive his appeals, but courts let him waive them; he believed guards were torturing him with an ultrasound machine.²⁶ His lawyer said no hearing had ever decided whether he was competent to be executed.²⁵
13. 2025On May 20, Indiana executed Benjamin Ritchie, 45. His lawyers said he had severe brain damage from his mother's drinking and drug use during pregnancy and from childhood lead exposure, and that his trial lawyers had failed to present that evidence fully; he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2005. Governor Mike Braun denied clemency without explanation.²⁷ On October 10, Indiana executed Roy Lee Ward, 53, who had recently been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder; his lawyers had questioned how the state stored its pentobarbital. Indiana is one of two death penalty states that bar journalists from witnessing executions.²⁸
14. 2026Lorth Sim, 59, who had come to the United States as a refugee, died in ICE custody at Miami Correctional Facility on February 16.¹⁰¹¹ Tuan Van Bui, 55, died there on April 1.²⁹¹¹ ICE's report says staff responded and began CPR; his wife said other detainees told her that his cellmates did CPR themselves while officers waited 15 to 20 minutes, and that he was declared dead about an hour after he collapsed.¹¹³⁰ Autopsies ruled both deaths natural.³¹

How far the official numbers can be trusted

ICJI's totals change after it publishes them. Its first report on 2021, in March 2022, counted 123 deaths in custody; a version issued two months later counted 168, and the dashboard shows 167.³²³³⁶ For 2022 the annual report counted 168 and the dashboard shows 173; for 2023, 174 and 188.³⁴⁵⁶ ICJI says that despite its media searches, not every death in the state may be captured each quarter.⁵

The prison counts do not match IDOC's own records. For 2024, the department's list released to UCLA has at least 103 people who died in its prisons, while ICJI's dashboard counts 84 deaths in state prisons. For 2020 both count 141.⁸⁶ The yearly totals Indiana reported to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics for 2015 through 2019 differ from its later list by up to two deaths a year. Those federal tables count at least 1,258 people who died in Indiana's prisons from 2001 through 2019, at least 87 of them by suicide and at least 32 by homicide.³⁵⁸

Jail deaths are the least settled. Of the 220 jail deaths on ICJI's dashboard, 75 are still listed as "investigation pending."⁶ ICJI's yearly jail counts, from 21 to 39 a year for 2019 through 2025, are the only statewide figures, and they depend on sheriffs' reports and news coverage.⁶⁵ The Indianapolis Star built its count of jail deaths since 2010 from at least 150 public records requests because no government agency kept an accurate one.²