267 of them are named here. The rest appear only in the state’s official counts, without names.
Each dot on the map is one of the people named here: a person held in a county jail, a state prison or a lockup, or executed by the state. Some are stories of abuse by corrections officers; others are preventable deaths from withdrawal, overdose or untreated illness. Many are suicides. What almost all of them illustrate is the state’s systematic neglect of human beings in its confinement, people who often died alone in prisons, or pretrial in county jails.
This is an undercount. Many deaths are never made public, and older records are hard to find. Choose a dot to learn about a person.
Where they died. Each color marks a kind of facility: a state or federal prison, where people serve sentences; a county or city jail or lockup, where most people are held awaiting trial or for short sentences; immigration detention; juvenile detention; an execution by the State of Kentucky; or another setting, such as work release, or one that wasn’t reported. Choose one to highlight it on the map, timeline and names, and choose it again to show them all.
One mark per person, by the year they died. Choose the box at the side to see every decade. Coverage is uneven: recent deaths come mostly from local news since 2000, older ones from official lists and historical newspapers, so the shape shows what was recorded as much as how many people died.
These deaths have cost taxpayers in Kentucky at least $1.7 million: the amount governments have agreed or been ordered to pay the families and estates of at least 2 people named here, in settlements and court awards reported in the news. Families sued over at least 17 of these deaths. Many suits end with no amount made public, and many settlements are kept confidential, so the true cost is higher.
| Person | Paid by | Year | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|
| Michael Moore | Kentucky Association of Counties All Lines Fund | 2019 | $1.8 million |
| Name not reported | Boyd County | $1.7 million |
The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics has published yearly counts of deaths in Kentucky's state prisons, as the state reported them, for 2001 to 2019, but not who died. Most of those deaths, especially from illness, never appear in the news, so far fewer are named here. The gap is people still to be identified.
These are the counts the state itself reported to the federal government. The series ends in 2019 and has not been updated since.
| Year | Deaths in state custody, as reported by BJS | Named here |
|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 63 | 1 |
| 2018 | 50 | 1 |
| 2017 | 70 | 0 |
| 2016 | 42 | 0 |
| 2015 | 60 | 0 |
| 2014 | 44 | 2 |
| 2013 | 40 | 1 |
| 2012 | 55 | 0 |
| 2011 | 60 | 0 |
| 2010 | 42 | 0 |
| 2009 | 57 | 0 |
| 2008 | 68 | 0 |
| 2007 | 46 | 0 |
| 2006 | 46 | 0 |
| 2005 | 43 | 0 |
| 2004 | 42 | 0 |
| 2003 | 45 | 0 |
| 2002 | 41 | 0 |
| 2001 | 36 | 0 |
Source: The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics Mortality in State and Federal Prisons, 2001–2019. Official counts are deaths in state prisons only; county jails report to no central agency.
Each bar is a source and the years its records cover. Sources checked on a schedule are searched again for new records; the others were collected once.
The Kentucky Department of Corrections runs the state's 14 adult prisons.1 When someone dies in a prison, department policy requires the warden to call a doctor and the officials named in state law, and the body may not be moved without the county coroner's approval. The Kentucky State Police must be called at once if a crime is suspected, and department policy also requires every death to be reported to the State Police.23 State law requires a post-mortem examination by the coroner, an elected county official, whenever a person dies in police custody, a jail or a prison.14 The department's annual reports for 2010 through 2025 give no count of deaths.5
Kentucky's 119 local jails, in 74 counties, are run by elected county jailers rather than by the state, and each county's fiscal court is responsible for its jail.146 The department's Division of Local Facilities inspects each jail twice a year against the state jail standards.7 Those standards require a jail to report the death of a prisoner to the department by phone within 24 hours and in writing within 48 hours.8 The department keeps logs of jail deaths but does not publish them; reporters have built their own counts from the logs and obtained the department's death reviews through the state's open records law.69 The department does not investigate jail deaths itself: in 2015 its spokeswoman said that "would fall to law enforcement."10
The Kentucky Department of Juvenile Justice runs eight detention centers and six youth development centers.1 No Kentucky law names any agency to collect reports of deaths during arrest or in police custody outside jails and prisons.1 For the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act, the Justice and Public Safety Cabinet's Grants Management Division collects the reports: the Department of Corrections emails it records of deaths in jails and prisons, usually within a week, and division staff search the news for deaths involving police. The division uploads the data to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance each quarter. In 2023 it had no public website for the data and no formal process for updating cases still under investigation.1
People held for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement are kept in county jails under contract; the Boone County Jail's contract goes back to 2005.11 ICE publishes its own report on each death in its custody.12
The jail count is only as complete as jailers' own reports. In 2015 the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting found deaths that did not appear in Department of Corrections records at all, and the causes of more than 40 percent of the jail deaths that did appear were listed vaguely, as "unknown," "natural" or "autopsy pending."1017 In 2022 the department found that Louisville Metro Corrections had failed to properly notify it of a death.9
Deaths during arrest and in police custody are the least complete part of the record. By the state's own account there is no central place for police agencies to report them, and the state finds many of them through news reports.1
For state prisons, the yearly totals Kentucky reported to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics through 2019 closely match the lists of deaths the department has released under open records requests; both show 70 deaths in 2017 and 63 in 2019.2829 Those federal figures placed Kentucky among five states with a prison death rate of at least 500 per 100,000 people in 2019.28 Most deaths in Kentucky jails from 2020 through 2024 were ruled natural, and experts have pointed out that a natural death can still be a preventable one.2425