At least 1,366 people have died in custody in Kentucky

How deaths in custody are reported in Kentucky

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

What has changed

1. 1908In the early morning of August 1, a mob of about 100 men forced the jailer in Russellville, Logan County, to hand over his keys, took four Black men from the jail and lynched them.¹³¹⁴
2. 1928On July 13, the state electrocuted seven men one after another in the electric chair at Eddyville, a record for executions in a single day.¹⁵
3. 1938Kentucky abolished hanging, two years after the state's last public execution drew as many as 20,000 people in Owensboro.¹⁵
4. 2008On November 21, Kentucky carried out its most recent execution, by lethal injection at the Kentucky State Penitentiary. It was the third since 1976.¹⁵¹⁶
5. 2015The Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting counted at least 154 deaths in Kentucky jails over six and a half years and found that the Department of Corrections did not know who was dying in county jails, or why.¹⁰¹⁷
6. 2016Gynnya McMillen, 16, died on January 11 at the Lincoln Village Regional Juvenile Detention Center, the first death in a state-run juvenile detention center since 1999. A state investigation found that six staff members had failed to do required checks and falsified the logs, and the juvenile justice commissioner left office the next month.¹⁸¹⁹
7. 2017A bill to create a panel to review deaths in Kentucky's state and local correctional facilities, first filed in 2016, never received a hearing in the House.²⁰²¹
8. 2022Department of Corrections reviews of eight deaths at Louisville Metro Corrections found that the jail broke state standards in five, each time by failing to check on people as often as required.⁹
9. 2023In April, a 457-page outside review commissioned by the Louisville Metro Council found staffing, leadership, security and medical failures at the jail, where at least 13 people had died in 15 months.²² By February 2025, at least 19 people had died in the jail's custody since 2021.²³
10. 2023In August, the Justice and Public Safety Cabinet adopted its plan for federal death-in-custody reporting, which says Kentucky has no single law on reporting deaths in custody.¹
11. 2025The Lexington Herald-Leader reported that at least 234 people died in Kentucky jails from 2020 through 2024, after six months of compiling records.²⁴²⁵
12. 2026Senate Bill 208, requiring examinations and a yearly public report on deaths during arrest, and Senate Bill 209, creating an outside panel to review deaths in jails, prisons and juvenile facilities, were filed in February. Neither moved past referral to committee.²⁶²⁷

How far the official numbers can be trusted

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