At least 3,321 people have died in custody in Louisiana

How deaths in custody are reported in Louisiana

Louisiana has no law on reporting deaths in custody; the state says so in its own plan for federal reporting.⁵ State law requires the parish coroner, an elected official, to view the body or investigate every death "in prison or while serving a sentence", but requires an autopsy only where a crime may have contributed to the death.⁶ The Department of Public Safety and Corrections runs eight state prisons.⁴ It publishes one data file per year listing every death in its custody from 2018, with the date, facility, age, sex and the department's own category for the cause, and no names.¹ It announces few of these deaths: its press release page carries releases about seven deaths from 2018 through 2025,⁷ a period in which its files list more than 1,200.¹ The department told WBRZ in 2024 that it does not receive the coroner's investigation report after an autopsy, and the Iberville Parish coroner refused the station the records of deaths at Elayn Hunt Correctional Center, saying criminal litigation might be anticipated.⁸

From 2001 to 2019 Louisiana held between 44.5 and 57.9 percent of its state prisoners in parish jails.⁹ A parish jail must report the death of someone serving a sentence to the department and the coroner, but the death of someone held before trial only to the coroner. Louisiana's prisons and jails operate without independent oversight or mandatory standards.⁴ The department's files count the sentenced people who die in parish jails without saying which jail.¹ Deaths of people held before trial reach no state agency at all except through federal reporting.⁴⁵

For the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act, the Louisiana Commission on Law Enforcement (LCLE) collects reports each quarter from about 301 police agencies, jails, lockups, state prisons and juvenile facilities. Agencies file through a password-protected form on the commission's website, and the state lists the number of agencies that do not take part as "Unknown."⁵¹⁰ The commission publishes none of what it collects.¹⁰

The fullest count of deaths behind bars in Louisiana comes from outside government. Since fall 2019, law students at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law have filed public records requests each year with every prison, jail and juvenile detention center in the state, asking for the death reports facilities prepare for the federal government. Their project, Incarceration Transparency, counted at least 1,168 deaths from 2015 through 2021.⁴

Deaths in immigration detention are counted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which Congress requires to publish a report on each death within 90 days.¹¹ At Winn Correctional Center in Winnfield, run for ICE by the Winn Parish Sheriff's Office and LaSalle Corrections, Alejandro Cabrera Clemente died on April 11, 2026, and Mamuka Artmeladze was found unresponsive on June 4.¹² Julian Curo-Churata, held at Richwood Correctional Center, died at a hospital in Monroe on September 29, 2026.¹³ The Loyola project stopped asking federal and immigration detention centers for records because their answers often took years.⁴

What has changed

1. 1844–1901Louisiana leased people from its penitentiary to private operators almost continuously. In 1867, a year that ended with 222 people in the penitentiary, sixteen died. The Constitution of 1898 prohibited leasing, and the state took over Angola when the last lease expired in 1901.¹⁴
2. 1891On March 14, a crowd broke into the Parish Prison in New Orleans and killed eleven Italian men held there.¹⁵
3. 2013A federal court approved a consent judgment in Jones v. Gusman, a suit over conditions in the Orleans Parish jail joined by the U.S. Department of Justice. It requires the sheriff to notify the court's monitor within 24 hours of any death, to report every suicide and death in custody, and to review each suicide.¹⁶
4. 2017Jonathan Fano, arrested in Baton Rouge during a mental health crisis, was denied psychotropic medication at East Baton Rouge Parish Prison and died by suicide in February. Reuters counted 45 deaths at the jail from 2009 to 2019.¹⁷
5. 2020Federal death-in-custody reporting passed from the Bureau of Justice Statistics to the Bureau of Justice Assistance, which collects less detail. For 2020, LCLE reported six deaths in custody for all of Louisiana; the Loyola project found 182 in prisons and jails.⁴
6. March 2021In Lewis v. Cain, a federal court found that medical care at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola violated the Eighth Amendment.¹⁸
7. June 2021Loyola's first "Louisiana Deaths Behind Bars" report counted 786 deaths from 2015 through 2019. Thirty-eight of the 132 facilities asked for records did not respond.¹⁹
8. June 2023The legislature adopted House Concurrent Resolution 65, asking the Louisiana Department of Health's Office of Public Health to study how deaths in state and parish custody are reported, with a report due by February 1, 2024.²⁰²¹ In August 2025 WAFB reported that no findings had been released.²²
9. November 2023The court in Lewis v. Cain ordered remedies for Angola's medical care, to be overseen by court-appointed special masters. In March 2026 the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit vacated the judgment.¹⁸
10. 2025On March 18, the state executed Jessie Hoffman Jr. with nitrogen gas at Angola, its first execution in 15 years.²³ Louisiana has carried out 29 executions since 1976.²⁴
11. 2026House Bill 323, setting notification and reporting procedures for deaths of people in custody, was filed in February and heard in the House Committee on Administration of Criminal Justice in April. It did not leave the committee.²⁵

How far the official numbers can be trusted

The state's yearly prison totals do not all agree. For 2018 the department's file lists 134 deaths, 110 of them outside parish jails, and for 2019 it lists 108, 94 outside parish jails;¹ the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics counted 116 and 102.⁹ The department answered every one of the Loyola project's records requests, including for people in its custody held in parish jails.⁴

Federal reporting through the state has been far less complete. LCLE's six reported deaths for 2020 compare with the 182 the Loyola project found, and several sheriffs told the students they were no longer required to report deaths for federal data.⁴ Nationally, a 2022 U.S. Senate investigation found that the Justice Department had missed at least 990 prison and arrest-related deaths in fiscal year 2021.¹⁷

For parish jails there is no official count to check. The independent count is limited by what facilities hand over: in 2021, 38 of 132 facilities had not answered records requests,¹⁹ and while 95 percent of 122 facilities had answered at least once by fall 2022, students still had difficulty getting records from jails run by LaSalle Corrections.⁴ Coroners can withhold their records while a death is under investigation.⁸