At least 137 people have died in custody in Maine

How deaths in custody are reported in Maine

Maine has no law on reporting deaths in custody; the state says so in its own plan for federal reporting. The Attorney General's office investigates them instead.¹ Under the Attorney General's Protocol for the Investigation of Deaths, Probable Deaths, and Missing Persons, the death of anyone held in a jail, holding facility or correctional institution, whatever the likely cause, must be reported immediately to the Office of Chief Medical Examiner, the appropriate State Police Major Crimes Unit and the Operations Division of the Maine Department of Corrections (MDOC). The Department of Corrections reviews whether the facility followed the required standards, and the Attorney General's office reviews all the investigations.²

MDOC runs seven adult facilities and one for young people.¹ When someone dies in one of them, the department tells reporters the person's name, age and facility and says that the Attorney General's office and the medical examiner have been notified, but does not give a cause of death.³ Its annual reports include no deaths, and it does not disclose what it calls confidential information about the people it holds.⁴ Asked by a legislative commission in 2022, the department said nine people had died in its facilities that year and that an average of seven had died each year since 2017.⁵

Maine's 15 county jails are run by the counties.¹ MDOC's yearly Report on Jails to the Legislature lists the in-custody deaths its inspectors reviewed, by jail and date, without names. The 2021 report lists five, of three men and two women, and says there were nine in 2020.² The investigation itself is done by the local police or State Police, MDOC and the medical examiner, under the Attorney General's oversight; after a death at the Cumberland County Jail in March 2024, the person's name was withheld until the family had been told.⁶

For the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act, the Attorney General's Investigation Division collects the name, race, date, place, manner and a short description of each death from every jail, state facility and police agency, and passes them on each quarter. The state's grant office does not check the information for accuracy, keeps each report as a file named for the person who died, and has no website for the data.¹

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement lists no deaths in Maine from 2003 through 2017.⁷ The Cumberland County Jail held people for ICE under a contract with the U.S. Marshals Service until ICE removed them in January 2026; county commissioners voted that April to end the arrangement.⁸ ICE, not the state, reports deaths in its custody, and Congress requires it to publish a report on each within 90 days.⁹

What has changed

1. 1887Maine abolished the death penalty for the second time, after restoring it in 1883. The state carried out 21 executions; the last was Daniel Wilkinson's, in 1885.¹⁰
2. 2016Charles Knowles, 16, a transgender boy, died by suicide at Long Creek Youth Development Center; staff found him in his cell on October 29. His mother's lawsuit said he had been placed in a cell that was neither suicide-resistant nor free of protrusions. The state settled it for $225,000 in December 2021.¹¹
3. 2020MDOC's Report on Jails counted nine deaths and probable deaths in county jails.²
4. 2022By September, 15 people had died in Maine's jails and prisons that year, more than in any year since 2014, by the count of a group that had begun tracking these deaths. Family and friends gathered at Capitol Park in Augusta to say many of the deaths could have been prevented.¹²
5. 2023WMTW reported that 39 people had died in Maine's jails and prisons from October 2019 to August 2022, ten of whom the Department of Corrections had not accounted for.⁴ The state's plan for federal reporting said Maine had no death-in-custody law.¹
6. 2026ICE removed the people it held at the Cumberland County Jail in January, and county commissioners voted in April to end the jail's contract to hold them.⁸

How far the official numbers can be trusted

No Maine agency publishes a regular count of all deaths in custody, so the fullest totals have been built outside government. Reporters at WMTW compared records obtained through public records requests with federal Justice Department data and found ten deaths from October 2019 to August 2022 that the Department of Corrections had not accounted for. The Office of Chief Medical Examiner releases nothing about a case until all investigations are finished.⁴

Advocates counted 101 people who died in Maine's prisons and jails from 1987 to 2022, using news coverage and obituaries.¹² MDOC's yearly averages cover only its own facilities.⁵ The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, using the department's reports, counted 82 deaths in Maine's state prisons from 2001 through 2019, from none in 2005 to eight in each of 2018 and 2019. It does not count jails.¹³ The Report on Jails counts reviews completed rather than deaths, without names.² I found no Report on Jails after 2021 in the Legislature's library. The Attorney General's office holds the only named statewide record, which it gathers for the federal government and does not publish.¹