At least 1,698 people have died in custody in Maryland

How deaths in custody are reported in Maryland

The Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services (DPSCS) runs the state prisons and also the jails of Baltimore City. It does not tell the public when someone dies in its custody unless the death is a homicide.³ When the department's Internal Investigative Unit suspects a homicide, it calls the Maryland State Police Homicide Unit, and the State Police post a release naming the person who died.⁵ Chapter 956 of 2024 requires the State Police to investigate every suspected homicide of a person in the custody of the Division of Correction and, from October 2024, to report each year how many investigations they completed and how many cases they referred for prosecution.⁶ Chapter 109 of 2025 requires the Commissioner of Correction, from October 2025, to notify certain elected officials whenever someone dies in a Division of Correction facility.⁷ The Division of Correction's annual report counts deaths only as a type of release from prison, by facility and without names: 54 in fiscal year 2025.⁸

The Office of the Correctional Ombudsman was created by Chapter 836 of 2024 to investigate and review the actions of DPSCS and the Department of Juvenile Services.⁹ It must report each year on deaths in custody. In its first report, in December 2025, it counted 679 deaths in DPSCS facilities from January 2015 through December 2025: an average of 4.32 a month in the first half of that period and 5.97 in the second, with the most, 15, in March 2024. The office agreed with DPSCS in December 2024 to be told of each death at the same time as the department's leadership. It called that process "inconsistent at best," and it can see the department's investigation files only after they are closed.¹

No state agency publishes deaths in the county detention centers, which hold mostly people awaiting trial. For the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act, the Governor's Office of Crime Prevention, Youth, and Victim Services collected quarterly Excel spreadsheets from reporting agencies. In 2023 only two agencies, DPSCS and the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, were taking part, and about 190 others were not. When a report was missing details, the office asked the medical examiner and then searched local news and obituaries.¹⁰ Researchers at the UCLA BioCritical Studies Lab who studied 180 deaths in ten city and county detention centers from 2008 to 2019 had to rely on the deaths those jails had reported to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and wrote that high barriers kept the public from key information about these deaths. More than 80 percent of the people in their sample had not been tried, and about half died within ten days of being booked.⁴

Deaths in police custody are investigated by the Attorney General's Independent Investigations Division, which lists each case it takes, with the name of the person who died, from late 2021.¹¹

The Dignity Not Detention Act, which became law over the governor's veto in December 2021, bars state and local agencies from contracts to hold people for immigration authorities and required the county jails that did so to end them by October 1, 2022.¹² Before then, Anthony Oluseye Akinyemi, 56, died at the Worcester County Jail in Snow Hill on December 21, 2019, less than a day after he was handed to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.¹³ ICE, not the state, reports deaths in its custody, and Congress requires it to publish a report on each within 90 days.¹⁴

What has changed

1. 1854–1933At least 38 Black Marylanders were lynched, according to the state's Lynching Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Among them, Howard Cooper, 15, was lynched outside the Towson jail in 1885.¹⁵
2. 1870s–1941Hundreds of Black children, some as young as five, died while confined at the state-supported House of Reformation and Instruction for Colored Children in Cheltenham. Their graves remain largely unmarked. A state commission created in 2026 is to report by the end of 2029.¹⁶
3. 2002On August 13, the U.S. Department of Justice found that conditions at the Baltimore City Detention Center violated the civil rights of the people held there, including through inadequate medical and mental health care.¹⁷
4. 2013Maryland repealed the death penalty on May 2. The state carried out 309 executions before 1976 and five after.¹⁸
5. 2015–2016The state closed the Baltimore Men's Detention Center in 2015. In June 2016 a federal judge approved a settlement in Duvall v. Hogan, a class action over medical care at the Baltimore City Detention Center that went back to court orders of 1993, with independent monitors to check the jail's progress.¹⁹
6. 2021The General Assembly overrode the governor's veto of the Dignity Not Detention Act, ending immigration detention contracts in county jails.¹²
7. 2023The state's plan for federal death-in-custody reporting said only DPSCS and the medical examiner were sending reports.¹⁰
8. 2024The General Assembly created the Office of the Correctional Ombudsman⁹ and required the State Police to report each year on their investigations of suspected homicides in state prisons.⁶
9. May 2025An independent audit commissioned by the Attorney General reviewed the medical examiner's list of 1,313 deaths in custody it had investigated from 2003 through 2019. Of 87 deaths during or soon after restraint, outside pathologists judged 48 to be homicides, 36 of them unanimously; the medical examiner had ruled 12 of them homicides.²⁰
10. October 2025The Commissioner of Correction began notifying elected officials of each death in a state prison.⁷
11. December 2025The Correctional Ombudsman's first annual report counted 679 deaths in DPSCS facilities since 2015 and said it would make deaths in custody the subject of a special report.¹
12. 2026The Baltimore Banner found that people in Maryland prisons were killed at nearly four times the national rate in 2025, and that homicides in state prisons rose from three in 2023 to 14 in 2025.²¹

How far the official numbers can be trusted

Each public count of deaths in Maryland prisons covers a different set of facilities and a different period, and none is complete. The Division of Correction counts deaths by fiscal year as releases;⁸ the Correctional Ombudsman counts calendar years across all DPSCS facilities, including the Baltimore jails, and its early years fall far short of what DPSCS reported to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.¹² For 2025, the Governor's Office of Crime Prevention and Policy reported 68 deaths in state prisons under the federal reporting law, with 21 ruled natural, eight homicides and 34 still pending, while the State Police said their homicide unit had investigated 13.²²

How a death is classified depends on the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, and the Attorney General's 2025 audit found that it had ruled many deaths after restraint undetermined rather than homicide.²⁰ The UCLA researchers found that people in their jail sample whose deaths were ruled natural died far younger than the general population, which they said may point to deaths from violence or neglect being recorded as natural.⁴

Because DPSCS announces only homicides, The Baltimore Banner has learned of deaths in the Baltimore jails from independent sources rather than from the department.³ Families of people killed in Maryland prisons are often left almost entirely in the dark about how they died.²¹ For the county detention centers there is no public state count to check at all.¹⁰⁴