At least 737 people have died in custody in Massachusetts

How deaths in custody are reported in Massachusetts

Massachusetts law requires anyone who knows of a death "in custody, in any jail or correctional facility, or in any mental health" institution to notify the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner at once.¹ When someone dies in a police lockup, the officer in charge must also send the county's medical examiner a report within seven days that names the person and describes the death.² No law requires any agency to publish these deaths. The state has no public tracking of causes of death in custody, and how people died in its prisons and jails comes out mainly through public records requests.³

The Massachusetts Department of Correction runs the state prisons, 17 of them by the state's own count, including Bridgewater State Hospital.⁴ Its yearly Prison Population Trends report, published for each year since 2009, gives one number for deaths, in a single line: "There were 18 deaths in the criminal jurisdiction population during 2024: all males."⁵⁶ The report names no one and gives no dates, places or causes. Individual deaths become public through the department's statements to reporters, and its fuller records, including causes, through records requests.⁷⁸

The 24 county jails and houses of correction are run by elected sheriffs,⁴ who face little oversight from any other level of government.⁹ State regulations require each sheriff to have written procedures for a death, including an investigation and a final report "to all appropriate parties," but they name no state agency to receive it.¹⁰ "No state office collects or examines death data in county jails," the New England Center for Investigative Reporting found in 2017,¹¹ and no regulator requires sheriffs to report the results of their own mortality reviews.¹² Sheriffs publish no counts. When MassLive and The Springfield Republican asked every sheriff's office for death records, most refused in full or in part until the state's appeal process made them answer, and the Essex and Barnstable sheriffs said they do not track causes of death.³

For the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act, the Research and Policy Analysis Division of the Executive Office of Public Safety and Security collects the data. The medical examiner's staff find custody deaths by searching their case system each day for words such as "cell," "custody" and "jail," and each quarter the division sends the results to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance. The state's plan says a death never reported to the medical examiner may go unknown, that the keyword search can miss cases, and that hospitals have reported deaths without saying the person was in custody. It makes no provision for publishing the reports.⁴

The Plymouth County Correctional Facility is the only jail in Massachusetts that holds people for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, under a contract signed in September 2024 that runs to 2029.¹³ In 2025 the jail set aside 526 beds for federal detainees.¹⁴ ICE publishes its own report on each death in its custody.¹⁵ Its list for October 2003 to June 2017 includes five deaths in Massachusetts: two people held at the Suffolk County House of Correction, two at the Federal Medical Center in Devens, and one at Lemuel Shattuck Hospital.¹⁶

What has changed

1. 1947On May 9, the state electrocuted Phillip Bellino and Edward Gertson at Charlestown State Prison, its last executions. Massachusetts carried out 345 executions before 1976.¹⁷
2. 1984The Supreme Judicial Court struck down the state's death penalty law in Commonwealth v. Colon-Cruz.¹⁷
3. 2006Following press scrutiny, the Department of Correction began a concerted effort to reduce suicides in the state prisons.¹¹
4. 2009Joshua Messier, 23, died at Bridgewater State Hospital in May after guards restrained him on a bed. His death was ruled a homicide. The Plymouth District Attorney dropped the criminal inquiry because the medical examiner could not identify a specific cause of death.¹⁸ In June 2014 Attorney General Martha Coakley said her office would review it.¹⁹
5. 2017The New England Center for Investigative Reporting found that at least 42 people had died by suicide in county jails since 2012, more than twice as many as in the state prisons, which held about the same number of people.¹¹
6. October 2018The U.S. Department of Justice opened an investigation of the Department of Correction under the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act.²⁰
7. March 2020WBUR, after public records requests, counted 195 deaths in Massachusetts county jails from 2008 through 2018: 127 from medical causes and 65 by suicide.⁹
8. June 2020A Supreme Judicial Court order on COVID-19 in prisons and jails was amended on June 23 to require the department to report COVID-19 deaths.²¹
9. November 2020The Justice Department found that the Department of Correction violated the constitutional rights of people in mental health crisis by failing to supervise them, failing to give them adequate care, and holding them on prolonged mental health watches in restrictive conditions.²⁰
10. December 2022The Department of Correction signed a settlement agreement with the Justice Department that requires an independent monitor, who issues periodic public reports.²⁰
11. 2025Six people died by apparent suicide in state prisons, after one each in 2022 and 2023 and none in 2024. By mid-December the department's records showed 25 deaths in the year.⁸
12. March 2026The department announced changes in response to an independent review by Dr. Sharen Barboza of the six suicides of 2025.²² The review found that four of the six had made earlier suicide attempts, and that three were held in Behavioral Adjustment Units, where most recorded contacts with clinicians lasted under five minutes.²³
13. March 2026MassLive and The Springfield Republican reported more than 140 deaths in Massachusetts prisons and jails since 2022, from records obtained through public records requests.³

How far the official numbers can be trusted

The Department of Correction's own counts do not agree. For 2019, its yearly report counted 30 deaths,²⁴ it reported 34 to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics,²⁵ and the list of names it released to the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project holds 35. For 2024 the report says 18 and the list holds 19.⁶²⁶ Part of the gap may be who is counted. The yearly report counts the department's "criminal jurisdiction population," people serving state sentences wherever they are held, while its prisons also hold people awaiting trial and people civilly committed for mental illness or addiction.⁶

In 2021 Bridget Conley of the World Peace Foundation compared what the department had said about COVID-19 deaths from March 2020 to March 2021 to reporters, in court-ordered reports and in answer to records requests. The three disagreed on dates, places and causes: a death listed as caused by COVID-19 in August 2020 records was listed as liver failure a month later, and while the department had reported 21 deaths, 22 appear in at least one of the three.²¹

For county jails there is no official count to check. WBUR found that neither the state nor the federal government accurately tracks deaths in county jails, and that over one nine-year period sheriffs had reported 37 fewer deaths to the U.S. Department of Justice than WBUR found.⁹ The federal reports that MassLive obtained gave only a general manner of death, and the Suffolk County sheriff listed three deaths simply as "substance abuse."³