0 people, most recent first. Choose a name, or a dot on the map.
One mark per person, by the year they died. Choose the box at the side to see every decade. Coverage is uneven: recent deaths come mostly from local news since 2000, older ones from official lists and historical newspapers, so the shape shows what was recorded as much as how many people died.
The Michigan Department of Corrections (MDOC) runs the state prisons. Since the 2025 budget law, Public Act 22 of 2025, it must send the Legislature a de-identified list of prisoner deaths twice a year, giving each death's date, place and official cause as written on the death certificate. The first list, in March 2026, covered 50 deaths from September 14, 2025, to January 31, 2026; 26 of them were still marked as pending review by the medical examiner.1 The second, in September 2026, covered 70 deaths from February to August 2026, 40 of them still pending.2 The requirement is a section of the yearly budget, so it lasts only as long as the Legislature keeps it there.1
MDOC's yearly Statistical Report counts deaths only as one way of leaving prison, without names: 126 in 2025.3 Under the same budget law, its Critical Incident Report counts prisoner deaths by month and facility in categories such as suicide, overdose and unexpected natural death.4 The department rarely names the people who die. After deaths at Women's Huron Valley Correctional Facility, the only state prison for women, it set up a page naming five women who died there or after transfer to hospital from May to July 2026, with medical examiner and State Police reports for some of them.56
Michigan has no law requiring state or local agencies to report deaths in custody to any state office.7 For the county jails there is one legal rule: when a prisoner dies in a county or city jail, the county medical examiner must examine the body.8 No state agency publishes deaths in jails. For the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act, the Michigan State Police Grants and Community Services Division collects quarterly reports by online survey from 579 agencies, including 476 local police departments and 83 county jails and lockups, and from MDOC by spreadsheet. Two part-time staff do the work, and they have no capacity to update deaths first reported as pending investigation. The state's plan makes no provision for publishing the data.7
The North Lake Processing Center in Baldwin, run by The GEO Group, began holding people for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on June 16, 2025, with room for up to 1,800.9 Nenko Stanev Gantchev, 56, was found unresponsive in his cell there on December 15, 2025, and pronounced dead that evening.10 ICE, not the state, reports deaths in its custody, and Congress requires it to publish a report on each within 90 days.11
MDOC's counts have disagreed with each other for years. In 2019 the department said that a combination of errors had caused some deaths to be counted twice and others not at all. For 2018 it reported 135 prison deaths to the federal government, while its critical incident report to the Legislature listed 44.16 The gap remains: the critical incident report for 2025 lists 86 prisoner deaths across its categories,4 against 126 deaths in the Statistical Report for the same year.3 Even the department's own yearly figures differ from what the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics published from its reports, which for 2015 was 118 deaths against the 110 in MDOC's Statistical Report.1819
The new twice-yearly lists are the most detailed public record, but they name no one, and more than half the deaths in each list had no cause yet when it was published.12 For county jails there is no public count at all; the only statewide record is what agencies send the State Police for federal reporting, which the State Police do not update once a death is reported as pending.7