At least 1,182 people have died in custody in Nevada

How deaths in custody are reported in Nevada

The Nevada Department of Corrections holds about 14,000 people in seven major prisons and a number of camps. The department's Inspector General reviews every death. After next of kin are told, or cannot be found, the department issues a press release and adds the person to its yearly list.¹ State law requires the department to ask the coroner for an autopsy after every death in its custody unless the next of kin object within 72 hours.⁸ The department does not release how anyone died; the cause must be requested from the county coroner.¹ In 2026, the ACLU of Nevada sued the department and the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department for records about a man killed at Southern Desert Correctional Center, after the department withheld them, citing an open criminal investigation.⁹

County sheriffs run Nevada's jails. Since Assembly Bill 301 of 2019, a sheriff must report each jail death to the board of county commissioners within 48 hours, with the person's name, age, gender, dates of admission and death, place of death and probable cause of death, and must give the board a report on jail deaths every six months. The board must put jail conditions and deaths on the agenda of a public meeting at least twice a year. City jails report the same way to the city council.¹⁰⁷ The law sends these reports to each local board, not to any state agency, and does not require them to be gathered or published in one place.⁷ What reaches the public comes one county at a time: in 2024, for example, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department told Clark County commissioners that 13 people had died in its custody in 2023, 11 of them in hospitals, after 10 in 2022 and 11 in 2021.¹¹

For the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act, the Department of Public Safety's Office of Criminal Justice Assistance emails a federal template every quarter to the Department of Corrections, Nevada's 20 jails in 17 counties, and the three youth centers run by the Division of Child and Family Services. It combines the replies into one spreadsheet for the U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance and says no agency in Nevada fails to take part. Its plan describes no public release of the data.¹² Nationally, a 2022 U.S. Senate investigation found that the Justice Department missed at least 990 prison and arrest-related deaths in fiscal year 2021.¹³

People held for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Marshals Service are kept at the Nevada Southern Detention Center in Pahrump, which CoreCivic owns and runs.¹⁴¹⁵ In 2025 the state planned to use federal grant money to build holding cells and office space for ICE in the Washoe County Jail.¹⁶ Congress requires ICE to publish a report on each death in its custody within 90 days.¹⁷

What has changed

1. 1903Executions moved from the counties to Nevada State Prison. The state has carried out 60 executions since 1860.¹⁸
2. 1905On February 28, a man known as "Red" Wood was taken from the wooden jail at Hazen, in Churchill County, and hanged.¹⁹
3. 1924Gee Jon became the first person in the United States executed with lethal gas, at Nevada State Prison. Nevada killed 32 men in its gas chamber through 1979.²⁰¹⁸
4. 2006Nevada carried out its most recent execution on April 26, the 12th since 1976.²¹¹⁸
5. 2012Miguel Angel Sarabia-Ortega died on January 17 at Desert Springs Hospital in Las Vegas after being held in ICE's Las Vegas hold room.²²
6. 2013The Legislature required the Department of Corrections to request an autopsy after every death in its custody unless next of kin object.⁸
7. 2015–2017Seven people died in the Washoe County Jail in 2015 and six in 2016, after zero to two a year before, the Reno Gazette-Journal found; it put the jail's death rate at almost five times the national average.²³ The jail had stopped announcing deaths, and resumed after the newspaper's reporting.²⁴ The paper also found that county commissioners may not have been inspecting the jail every three months, as state law requires.²⁵
8. 2019Assembly Bill 301 required sheriffs and city jail administrators to report each jail death to their county board or city council within 48 hours, and boards to review jail deaths in public twice a year.¹⁰
9. 2020The Department of Corrections recorded 83 deaths, up from 41 in 2019.¹
10. 2023Assembly Bill 452 created the Office of the Ombudsperson for Offenders, independent in its operations from the Department of Corrections, to protect the health, safety and welfare of people in state prisons.²⁶
11. 2024The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that the Clark County coroner was redacting autopsies of people who died in jails and prisons almost entirely, and expected to take more than a year to produce them, even after the Nevada Supreme Court upheld the newspaper's right to autopsy records.²⁷
12. 2025The Department of Corrections recorded 76 deaths, up from 55 in 2024.¹
13. July 2026The Legislature's Joint Interim Standing Committee on the Judiciary heard presentations on in-custody deaths from the Department of Corrections, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and the Washoe County Sheriff's Office.²⁸ The committee's chair, Sen. Melanie Scheible, said: "This sounds like a lot of unexplained deaths to me."²⁹
14. August 2026The ACLU of Nevada filed suit for the department's records on the killing of Ryan Anthony Warren-Hunt at Southern Desert Correctional Center.⁹

How far the official numbers can be trusted

The department's list is the only official record that names the people who died in Nevada's prisons, but on its own it cannot show how they died. In July 2026 the department gave legislators a breakdown by manner of death: of 166 deaths from 2024 to mid-2026, 98 were natural, 25 accidental, 18 homicides, 13 suicides and 12 still pending. A department official said accidental deaths include overdoses and taking the wrong medication, and the department could not say how its numbers compared with other states.²⁹ Department records gathered by the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project describe causes for most deaths from 2015 to 2020, which the public list leaves out.³⁰

The counts do not line up across sources. The department's totals are higher than those it gave the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2018 and 2019; for 2018 the department lists 45 deaths and the federal table 29.¹⁴ The yearly totals and the named lists also differ by one person in 2018 and 2021.²³

For jails there is no statewide count to check at all. The record depends on what each sheriff tells a county board, and on the sheriff deciding to announce deaths; in Washoe County, deaths went unannounced until the newspaper's reporting.²⁴ Autopsy reports, the one record of cause the department points the public to, have been heavily redacted and slow to arrive in Clark County.²⁷