At least 1,309 people have died in custody in New Jersey

How deaths in custody are reported in New Jersey

The New Jersey Department of Corrections runs 9 state prisons, 11 residential community release programs and an assessment center. Each of the state's 21 counties runs its own jail, and the Juvenile Justice Commission runs 3 secure juvenile facilities.¹ State law requires medical examiners to investigate every death in a correctional facility.²

Since 2019, state law has required the Attorney General's Office to investigate any death that occurs while a person is in custody and to present the case to a grand jury.³ Under Attorney General Directive 2019-4, law enforcement agencies must notify the Attorney General of any death in their custody. The directive does not cover the Department of Corrections, but a state regulation requires prisons to notify the prosecutor of the county that committed the person by the next business day, which sets off the same investigation; every correctional facility except the federal prisons reports deaths to the Attorney General through the county prosecutor. The Office of Public Integrity and Accountability records each person's name, date of birth, sex, race, facility, date, place and manner of death in a spreadsheet, which it sends each quarter for the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act.¹ The Attorney General announces grand jury decisions in individual cases, naming the person who died.³

The Department of Corrections has published two counts of deaths in its prisons. Its first Healthcare Delivery and Outcomes report, issued in 2026, counted 16 deaths in the first half of 2025 and summarized deaths from 2018 through 2024 by manner, without names. It said later 2025 deaths could not be reported yet because medical examiner findings take six months or more.⁴ Separately, the Office of the Corrections Ombudsperson, the state's independent prison oversight agency, published its first report on deaths in custody in December 2025: 336 people died while serving state prison terms from 2018 through 2024.²⁵ Neither report names anyone.⁴²

The department inspects county jails and municipal lockups every year.⁶ A county jail must send the department a form within 72 hours of any death, giving the person's name, age, race, where they died and how.⁷ The department publishes no count of these deaths and no jail inspection reports on its reports page.⁸ In 2026 the Ombudsperson told lawmakers that county jails, unlike state prisons, have no independent oversight body with the authority to investigate complaints, including complaints about deaths.⁹

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement publishes a report on each death in its custody.¹⁰ Boubacar Bah, held at the Elizabeth Detention Facility, died on May 30, 2007, at a hospital in Newark of a traumatic brain injury.¹¹ Jean Wilson Brutus became ill on December 12, 2025, the day ICE moved him to Delaney Hall in Newark, and was pronounced dead that evening at University Hospital.¹² Edwin Lopez Cornejo, held at Delaney Hall, collapsed and was pronounced dead at the same hospital on August 1, 2026.¹³¹⁰ The federal Bureau of Prisons publishes no list of deaths at FCI Fort Dix or FCI Fairton; three men died at Fort Dix in 2025, among them Jarrette Morales, 25, in November.¹⁴

What has changed

1. 1886On March 5 in Eatontown, a mob broke into the jail where a constable had locked up Samuel "Mingo" Johnson, 66, beat him to death and hung his body over the cell door. The constable had told locals he would not be surprised if Johnson was lynched before morning.¹⁵
2. 2007New Jersey abolished the death penalty, the first state to do so by legislation since 1965. It had carried out 361 executions before 1976 and none after reinstating the death penalty in 1982.¹⁶
3. 2019A new law, N.J.S.A. 52:17B-107(a)(2), made the Attorney General's Office responsible for investigating every death in custody and presenting it to a grand jury.³¹
4. 2020Medical examiners confirmed 48 COVID-19 deaths in state prisons from 2018 through 2024, nearly all in the first two months of the pandemic. The Ombudsperson found that COVID deaths had at first been over-reported.²
5. 2021Dan Gelin, 27, died on December 3 of injuries from a fight with another man at the Essex County Correctional Facility in Newark. Jail medical staff had cleared him to return to his housing unit. In August 2025 a state grand jury declined to charge any officer.³
6. 2025In November, WHYY counted at least seven deaths in 12 months at the Hudson County Correctional Facility in Kearny, among them John Patrick Finucane, 32. The county changed its jail health care provider.¹⁷
7. 2025In December, the Corrections Ombudsperson published its report on deaths in state prisons from 2018 through 2024 and recommended that the department publish regular reports on deaths in custody.²⁵
8. 2026From January to July, four young men in their 20s died in state prisons. Medical examiners ruled three deaths in custody homicides between January and April, and three more unnatural deaths over the summer remained under investigation; three of those six deaths were at Garden State Youth Correctional Facility.⁹

How far the official numbers can be trusted

The two official counts of prison deaths cover different people. The Ombudsperson counts people who died while serving state prison terms;² the department's report also counts residents of community release programs, people from other states held in New Jersey prisons, and parole violators in outside hospitals.⁴ For 2018 through 2024, the Ombudsperson found 83 percent of deaths natural and the department 84 percent.²⁴ The Ombudsperson's yearly totals appear only in a bar chart, without the numbers.²

Records of the department's prison deaths released through public records requests and compiled by the UCLA Law Behind Bars project list 339 deaths for 2018 through 2024, three more than the Ombudsperson's count.¹⁸² For 2019 they list 40 deaths; the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics counted 43.¹⁸¹⁹

For county jails there is no public count to check. The death forms jails send to the department and the quarterly spreadsheet kept by the Attorney General's office are not published, and a Hudson County commissioner said the county learns about deaths in its own jail well after the fact, and only when it presses for information.⁷¹¹⁷