At least 69 people have died in custody in North Dakota

How deaths in custody are reported in North Dakota

The North Dakota Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation runs the State Penitentiary, a maximum-security prison in Bismarck, the James River, Missouri River and Heart River correctional centers, and the Youth Correctional Center in Mandan.¹²³ Women are held at the Dakota Women's Correctional and Rehabilitation Center in New England, which the Southwest Multi-County Correction Center has run under a contract with the department since 2003.⁴ On December 31, 2025, the department held 2,145 people.⁵

The department's website has no page of news releases.¹ Its 2023-2025 Biennial Report and its yearly fact sheet give no count of the people who died in its prisons; the only deaths the biennial report counts are of 48 people under community supervision who died of drug or alcohol use or overdose.⁶⁷⁵ The North Dakota Highway Patrol has investigated some prison deaths together with the department and announced them in news releases.⁸ State law makes the death of anyone in the custody of the department, another correctional facility or law enforcement a reportable death, which must be reported at once to the county coroner or to law enforcement.⁹ The coroner's Report of Death is a public record, but the rest of the coroner's file, including the autopsy, is confidential.¹⁰

North Dakota has 22 county jails and detention centers.¹¹ State law requires the department to inspect every jail, lockup and court holding facility at least once a year against its standards, and lets its director issue an order of noncompliance, and close a facility, when it falls short.¹² Under the North Dakota Correctional Facility Standards, a jail must report a death to the department's Office of Facility Inspections within one hour and file a written significant incident report within 24 hours, must ask the Bureau of Criminal Investigation or the Highway Patrol to investigate every in-custody death, and must notify the county coroner, the State Forensic Examiner and the next of kin.¹³ The department posts inspection reports and orders of noncompliance on its website.¹⁴ It does not publish the death reports jails send it, or any count of jail deaths.

For the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act, the Office of Attorney General wrote in 2023 that "North Dakota does not have a death-in-custody reporting law, nor does it require state and local agencies to report this information to a state agency," and that none of the state's 53 sheriff's offices, 51 police departments, 22 jails and three state correctional facilities took part. The Uniform Crime Reporting manager in the Bureau of Criminal Investigation collects the data, and "all data reported is collected through media searches."¹¹ I have found no state publication of these data.

Jails on reservations, such as the federally run jail on the Spirit Lake reservation overseen by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, are not mentioned in the state's federal reporting plan.¹¹¹⁵ People held for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement are kept in county jails; in June 2026 the Burleigh-Morton Detention Center held about 10 or 11.¹⁶ ICE publishes its own report on each death in its custody.¹⁷

What has changed

1. 1882On October 24, a mob dragged Charles Thurber, a Black man, from his cell in the Grand Forks jail and lynched him. At least 12 people were lynched in North Dakota from 1882 to 1931.¹⁸
2. 1897About 40 men on horseback forced deputies at the Emmons County jail in Williamsport to hand over three Native men, Philip Ireland, Alex Caudatte and Paul Holytrack, and hanged them.¹⁸
3. 1905On October 17, John Rooney was hanged inside the State Penitentiary in Bismarck, where a 1903 law required all executions to take place. He was the last of eight people executed in North Dakota's history.¹⁹²⁰
4. 1915–1973North Dakota abolished the death penalty in 1915 except for treason and murder by a person already serving a life sentence, and abolished what remained of it in 1973.²⁰
5. 1931On January 29, a mob took Charles Bannon from the McKenzie County jail in Schafer and lynched him.¹⁸
6. 2014Dustin Irwin, 25, of Mandaree, died on October 6, three days after he was booked into the Ward County Jail, shortly after a prisoner exchange with Burleigh County. The department found his care "grossly inadequate" and in December issued an order of noncompliance. A full-time state monitor stayed at the jail until July 2017, at a cost to the county of $232,206.²¹²²
7. 2017Nathan Dogskin, 45, died on April 22 after being held in the Grand Forks County Correctional Center. Video showed him on his cell floor for about 17 hours before staff rolled him over. The department found that the jail had not moved him to an observation cell and had not taken him to the hospital when a nurse advised it, and on July 31 placed the jail under an 18-month order of noncompliance.²³
8. 2020Joe Snell, 37, collapsed on March 26 while exercising in the federally run jail on the Spirit Lake reservation. The two officers on duty did not perform CPR or use a defibrillator, and the State Forensic Examiner refused to release his autopsy, citing state confidentiality law. NPR counted at least 19 deaths since 2016 in tribal jails overseen by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.¹⁵
9. 2020Lacey Higdem, 19, died early on June 4, about nine hours after she was booked into the Rolette County jail. Officers did not check on her for nearly three hours despite required hourly checks, and the officer who found her not breathing left to get other officers instead of starting CPR. The department shut the jail for more than two months, citing an ongoing danger to the health and safety of the people held there. In April 2025 her mother accepted a $2 million offer of judgment from the county defendants in her wrongful death lawsuit.²⁴
10. 2025House Bill 1116, requested by the department, was signed on March 18. It lets coroners and the State Forensic Examiner give autopsy reports to the department for its jail inspections. The Grand Forks County coroner, a forensic pathologist, told lawmakers that in her experience investigators of jail deaths lacked interest in working with her office to understand what had happened.²⁵²⁶
11. 2025–2026Patrick Aune, 39, died on October 5, 2025, in the Walsh County Correctional Center in Grafton, about 13 hours after he arrived. In March 2026 the department found that only one officer had been on duty overnight, that safety checks recorded in the log were not supported by video, and that staff failed to respond to the obvious change in his condition. Its order barred the jail from holding anyone overnight.²⁷

How far the official numbers can be trusted

No North Dakota agency publishes a count of deaths in custody. The state's own reporting to the federal government rests on news searches, so a death that is never reported in the news can be missed.¹¹ Jails must tell the department's inspectors of every death within an hour, which should make the inspectors' files the most complete record of jail deaths in the state, but that record is not public.¹³¹⁴ The department's web page lists only two orders of noncompliance; the orders issued after the deaths in Ward County in 2014 and Grand Forks County in 2017 are not posted.¹⁴²¹²³

For state prisons, the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics counted 21 deaths from 2001 through 2019, none of them homicides.²⁸ The department's own list, released to the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project, names 35 people who died from 2005 through 2024. It agrees with the federal totals in most years but records two deaths in 2008, a year the federal count shows none. It also includes people who died while held in Nevada, Wyoming and Arizona or while living in a community placement or a transitional facility, and it records seven deaths in 2020, more than any other year, and three deaths from COVID-19 in 2020 and 2021.²⁹²⁸

For county jails, the Bureau of Justice Statistics counted 38 deaths from 2000 through 2019, from 21 to 24 reporting jails a year, with six deaths in 2018 and none in 2019.³⁰ There is no official count of jail deaths after 2019. Deaths in tribal and federal jails on reservations fall outside every state count.¹¹¹⁵ Even where a death is known, its cause can stay hidden: autopsies are confidential, and the State Forensic Examiner refused to release Joe Snell's.¹⁰¹⁵