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 Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction runs the state's prisons. Ohio has 28 state prisons, three of them private, and one of the private prisons holds federal as well as state prisoners. The Office of Criminal Justice Services, part of the Ohio Department of Public Safety, collects death reports for the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act. By the state's own account, no Ohio statute requires law enforcement agencies to report deaths in custody. The prisons department sends the office a quarterly report of deaths in prisons, jails, community-based correctional facilities and halfway houses, and the Department of Youth Services sends one for its facilities.2 The office's yearly reports for 2020 to 2022 give counts by type of facility, month, sex, race and manner of death, with no names.5 It has published no such report for any later year.1
Ohio has 86 full-service jails, 81 run by counties and five by cities, as well as minimum-security jails and short-term city jails that hold people for up to 12 days or 12 hours.2 A state rule requires jail officials to report deaths, suicides and other critical incidents to the prisons department's Bureau of Adult Detention "at times and by methods determined by the bureau."6 Bureau inspectors review each death to see whether the jail broke state jail standards.7 The sheriff who runs a jail generally investigates deaths in it, and a jail faces no consequence for failing to report a death.8 The state cannot close a jail that fails its standards; the law lets the prisons director sue a sheriff to force compliance, a step Governor Mike DeWine called a "nuclear option."7 The bureau's death reviews are not published as a series; reporters have built their counts from the bureau's records.78
A county coroner's records, including the written findings of an autopsy, are public records under Ohio law.9 The Office of Criminal Justice Services finds most deaths during arrest through news reports, then asks the county coroner or medical examiner for the autopsy report.2
Deaths in federal custody are reported by federal agencies, not by the state. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement publishes a report on each death in its custody.10 David Hernandez Colula, 34, died in ICE custody on February 20, 2020, after ICE moved him to the Northeast Ohio Correctional Center in Youngstown.11
The state's yearly counts end with 2022.1 For state prisons they agree closely with the department's own list of deaths, which it released to the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project without names: both show 250 deaths in 2020 and 165 in 2022, while for 2021 the department's list has 123 and the state count 119.420 The yearly prison totals Ohio reported to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2,311 deaths from 2001 to 2019, are within a few deaths of the department's list in the years both cover.2120
The jail counts, 46 in 2020, 63 in 2021 and 49 in 2022,345 are only as complete as jails' own reports to the Bureau of Adult Detention, and nothing happens to a jail that fails to report.8 Many causes were unsettled when the counts were published: in 2021 the manner of death was still pending for more than a quarter of all deaths.4