At least 2,550 people have died in custody in Oklahoma

How deaths in custody are reported in Oklahoma

The Oklahoma Department of Corrections publishes a list of every person who has died in its custody since January 2024, with the person's name, date of death, facility, whether they died at the facility or in a hospital, age and manner of death.¹ It began posting the list in April 2026. The department does not name a cause of death; it gives the manner only once the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner has ruled, which can take months.² The list also carries each person's county and offense of conviction. Deaths from before 2024 are not on it. It includes executions and people the department held in other states under an interstate compact.¹ From November 2026 the department must notify the State Board of Corrections of deaths in its custody, but no law requires it to publish them.³

Oklahoma has about 91 city and county jails.⁴ State law requires every jail and lockup to tell the Oklahoma State Department of Health no later than the next working day when someone dies there, on the department's Jail Incident Report form.⁵⁶ The Health Department inspects each jail at least once a year and posts its inspection results, but it publishes no list or count of the deaths jails report to it.⁷ The Frontier counted 215 deaths in Oklahoma jails from 2009 to 2018 from Health Department data.⁸

State law requires the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner to investigate deaths in prisons and jails, and by the state's own account the medical examiner is its most reliable source on deaths in custody.⁴ The office gives a copy of a finished report to anyone who asks in writing, free to family members and the press.⁹ For the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act, the District Attorneys Council enters the medical examiner's records by hand and checks them against the Health Department's jail records and the Department of Corrections' prison records. It publishes none of this data; a public website for it was only a plan in 2023.⁴

The Office of Juvenile Affairs runs the state's secure youth facilities; in 2019 it said a young woman's death after an incident at the Central Oklahoma Juvenile Center in Tecumseh was the first death of a young person in its custody in at least 15 years.¹⁰ Deaths in immigration detention are reported by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which publishes a report on each death in its custody.¹¹ The Oklahoma County jail has held people for ICE,¹² and in 2025 CoreCivic won a contract with ICE and the Department of Corrections to reopen its Diamondback Correctional Facility near Watonga for immigration detention, while its Cimarron Correctional Facility in Cushing already held ICE detainees.¹³

What has changed

1. 1911Shortly before midnight on May 24, a mob of armed white men broke into the Okfuskee County jail in Okemah, took Laura Nelson and her young son, L.D., from custody and hanged them from a bridge over the Canadian River.¹⁴
2. 2008The U.S. Department of Justice found that conditions at the Oklahoma County jail violated detainees' constitutional rights. It reviewed four deaths there from July 2005 to October 2006 and found the jail had no formal process for reviewing deaths for what went wrong.¹²
3. 2014Clayton Lockett died of a heart attack about 40 minutes after the state began a botched execution with a new three-drug protocol. Oklahoma has carried out 132 executions since 1976.¹⁵
4. 2015A riot at CoreCivic's Cimarron Correctional Facility in Cushing left four men dead.¹³
5. 2019A young woman died after a suicide attempt at the Central Oklahoma Juvenile Center.¹⁰ The Oklahoma Commission on Children and Youth found 21 policy violations at the center, including poor staff training and supervision.¹⁶
6. 2019The Frontier began Cell by Cell, a project to track every death in Oklahoma's jails, noting that in rural counties deaths often went unnoticed and sometimes unreported.⁸
7. 2020Oklahoma County placed its jail under a public trust instead of the sheriff. Advocates counted at least 60 deaths there from 2020 to early 2026.¹⁷
8. 2023Oklahoma Watch found that the Pottawatomie County jail reported only two of the seven deaths there since 2018 to the state Health Department, despite the legal duty to report each one.¹⁸¹⁹
9. 2024The Oklahoman found that the District Attorneys Council had reported 14 prison homicides to the federal government for 2019 to 2023, while Department of Corrections records showed at least 29.²⁰
10. 2025Senate Bill 595 created the Oklahoma Jail Standards Act, which requires jails to notify the Health Department of a death by the next working day.⁵
11. 2026In April the Department of Corrections began publishing its deaths in custody online.² House Bill 3086 added notice of every death in the department's custody to the State Board of Corrections' duties from November 1.³

How far the official numbers can be trusted

For state prisons, the department's lists are consistent with one another. Its online list counts 140 deaths in 2024 and 144 in 2025,¹ and the list it released to the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project also counts 140 for 2024.²¹ The yearly totals Oklahoma reported to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1,575 deaths from 2001 to 2019, are close to that list, within seven deaths in every year both cover.²²²¹ The weak point is the cause of death: the federal count the District Attorneys Council sent for 2019 to 2023 held about half the homicides the department's own records showed.²⁰

Jail deaths are counted only as well as jails report them. The Pottawatomie County jail failed to report five of the seven deaths there since 2018, though state law required each to be reported.¹⁸¹⁹ The Health Department publishes no count of its own, so the fullest jail counts are those built by reporters and advocates.⁸¹⁷