At least 985 people have died in custody in Oregon

How deaths in custody are reported in Oregon

The Oregon Department of Corrections holds about 12,000 people in 12 prisons.¹ An administrative rule requires it to report each death to the Oregon State Police and the State Medical Examiner, who determines the cause. Beyond that rule, by the state's own account, no Oregon law requires prisons, jails or police to report deaths in custody to any state agency.² The department announces each death in a short news release that gives the person's name, age, prison and date of death, but not the cause.²¹ It also sends the Legislature legally required quarterly reports listing deaths in custody, which Street Roots obtained from the Legislature.³

Oregon has 30 county jails and eight city jails.⁴ State law sets 14 basic standards for jails, among them a personal check on every prisoner at least once an hour and written policies for emergency medical and dental care;⁵ it says nothing about care for medical and mental health conditions short of an emergency.⁶ Beyond those standards, the Oregon State Sheriffs' Association, a private association, inspects each county jail every two years against its own standards, which are "completely voluntary."⁷ No state agency oversees health care in jails or keeps a count of jail deaths.⁶ Jails send details of their deaths to the Sheriffs' Association once a year, also voluntarily, and the association passes them to the Criminal Justice Commission as a yearly spreadsheet.² Some sheriffs announce deaths themselves: the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office posts a release when someone dies in its jails and names the person once the family has been told.⁸

The Criminal Justice Commission gathers death reports for the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act from the prison releases, the jail spreadsheet, news reports and the records of the State Medical Examiner and the Multnomah and Clackamas county medical examiners. It receives no information about deaths in juvenile facilities, which the Oregon Youth Authority runs, and it has trouble learning how and when people in state custody died when they die in hospitals outside Oregon.² The Oregon Department of Justice keeps a public list of deaths in which police used deadly force, which the commission uses for deaths during arrest.²⁹

Deaths in immigration detention are reported by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which publishes a report on each death in its custody.¹⁰

What has changed

1. 1914–1984Oregon voters abolished the death penalty in 1914, restored it in 1920, abolished it again in 1964 and approved the present death penalty law in 1984.¹¹ The state carried out 122 executions before 1976.¹²
2. 1996–1997Oregon carried out its only two executions since 1976, the first in 34 years.¹¹¹²
3. 2019OPB, KUOW and the Northwest News Network found that at least 306 people had died after being taken to county jails in Oregon and Washington since 2008, a number unknown until then in part because neither state fully tracked jail deaths.¹³ The Legislature then passed House Bill 3289, directing the Criminal Justice Commission to study jail data, jail health care and deaths.⁴
4. 2020The Criminal Justice Commission reported that it could not count jail deaths: not every jail answered its questions, its count of seven jail deaths in 2019 was too low, and jail records often did not show that a person had died in custody.⁴
5. 2020–2021Covid-19 killed at least 42 people in Oregon's state prisons by March 2021.¹⁴
6. 2021Disability Rights Oregon investigated ten deaths in eight Oregon jails from January to October 2020, six of them suicides, and found that many could have been prevented with adequate health care, oversight and diversion from jail.⁶
7. 2022Governor Kate Brown commuted the sentences of all 17 people on Oregon's death row; executions had been under a moratorium since 2011.¹²
8. 2022Street Roots found that the department's quarterly reports to the Legislature listed no cause for 78 of the 123 deaths in its custody from January 2020 to June 2022.³
9. 2022The state paid $2.5 million to the family of Brett Bruns, 19, who died by suicide in 2019 while committed to the Oregon Youth Authority and living in a group facility it contracted with in Eugene. The family's lawsuit said staff had put him on suicide watch without taking away his shoelaces.¹⁵
10. 2023–2024Ten people died in Multnomah County's jails from 2022 to April 2024, more than in the previous seven years combined, seven of them from May 2023 on. The sheriff asked the Oregon State Police to review every death investigation from 2023 and brought in the National Institute of Corrections to assess the jails.¹⁶

How far the official numbers can be trusted

Oregon has no official count of jail deaths to trust. The state's own study found that the Criminal Justice Commission could not identify every death in a jail from jail records, and that finding them all required checking jail by jail.⁴ The jail figures sent for federal reporting depend on what sheriffs choose to send their association.²

For prisons, the department's list of deaths released to the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project names 420 people who died from 2015 to 2024, with no cause of death for any of them.¹⁷ Its yearly totals match those Oregon reported to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics for 2016 to 2018, and run five higher for 2015 and two higher for 2019.¹⁸¹⁷ When Street Roots asked why most deaths in the quarterly reports had no cause, the agencies involved each pointed to another as responsible for that information.³