At least 4,731 people have died in custody in Pennsylvania

How deaths in custody are reported in Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania's reporting of deaths in custody rests on the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act. The Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency asks state prisons, county jails and police to send it a form for each death every quarter, citing only the federal law.¹ The commission publishes the reports on a public dashboard that names each person and gives the date, age, county, agency, type of facility and cause of death, for deaths from October 2019 on. The dashboard mixes deaths in prisons and jails with deaths during arrest, and agencies name themselves in many different ways.² No state law requires the reports. A 2025 bill to make agencies report every death in custody to the Attorney General within 30 days, with fines for failing to, was referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee and went no further.³⁴

The Department of Corrections runs the state prisons. Its annual statistical report counts deaths only as one kind of release from prison: 193 in 2023 and 211 in 2024.⁵

The counties run their own jails. The department's Office of County Inspections and Services inspects them against the state's county jail regulations, but has no day-to-day authority over them; any corrective action after a citation is up to the warden and the county prison board, and inspection reports must be requested from each county. The office posts the counties' own yearly counts of deaths in their jails, by county and by manner of death, and says it is not responsible for the figures the counties report.⁶

Deaths in immigration detention are reported by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which publishes a report on each death in its custody.⁷ Frankline Okpu, 37, died in December 2023 while held at the Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Philipsburg,⁸ and Chaofeng Ge, 32, died there on August 5, 2025.⁹

What has changed

1. 1834Pennsylvania became the first state to end public executions, moving the gallows into county prisons. In 1913 the state took executions over from the counties and turned to electrocution; it carried out 350 executions from 1915 to 1962.¹⁰
2. 1911A mob dragged Zachariah Walker from a hospital in Coatesville, where he was held under arrest, and burned him alive in a field outside town while some 1,600 people watched. He was the last person lynched in Pennsylvania.¹¹
3. 2013–2014The U.S. Department of Justice found that the State Correctional Institution at Cresson held prisoners with serious mental illness and intellectual disabilities in solitary confinement in ways that violated the Eighth Amendment and the Americans with Disabilities Act, then found the same across the state prison system. At the prisons it toured, more than 70 percent of documented suicide attempts from January 2012 to May 2013 took place in solitary confinement units.¹²
4. 2015Governor Tom Wolf announced a moratorium on executions; Pennsylvania had carried out three since 1976. Governor Josh Shapiro continued the moratorium in 2023 and asked the General Assembly to repeal the death penalty.¹⁰
5. 2019The Commission on Crime and Delinquency began collecting reports of deaths in custody; its public dashboard begins with deaths on October 1, 2019.²
6. 2020Deaths in state prisons rose from 171 in 2019 to 239 in 2020.³
7. 2021Eighteen people died in Philadelphia's jails, the highest death rate there in recent memory, during a year of riots, severe staff shortages, a federal lawsuit and a grand jury investigation.¹³
8. 2022The Allegheny County Jail recorded 13 deaths in the two years after March 2020, more than double its earlier rate, though only one was from Covid-19.¹⁴
9. 2023PennLive and the Pittsburgh Institute for Nonprofit Journalism published the first full database of deaths in Pennsylvania's jails. They found at least 65 deaths in jails in 2022, of which only 40 had been reported as required.¹⁵
10. 2025The Pennsylvania Prison Society found that the death rate in county jails rose 60 percent from 2015 to 2023, and that the rate in state prisons, though down from its pandemic peak, was 17 percent higher than in 2015.¹⁶

How far the official numbers can be trusted

For state prisons, the official counts mostly agree. The commission's dashboard lists 159 deaths in state prisons in 2023 and 189 in 2024;² the department's list of deaths released to the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project names 158 and 190 people for those years.¹⁷ The department's annual reports count more, 193 and 211, because they count deaths among all releases without saying what else they include.⁵ Pennsylvania's reports to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2,887 prison deaths from 2001 to 2019, are within five deaths a year of the department's list for 2015 to 2019.¹⁸¹⁷

Jail deaths are where the counts fall apart. The counties reported 56 deaths in their jails in 2022, 59 in 2023 and 50 in 2024 to the Department of Corrections,⁶ while the commission's dashboard lists 34, 38 and 28 deaths in county jails for the same years.² Reporters found at least 65 jail deaths in 2022.¹⁵ Philadelphia's four jails reported 14 deaths to the state for 2021,⁶ in a year when the Philadelphia Inquirer counted 18.¹³ The Allegheny County Jail reported two deaths in each of 2020 and 2021,⁶ and its officials told the county's oversight board that one death went unreported because the man had been moved to a hospital and was "no longer on our count."¹⁴

Causes are not always right either. The dashboard lists four deaths as executions, three of them in state prisons in 2025 and 2026,² although Pennsylvania has carried out only three executions since 1976 and has held none under the moratorium in place since 2015.¹⁰