At least 730 people have died in custody in Puerto Rico

How deaths in custody are reported in Puerto Rico

The Departamento de Corrección y Rehabilitación (DCR), created in 1993, holds both people awaiting trial and people serving sentences, and since Reorganization Plan No. 2 of 2011 it has also run the juvenile institutions.¹ Under DCR Administrative Order AC-2005-04, the officer who finds a death must write a report on the scene, and regional officials must open a file on every death that is or may have been violent. A 2010 memorandum with the Instituto de Ciencias Forenses (ICF) set up joint investigations of deaths in prisons and requires both agencies to produce yearly statistics. Law 135 of 2020 makes the ICF investigate the cause and manner of any death in prison or in police custody.⁴

The DCR publishes a yearly report on deaths in its institutions, the Informe de Muertes de Confinados Reportadas en las Instituciones Correccionales. Reports for fiscal years 2007-08 through 2023-24, except 2011-12, are posted on the portal of the Instituto de Estadísticas de Puerto Rico;⁵ the page for these reports on the DCR's own website lists no files.⁶ The reports count deaths in the adult system by sex, age, institution, place of death and class of cause, and quote the forensic cause where the ICF has certified one. They give no names and no dates of death.⁴ Only for fiscal year 2010-11 did the department post a register of each death, still without names.⁷ For 2023-24 it reported 68 deaths: 34 from intoxication, most of them from fentanyl, some with xylazine or cocaine; 18 natural; and 13 still awaiting a forensic certificate.⁴

The ICF publishes no count of deaths in custody. The Comisión de Derechos Civiles found that it keeps no separate register of autopsies of people in custody, and obtained its figures only after repeated requests.¹ The ICF has given counts to reporters: 48 deaths of people in DCR custody in 2017 and 47 in 2018, by calendar year.⁸ I have found no published count of deaths in juvenile institutions or in police lockups.

For the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act, the External Resources Division of the Puerto Rico Department of Justice collects the data. Every agency with arrest powers, the DCR included, is to report deaths in its custody to the Puerto Rico Police Bureau, whose incident reports feed the quarterly federal submissions. By the plan's own account, the main problem is delay, caused by short staffing and turnover in the reporting agencies.⁹ I have found no publication of these data.

The Metropolitan Detention Center in Guaynabo is the island's only federal prison.¹⁰ U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has held people there; its list of deaths in its custody from 2003 to 2017 includes Ervin Ruiz-Tabares, from Colombia, who died at the detention center on September 25, 2004, and Glaston M. Smith, from the British Virgin Islands, who died at Centro Médico in Río Piedras on April 4, 2013.¹¹ The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics' series on deaths in state prisons leaves out Puerto Rico.¹²

What has changed

1. 1514–1929Puerto Rico carried out 589 executions, the last a hanging in 1927. The death penalty was abolished in 1929, and the 1952 constitution says that it "shall not exist."¹³
2. 1979People held in Puerto Rico's prisons filed Morales Feliciano v. Barceló, a federal class action over conditions of confinement, on February 7. The court issued a preliminary injunction in 1980 and, finding years of noncompliance, appointed monitors in 1986.¹⁴
3. 2002–2010The ACLU of Puerto Rico documented 53 deaths at the Guerrero Correctional Institution in Aguadilla from 2002 to 2008, most of them of people awaiting trial and many within days of arriving. A Puerto Rico Department of Justice inquiry was closed without a report. The ACLU published its findings in July 2010.¹⁵
4. 2005DCR Administrative Order AC-2005-04 set a uniform protocol for handling a death in a prison, halfway house or treatment center.⁴
5. 2010On March 11, the DCR and the ICF signed a memorandum on joint investigation of deaths in prisons, under which both agencies are to produce yearly statistics.⁴
6. 2011Reorganization Plan No. 2 merged the Corrections Administration and the Juvenile Institutions Administration into the DCR.¹
7. 2016On September 2, after decades of settlements and stipulations, the federal court entered final judgment in Morales Feliciano. The stipulations made health and safety priorities and required medical evaluations on entry and at intervals.¹
8. 2018On October 1, Physician HMO, also known as Physician Correctional, took over health care in the prisons from Correctional Health Services Corporation, which had provided it since 1997.¹
9. 2020Law 135 of September 1, 2020, the law of the Instituto de Ciencias Forenses, required it to investigate the cause and manner of every death in prison or in police custody.⁴
10. 2022Shannel Colón Ponce, 23, died on June 2 at the women's correctional complex in Bayamón.¹⁶ Her family sued the DCR, the Police Bureau, the Secretary of Justice and the prisons' medical contractors. An amended complaint filed with the ACLU of Puerto Rico in 2025 says staff knew for weeks that she was at risk of suicide but held her in a punishment area without constant watch.¹⁶¹⁷
11. 2023In January the ICF finished 119 overdue autopsy reports on deaths in prison going back to 2012.⁸ The same year, the Puerto Rico Department of Justice prepared its plan for federal death-in-custody reporting.⁹
12. 2025The Comisión de Derechos Civiles sent the Governor and the Legislature its report on deaths in DCR custody from 2011 to 2024, counting 726 deaths. It found that overdose was the main cause of death and that deaths rose from 2016 even as the prison population fell, and it recommended that the DCR publish its statistics and that the ICF keep a separate register of autopsies of people in custody.¹¹⁸

How far the official numbers can be trusted

Puerto Rico's official sources do not agree on how many people died. The DCR's published reports give 94 deaths for fiscal year 2021-22 and 84 for 2022-23; the lists it gave the Comisión de Derechos Civiles give 80 for each.¹²³ In April 2023 the Secretary of Corrections told reporters of 95 deaths in fiscal year 2021 and 81 in 2022, a third set of figures.¹⁹ From July 2022 to May 2024 the DCR reported 142 deaths and the ICF 152, and only 115 appeared in both: 27 were only in the DCR's records and 37 only in the ICF's. The ICF had autopsied 50 bodies sent from the DCR that were not on its lists; the DCR confirmed that 29 were people in its custody, denied it for 21, and said 5 came from the federal jail.¹

Causes of death are less certain still. The ICF counted 58 deaths from sepsis from 2017 to 2024, 18 of them in 2019, while the DCR's reports showed 31 from 2011 to 2022. The Commission found that causes for fiscal years 2013-14 and 2014-15 had been checked only by the prisons' own medical staff, and that the causes for 2019-20 were incomplete.¹ Many causes are still open when the yearly figures are given: in September 2019 the department said it had resolved 3 of the 14 deaths that year that were not from natural causes,²⁰ and in April 2023 it said the causes of about 35 deaths since January were not yet known.¹⁹

No official source names the people who died. When the ACLU of Puerto Rico asked for the names of everyone who had died at the Guerrero prison since 2002, the DCR did not give them.¹⁵ Of 726 deaths from 2011 to 2024, the DCR gave the Commission reports of only 84 investigations by its Oficina de Investigaciones del Sistema Correccional, 68 of them with a forensic report. The department's reports counted 110 people awaiting trial among the dead from 2012 to 2021, but left 211 deaths without saying whether the person had been tried, and for 2023-24 said so for none. In the first seven years the Commission studied, 106 people died within their first year in custody and 44 within their first month.¹