At least 128 people have died in custody in Rhode Island

How deaths in custody are reported in Rhode Island

Rhode Island has no county jails. The Rhode Island Department of Corrections runs a unified system: everyone held awaiting trial and everyone serving a sentence, whatever its length, is in its custody, in six facilities at the Adult Correctional Institutions on the Pastore Government Center complex in Cranston.¹ The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics counts Rhode Island's prisons and jails as one integrated system,² and the state lists no local jails at all in its plan for federal death-in-custody reporting.³

Rhode Island has no death-in-custody reporting law; the state says so in that plan.³ The department has said that every death inside its facilities is investigated by its own Special Investigations Unit and by the Rhode Island State Police, and the state Medical Examiner's Office determines the cause of death.⁴⁵ People awaiting trial are held at the Anthony P. Travisono Intake Service Center, alongside newly sentenced men awaiting classification.⁵ The Attorney General's protocol on deadly force and custodial deaths requires a police department to notify the Attorney General at once when a person dies in police custody, and sends a joint team from the Attorney General's office, the State Police and the police department to investigate. The protocol is written for state and municipal police and does not mention the Department of Corrections.⁶

The department does not publish a list or a count of the people who die in its custody. It confirms deaths in statements from its spokesperson to reporters, and it declines to give the names of the people who died.⁷⁸ Its annual population reports for fiscal 2019 and 2020 gave a one-line count of deaths; the fiscal 2021 report gave only deaths from COVID-19.⁹¹⁰¹¹ In 2021, answering a public records request from the COVID Prison Project, the department released its Health Services "Death List," every death from October 20, 1999 to May 2021 with the date, the facility and the cause, and a table of deaths by facility and year. It blacked out every name and date of birth as confidential, and said it held no final reports on any of the deaths.¹²

For the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act, the Public Safety Grant Administration Office collects reports each quarter on a form sent by email or mail, and enters them by hand into the U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance's system. In 2024 the Adult Correctional Institutions were the only one of 51 agencies listed as reporting. The Rhode Island Training School, the state's juvenile detention facility, the Rhode Island State Police, all 38 municipal police departments and the Narragansett Tribal Police were listed as not reporting. The state does not keep a website for the data.³

The Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls, run by the Central Falls Detention Facility Corporation, a quasi-public nonprofit, holds people for the U.S. Marshals Service and for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, with room for 770.¹³ It does not appear in the state's federal reporting plan.³ ICE publishes a report on each death in its custody.¹⁴ Deaths of people held at Wyatt for the Marshals reach the public through the news: in August 2019, Gilbert Delestre, 29, died at Rhode Island Hospital after being held at Wyatt since July 2, and the facility's own warden found that all protocols had been followed.¹⁵

What has changed

1. 1845On February 14, Rhode Island hanged Johnny Gordon, the last of 52 people the state executed. Anti-Irish prejudice likely played a part in his case, and in 2011 Governor Lincoln Chafee pardoned him.¹⁶
2. 1852–1984Rhode Island abolished the death penalty on February 11, 1852. It restored it in 1873 for murder committed by a person serving a life sentence, and removed it from the penal code on May 9, 1984.¹⁶
3. 2008Hiu Lui "Jason" Ng, 34, died on August 6 at Rhode Island Hospital, after being held for ICE at Wyatt, of complications of metastatic liver cancer.¹⁴¹⁷ His family's lawsuit said he had complained of severe pain for months and that staff accused him of faking it; his terminal cancer and a broken spine were diagnosed less than a week before he died.¹⁷ On December 8, ICE moved all 153 of its detainees out of Wyatt.¹⁸ The ACLU of Rhode Island sued in 2009, and in December 2012 a federal judge approved a settlement for his family.¹⁷
4. 2019In March, ICE began sending immigration detainees to Wyatt again.¹⁹ The facility's board voted in April to end the contract, but a federal judge ruled that it could not, and ICE resumed sending people within days.²⁰
5. 2020On June 17, the Attorney General updated the protocol for investigating deadly force and custodial deaths, last revised in 2007.⁶ The department reported eight deaths in its custody during the year, two of them from COVID-19.⁸
6. 2021–2025Timothy McQuesten, 49, died at the Intake Service Center in January. After it was determined that he was at risk of harming himself, he was held alone in a cell on crisis management status, which required staff to watch him. He choked on his face mask on the night of January 18 and was found dead the next day.²¹²² The Attorney General's office and the State Police investigated under the Attorney General's custodial-death protocol, and in July 2022 a grand jury indicted Geoffrey Peters, a correctional officer on duty at the Adult Correctional Institutions, on one count of involuntary manslaughter, alleging that he owed Timothy McQuesten a duty of care and was criminally negligent in carrying it out.²³ The department fired Peters that year. On April 16, 2025, he pleaded no contest to involuntary manslaughter and received a five-year deferred sentence.²²
7. 2023Carol Pona, 64, died of liver cancer in April, hours after the department released her to home confinement; the department does not count her death as one in custody. Brian Rodenas, 27, died by suicide in a disciplinary confinement cell in May.⁷⁴ On September 9, protesters carried seven coffins to an event the mayor of Providence held to open PVDFest, one for each person they counted as having died at the Adult Correctional Institutions that year.⁴
8. 2024On April 29, nine organizations, among them the ACLU of Rhode Island, OpenDoors and Direct Action for Rights and Equality, asked the department's director for an independent investigation after four deaths in about three months, writing that the "secrecy surrounding these deaths only breeds mistrust."²⁴²⁵ Among the people who died that spring was a woman who died hours after arriving at the prison; the department declined to release her name.²⁵ In July, the ACLU of Rhode Island filed federal lawsuits for the families of Dana Leyland, Brian Rodenas and Peter De Los Santos, who died by suicide in 2023. A separate ACLU lawsuit had led the department to set a general limit of 30 days in solitary confinement.²⁶ In July the state also filed its plan for federal death-in-custody reporting.³
9. 2026Ross Amos, 34, died at Rhode Island Hospital on May 31, after telling staff he felt unwell and being sent back to his cell, according to his mother. His family has pressed the department for more openness about deaths in its prisons.²⁷⁵ In June the department said three people had died in its custody during the year, and on July 5 a man was found unresponsive in his cell at the Intake Service Center and pronounced dead.⁵

How far the official numbers can be trusted

The department's own records do not agree with each other. Its annual population report for fiscal 2020, July 2019 through June 2020, says three people died in custody; its Health Services death list has five deaths in those twelve months, two of them suicides.¹⁰¹² The fiscal 2021 report lists two deaths, both from COVID-19; the death list has at least 11 deaths in that year.¹¹¹² The list the department later released to the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project has four deaths for 2018; the Health Services list has five, including two people who died by suicide at the Intake Service Center on the same day, June 3, 2018, and only one of those two deaths is on the later list.²⁸¹²

The yearly totals Rhode Island gave the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics for 2001 through 2019 match the department's table for most years, but not for 2003, 2014 or 2015, when the department's table has one more death each year.²¹² In those federal figures, 27 of the 115 people who died in Rhode Island's prisons and jails from 2001 through 2019 died by suicide, as many as died of heart disease.²

What counts as a death in custody is the department's choice. It does not count people who die after release to home confinement, though they remain under its supervision.⁷ Its list for 2023 has six deaths, all of them men; Carol Pona is not on it.²⁸ In August 2023 two newsrooms reported the department's count for the year, one as five deaths and the other as six; advocates counted seven.⁷⁸⁴

No official source names the people who die in Rhode Island's prisons. The names that are known come from families, lawsuits and reporters.⁷²⁶²⁷ The Health Services list released in 2021 ends in May of that year. The later list released to UCLA gives dates and causes of death for 2022, but for 2023 and 2024 only each person's facility, age and sex, with no date or cause of death.¹²²⁸