At least 2,080 people have died in custody in South Carolina

How deaths in custody are reported in South Carolina

The South Carolina Department of Corrections (SCDC) runs the state prisons. When anyone dies in a municipal, county or multijurisdictional jail or overnight lockup, a county prison camp or a state prison, state law requires the person in charge to notify the county coroner at once and to report the death and its circumstances within 72 hours to SCDC's Jail and Prison Inspection Division, which must keep a permanent record of the reports. Knowingly failing to report is a misdemeanor punished by a fine of no more than $100.¹ The coroner must order an autopsy for every death in a jail, lockup, prison camp or state prison, and the records of the death and of any decision about the autopsy must be filed with the same division.² The state's minimum standards for local detention facilities also require jails to phone a death in to the division the same day, or the next business day.³ SCDC does not publish the death reports it collects.³

SCDC's only public count of deaths is one line, "DEATH," in the table of releases in its monthly fact sheet, which gives the number of people released from its custody by death in each of the last three fiscal years (July through June), with executions on a separate line.⁴⁵ The sheet gives no names, facilities or causes. SCDC keeps each death in a spreadsheet with the person's name, date and cause of death and assigned institution, and releases it in answer to public records requests; when University of South Carolina law students asked for it, SCDC redacted each person's medical condition on admission.³

For the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act, the South Carolina Department of Public Safety's Office of Highway Safety and Justice Programs collects reports each quarter from coroners' offices and from correctional and law enforcement agencies.⁶ It began collecting on October 1, 2019. By the department's own account, reporting to it is "essentially voluntary," and the $100 penalty in state law is "de minimis." It gathers deaths from SCDC's quarterly spreadsheets, quarterly case reports from the State Law Enforcement Division (SLED), which is asked to investigate almost every suspicious death in custody, reminders to all 46 county coroners, traffic-fatality records, news searches and outside researchers.⁷ Its public page explains how to report a death and publishes no counts or names.⁶

The South Carolina Department of Juvenile Justice holds children before and after court in a central detention center in Columbia, three evaluation centers and the Broad River Road Complex; some counties run their own juvenile detention.³ Its reports page carries federal settlement monitoring and Prison Rape Elimination Act reports and no count of deaths.⁸ People held for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are counted by ICE, which publishes its own report on each death in its custody.⁹ ICE's list for 2003 to 2013 records nine deaths of people who were held at, or died at, the Columbia Care Center in Columbia, the last in 2010.¹⁰

What has changed

1. 1947On February 17, a mob of white men took Willie Earle, a 24-year-old Black man, from the Pickens County jail and killed him on a road near Greenville. Twenty-six of the 31 men arrested gave statements admitting a part in his death; an all-white jury acquitted them all. His mother's claim under a state law requiring counties to pay the families of lynching victims was denied.¹¹
2. 2018On April 15, fighting at Lee Correctional Institution in Bishopville went on for more than seven hours and left seven men dead and at least 17 seriously hurt. At least 20 people had been killed by other prisoners in South Carolina prisons since the start of 2017.¹²
3. 2019On October 1, the Department of Public Safety began collecting reports of deaths in custody for the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act.⁷
4. 2021Jamal Sutherland, 31, died on January 5 at the Sheriff Al Cannon Detention Center in North Charleston after detention deputies repeatedly used Tasers on him while forcing him from his cell for a bond hearing. The coroner ruled his death a homicide and the sheriff fired the two deputies. The Ninth Circuit Solicitor declined to charge them, and in 2022 the U.S. Department of Justice declined to bring federal charges. Charleston County, the Sheriff's Office and the City of North Charleston paid his family $10 million.¹³
5. 2021The legislature authorized the electric chair and the firing squad as methods of execution, a decade after the state's last execution.¹⁴
6. 2022On April 14, the Department of Juvenile Justice and the U.S. Department of Justice announced a settlement agreement over conditions at the Broad River Road Complex, after a federal investigation opened in 2017 and a findings letter in February 2020.¹⁵
7. 2023In January, Incarceration Transparency at the University of South Carolina School of Law published the first statewide count built from records requests: at least 777 people died in South Carolina prisons, jails and juvenile facilities from 2015 to 2021.³
8. 2023On November 2, the U.S. Department of Justice opened civil rights investigations of the Sheriff Al Cannon Detention Center, citing eight recent deaths, and of the Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center in Richland County, citing six.¹⁶
9. 2024On September 20, South Carolina carried out its first execution in 13 years, after a pause caused by the prison system's inability to obtain lethal injection drugs.¹⁷
10. 2025In January, the Justice Department reported that the Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center vastly underreported violence and left people unsupervised for hours, and that on two occasions jail staff learned that a person had been killed only from callers outside the jail.¹⁸
11. 2025On March 7, the state carried out the first execution by firing squad in the United States in 15 years.¹⁹ SCDC's release tables count six executions in the fiscal year ending June 2025.⁵

How far the official numbers can be trusted

SCDC's own tables disagree with each other. Its fiscal-year release table lists 99 deaths and 6 executions for the year ending June 2025, while its later monthly fact sheet lists 105 deaths and no executions for the same year.⁵⁴

The federal count is incomplete by the state's own admission. Because no South Carolina law requires agencies to report to the Department of Public Safety, the department says it "cannot be entirely confident" that it captures every death.⁷ Comparing the department's data with records gathered directly from facilities, Incarceration Transparency found 33 deaths from October 2019 through 2021 that had never been reported to it, including all three deaths at the Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center, while the department had 28 deaths in jails and prisons that the records requests had missed.³ Thirty-four facilities, including 13 county jails, did not answer the students' requests or did not provide the information the law requires.³

SCDC publishes nothing from the jail death reports it receives.³ The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics published yearly counts through 2019, from 7 to 29 deaths a year in South Carolina jails from 2000 to 2019.²⁰ Of the 1,316 deaths the bureau counted in South Carolina prisons from 2001 to 2019, 61 were homicides, an average of 15 a year for every 100,000 people held.²¹