At least 186 people have died in custody in South Dakota
54 of them are recorded here one by one, 51 by name. Another 132 are known only as numbers: deaths the official yearly counts report, for the same years, beyond the people recorded here.
At least 8 people have died in custody in South Dakota so far in 2026. The most recent named here is Michael Kaiser, who died on September 8, 2026 at South Dakota State Penitentiary.
Each dot is one of them, held in a jail, prison or lockup, or executed by the state. Some died after abuse by officers; others from withdrawal, overdose or untreated illness; many by suicide. Almost all of them show the state’s neglect of the people in its custody.
This is an undercount: many deaths are never made public, and older records are hard to find.
0 people, most recent first. Choose a name, or a dot on the map.
Their names
When they died
One mark per person, by the year they died. Choose the box at the side to see every decade. Coverage is uneven: recent deaths come mostly from local news since 2000, older ones from official lists and historical newspapers, so the shape shows what was recorded as much as how many people died.
What official counts show
The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics has published yearly counts of deaths in South Dakota's state prisons, as the state reported them, for 2001 to 2019, but not who died. Most of those deaths, especially from illness, never appear in the news, so far fewer are named here. The gap is people still to be identified.
These are the counts the state itself reported to the federal government. The series ends in 2019 and has not been updated since.
Each bar is a source and the years its records cover. Sources checked on a schedule are searched again for new records; the others were collected once.
Local news2000–today · Searched again every night · News coverage searched county by county and year by year
How deaths in custody are reported in South Dakota
The South Dakota Department of Corrections runs the state's prisons. Since 2020 it has posted short press releases naming people who die in its custody, filed by year on its news page; nothing earlier is posted.1 By agency policy the department makes no public statement about the cause of death of a person in its custody, and it refers anyone who asks to the coroner of the county where the death happened, whose final report may be released "if/when the death is determined to be a public record."2 Some releases call a death an "apparent suicide"; others say only that the person was found unresponsive.34 In 2025, most of what the public learned about overdose deaths in the prisons came from the Attorney General's office rather than from the department.5
State law makes the death of anyone held in a state, county or city correctional facility a case the county coroner must investigate.6 The department's yearly statistical reports count deaths by fiscal year, July to June, including South Dakotans held in other states' prisons, and say causes are determined by a medical examiner outside the department.7 The Division of Criminal Investigation, part of the Attorney General's office, investigates prison deaths together with the department's Office of the Inspector General, which the department created in March 2023.38
County jails are run by sheriffs, and no state agency counts the deaths in them. The state's jail law sets no inspection by any state agency and no duty to report a death.9 Each county or other governing body writes its own jail rules,10 and the only outside supervision the law provides is that a circuit judge "may visit, inspect, and supervise" the jails in the circuit.11 The Division of Criminal Investigation looks into a jail death when the local agency asks, as the Pennington County Sheriff's Office and the Rapid City Police Department did after Abbey Lynn Steele's death in 2022.12
For the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act, the South Dakota Department of Public Safety gathers reports from the state prisons and the Highway Patrol and asks other agencies to report each death on a spreadsheet, and it sends the results to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance each quarter. Its plan says that "South Dakota does not have a law requiring the submission of such report," and that it lacks the leverage to make counties and cities report when they receive no federal justice grants through it. The plan promised a page on the department's website with the reporting form and training.13 I have found no published South Dakota data from this collection.
Jails on the state's reservations, run by tribes or by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, fall outside every state count. The bureau commissioned an outside review of 16 deaths in custody from 2016 to 2020, one of them at the Rosebud Sioux Tribe Adult Corrections Facility in 2019, and did not publish it. The Project On Government Oversight obtained a redacted copy and found that the bureau had reported fewer deaths to the U.S. Justice Department than the review covered, and that the review itself named inconsistent reporting of in-custody deaths as a central problem.14 In December 2022 Congress directed the Interior Department's Inspector General to follow up on the troubled tribal jails program.15
What has changed
1877–1947Fourteen people were executed in what is now South Dakota before the state abolished the death penalty in 1915. It was restored in 1939, and George Sitts was electrocuted in 1947, the last execution before 1976.16
1999Gina Score, 14, collapsed in July during a forced 2.7-mile run at the state's boot camp for girls in Plankinton, and lay on the ground for three hours before dying of heatstroke; staff thought she was faking. Her temperature reached at least 108 degrees. By December 2000 the girls' boot camp had been dismantled, and the legislature had set up an office to monitor juvenile corrections.17
2007–2019South Dakota carried out five executions by lethal injection. The last was in November 2019, after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review a case in which jurors had relied on anti-gay beliefs.16
2020The Department of Corrections began posting press releases naming people who die in its custody.1
2022Jordan Ward, 30, died of a fentanyl overdose in his cell at the State Penitentiary in Sioux Falls on August 4. A lawsuit his father filed in 2025 says it took 20 minutes for an officer to come back after people nearby shouted for help, and 10 more for a nurse to arrive, without naloxone. The department denies wrongdoing.18 Abbey Lynn Steele, 20, whose heart stopped in the Pennington County Jail on November 16, died on December 2. People held in the jail told her mother that Abbey "kept pushing the button for help." The Division of Criminal Investigation found that neither the arresting officer nor jail staff did anything wrong, and the video was not released.12
2023Robert "Berta" Enoch, 35, a member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Sioux Tribe, was found unresponsive in a cell at the Charles Mix County Jail in Lake Andes on April 3 and pronounced dead at a hospital in Wagner. Eight days later his state death record still gave no cause.19 In July, the state Law Enforcement Officers Standards Commission found that the deputy who brought him in had no training to recognize an overdose and that the jail had no overdose policy, and decided not to reprimand him. His death certificate lists methamphetamine toxicity.20
May 2025After two men, Jason Garreau and Joshua Arrow, died days apart at the State Penitentiary complex, families and former prisoners led by Tracii Barse protested outside, asking the department to be honest and open with families, who, Barse said, are left to wonder what happened for days, weeks or longer.4
2025The department counted 19 deaths in fiscal year 2025, the most since at least 2018.3 Three men died on three days in a row in September, the week the legislature approved a 1,500-bed, $650 million men's prison in Sioux Falls.3 By South Dakota Searchlight's count, 25 people died in state prisons during calendar year 2025, eight of them from confirmed or suspected overdoses, most tied to the synthetic drug K2, and four by suicide according to their death certificates.5
How far the official numbers can be trusted
The department's published counts are short and unnamed. Its statistical reports give 12 deaths in fiscal year 2018, 12 in 2019, 14 in 2020, 14 in 2021, 11 in 2022, 11 in 2023, 14 in 2024 and 19 in 2025, and sort them as natural, suicide, accident or execution.21227 Reports before fiscal year 2022 are not posted,23 and the earliest year any posted report covers is fiscal year 2016.7 A separate 2023 data brief counted 75 deaths from July 2017 to that summer.24 Because the counts run by fiscal year and the named releases by date, the two cannot be checked against each other without a list of names, which the department does not publish.
Before 2020, the yearly totals South Dakota gave the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics are the only official count by calendar year: 140 deaths in prisons from 2001 through 2019, 17 of them suicides, not counting executions.25 They mostly agree with the department's own unnamed list of deaths, which it released to the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project. The two match exactly for 2014 through 2017, but the department's list has two more deaths than the federal count for 2013, and one more for each of 2018 and 2019 once executions are set aside.2625
For jails there is no state number to check. The federal count, from what jails reported, shows 38 deaths in South Dakota's local jails from 2000 through 2019, 14 of them in 2015 and 2016 alone, and stops there.27 Since then, jail deaths have come to light one at a time, through families and reporters, and their causes have been settled by death certificates days or weeks later: in Abbey Lynn Steele's case the certificate listed methamphetamine toxicity and pneumonia, while her mother said doctors had told her something else.12
South Dakota Searchlight reported that more than half of the 2025 deaths had been preventable.5 The department's reports say that 99 of the deaths from fiscal years 2016 through 2025, 81 percent, were natural or medical.7 A death being ruled natural says how a person died, not whether the death could have been prevented.