At least 2,645 people have died in custody in Tennessee

How deaths in custody are reported in Tennessee

The Tennessee Department of Correction (TDOC) holds people in state-run prisons and in prisons run under contract by CoreCivic, a private company; the state's federal reporting plan counts 12 state prisons, 7 private prisons and 113 county jails.¹² A 2017 law, Tennessee Code Annotated Section 38-10-102, requires every state, county and municipal law enforcement and correctional agency, and the courts, to report "law enforcement-related deaths" to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI). These include any death of a person in custody, "whether in prison, in a jail, or otherwise."¹³ Jails and prisons report each death on a CJ-9 form.⁴

Each year the TBI publishes a report, Law Enforcement-Related Deaths in Tennessee, with a section on deaths in jails and prisons. It gives statewide totals by month, sex, age, race, cause, place of death and conviction status, and no names, facilities or counties. The TBI says it does not edit or alter what agencies send it, and once a report is published it is not updated, even when an agency later corrects its records.⁴

TDOC publishes a yearly Statistical Abstract with a page on deaths: the number of people who died in its custody during the fiscal year (July through June), with tables by institution and manner of death and by whether the death occurred in a hospital or a prison. In the year ending June 2026, 141 people died in TDOC custody, 75 of them in a hospital and 65 in a prison; the cause of 4 deaths was still waiting on a death certificate. The department says a medical examiner, coroner or physician must examine the body, and that each death is investigated and reported to the TBI.⁵ TDOC does not publish the names of the people who died.⁵⁶

No agency publishes a list of deaths in county jails, by name or by county; jail deaths appear only inside the TBI's statewide totals.⁴ News outlets keep their own counts: Action News 5 counted 13 deaths in the Shelby County jails in Memphis in 2025.⁷

For the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act, the Department of Finance and Administration's Office of Criminal Justice Programs collects the TBI's data each quarter, and TDOC and the Department of Children's Services also report to it directly. Department of Children's Services rules require the 26 county juvenile detention centers to report a death to the department immediately.¹ People held for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement are counted by ICE, which publishes its own report on each death in its custody.⁸

What has changed

1. 1906On March 19, a mob took Ed Johnson from the Hamilton County jail in Chattanooga and lynched him on the Walnut Street Bridge, in defiance of a U.S. Supreme Court order protecting him. The Court then held its only criminal trial and found Hamilton County Sheriff Joseph Shipp and five others guilty of contempt.⁹
2. 1916Tennessee began executing people in the electric chair; 125 people were electrocuted from 1916 to 1960. TDOC says no official record exists of the number or names of people hanged before 1913.¹⁰
3. 2017Section 38-10-102 was enacted, requiring agencies to report deaths in custody to the TBI. Its sponsor, Rep. Harold M. Love Jr., said he wanted every death counted.³
4. 2020In January, a Comptroller's performance audit found that TDOC had not ensured that its data on deaths and other serious incidents was valid and reliable.¹¹ Auditors found that eight deaths recorded as natural were five drug overdoses, two homicides and a suicide.¹²
5. 2021In November, WBIR in Knoxville reported that prisons and jails had reported 337 deaths to the TBI for 2017 through 2020, while records it obtained showed 602, including 153 unreported deaths in 2020 alone. The TBI scheduled an audit of its data for February 2022.³
6. 2021TDOC records showed that 186 people died in Tennessee prisons during the year, 39 of them in deaths recorded as accidental, most of which the department said were drug-related. Sixty incarcerated people had died of COVID-19 since the pandemic began.¹³
7. 2022In April, Gov. Bill Lee stopped an execution about an hour before it was to take place and paused all executions for an independent review.¹⁴ The review, released December 28, found that TDOC had repeatedly failed to test lethal injection drugs as its own protocol required, running the required endotoxin test for only one of the eight executions it prepared from 2018 to 2022.¹⁵
8. 2024On August 20, the U.S. Department of Justice opened a civil rights investigation of Trousdale Turner Correctional Center, run by CoreCivic, which had reported at least 196 assaults, two murders and 15 deaths classified as accidental between July 2022 and June 2023.²
9. 2025Senate Bill 1115 became law as Public Chapter 460. When the death rate at a privately run prison holding state prisoners is twice that of a comparable state-run prison, TDOC must cut its population by 10 percent.¹⁶
10. 2025On May 22, Tennessee carried out its first execution since 2020; three more followed by August 2026.¹⁰
11. 2025Thirteen people died in the custody of the Shelby County Sheriff's Office, twelve of them at the men's jail at 201 Poplar.⁷ In January 2026, Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris announced a plan to address conditions at the jail.¹⁷

How far the official numbers can be trusted

The TBI's totals are only as complete as what agencies choose to send. For 2017 through 2020 they missed nearly half the deaths that local and state records showed; a TBI spokesperson said the bureau "can only compile what they send us—nothing more and nothing less."³ The TBI states that a published report is not updated when agencies later change their data.⁴ In 2025, 34 correctional facilities reported at least one death, and in 2024, 30 reported 188 deaths; the reports do not say which facilities reported, or whether any failed to.⁴¹⁸

TDOC's own records have been wrong about how people died. The 2020 audit found deaths recorded as natural that were overdoses, homicides and a suicide, and health files missing death certificates.¹² TDOC counts by fiscal year and the TBI by calendar year, so the two cannot be matched directly; in the TBI's 2025 report, 162 of the 216 people who died in jails and prisons were serving prison sentences and 45 had not been convicted.⁴⁵ The longest consistent prison series is federal: the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics counted 1,554 deaths in Tennessee prisons from 2001 to 2019, rising from 51 in 2001 to 121 in 2018, and that series ends in 2019.¹⁹