At least 19,169 people have died in custody in Texas

How deaths in custody are reported in Texas

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) runs 86 prisons; about 90,000 people, two-thirds of the people it holds, live in units without air conditioning.¹ Counties run the jails. The Texas Commission on Jail Standards sets their standards and inspects them; the State Auditor counted 237 jails subject to its inspections in 2025.² The Texas Juvenile Justice Department runs the state's secure youth facilities, among them the Evins, Gainesville, Giddings, McLennan County and Ron Jackson facilities.³

Article 49.18 of the Code of Criminal Procedure requires the head of a jail, a TDCJ prison or halfway house, a state juvenile facility, or a police agency to investigate each death of a person in its custody, or caused by an officer's use of force, and to file a written report of the cause of death with the Texas Attorney General within 30 days. The Attorney General must make each report available to anyone who asks, except any part it decides is privileged.⁴ Executions are not reported: the article leaves out deaths in TDCJ custody by lawful execution.⁴⁵ Failing to report is a crime under section 39.05 of the Penal Code;⁶ the Texas Justice Initiative, a nonprofit that tracks the reports, has written that no one is ever prosecuted for it.⁷

The Attorney General has posted the reports online since 2016.⁷ It also publishes a list on the state's open data portal with the agency, county, name, date of death and report date for each report; the August 2025 edition held 18,388 current reports, almost all of them for deaths from 1983 through July 2025, but no cause or manner of death and no type of custody.⁸ Each report includes a narrative summary, and the Texas Justice Initiative found that 70% of the summaries for deaths in prisons and jails ran under 100 words, with large agencies using templated language.⁹

Jails must tell the Commission on Jail Standards of a death within 24 hours, and since the Sandra Bland Act took effect in September 2017 the commission must appoint a law enforcement agency other than the one that runs the jail to investigate.²¹⁰ The investigating agency, the Texas Rangers or another agency, reports back to the commission, and the sheriff forwards a copy.¹¹ The commission's annual reports count the people who died in county jails, without names: at least 173 people in 2021, 163 in 2022, 154 in 2023, 135 in 2024 and 153 in 2025.¹²

For the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act, the Governor's Public Safety Office files a public records request with the Attorney General every quarter and sends the data on to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance. Its plan says that, to the best of its knowledge, every agency that must report does, and it counts an agency as not participating only once a death goes unfiled.⁶

TDCJ publishes the name, age, date and county of each person it has executed since 1982.¹³ Deaths in immigration detention are reported by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which posts a report on each death in its custody.¹⁴

What has changed

1. 1910On March 3, a crowd broke into a courtroom in the Dallas County Courthouse, seized Allen Brooks, threw him from a second-floor window and hanged him at the corner of Main and Akard streets.¹⁵
2. 1916On May 15, a crowd chained Jesse Washington, a Black teenager, dragged him out of the McLennan County courthouse in Waco and burned him alive beside City Hall before 10,000 to 15,000 people. Sheriff Fleming had ordered his men not to interfere, Mayor John Dollins watched from a City Hall window, and the Waco police chief stood in the crowd.¹⁶
3. 1924-1964Texas took executions from the counties, which had hanged people until 1923, and executed at least 361 people in the electric chair at the Huntsville Unit.¹⁷¹⁸ The Death Penalty Information Center counts at least 755 people executed in Texas before 1976.¹⁹
4. 1930On May 9, a crowd of white people attacked the Grayson County courthouse in Sherman, where Texas Rangers held George Hughes, a Black farmhand, and had put him in the courthouse vault. The crowd set the courthouse on fire and cut the firemen's hoses, blew open the vault that night, dragged his body to the Black business district, hanged it from a tree and burned it, then burned most of the Black-owned businesses in town. Of 14 men indicted, two were convicted, of rioting and arson; no charge named the lynching.²⁰
5. 1982-1992Texas carried out the first execution by lethal injection in the United States, of Charlie Brooks, on December 7, 1982.¹⁷ At Raymond Landry's execution in 1988, the syringe came out of his vein two minutes in and sprayed the drugs toward the witnesses, and he was pronounced dead 40 minutes after he was strapped down.²¹ Carlos DeLuna was executed on December 7, 1989; doubts about the case center on the eyewitness identification and on evidence that another man was responsible.¹³²² Johnny Garrett was executed on February 11, 1992, for something that happened when he was 17. Amnesty International reported that he was severely mentally impaired, and religious leaders across Texas had asked for clemency.²³ Texas executed at least 13 people who were under 18 at the time of the offense before the U.S. Supreme Court ended the practice in 2005.¹⁹
6. 1995-2004Mario Marquez was executed in 1995; experts had measured his IQ at 65.¹⁹ Shaka Sankofa, whom the state listed as Gary Graham, was executed on June 22, 2000, on the testimony of a single, disputed eyewitness, with no physical evidence linking him to the crime, for something that happened when he was 17.²⁴¹³ Cameron Todd Willingham was executed on February 17, 2004; independent experts later concluded that the forensic investigation used against him was flawed, and a jailhouse informant who testified against him was later shown to have received favorable treatment.²²
7. 2011Larry McCollum, 58, collapsed on July 22, three days after he arrived at the Hutchins State Jail in Dallas, a TDCJ unit, and died on July 28. His family's lawyer said his body temperature was above 109 degrees when he reached the hospital, and the autopsy attributed his death to "living in a hot environment." At least nine people died of heat-related causes in Texas prisons that year.²⁵
8. 2015Sandra Bland, 28, was found hanged in her cell in the Waller County jail on July 13, days after a state trooper, Brian Encinia, arrested her.²⁶²⁷ The Commission on Jail Standards then found that the jail was not checking on everyone face to face at least once an hour, and that not all staff had taken the required suicide prevention training.²⁶ Two jailers later admitted under oath, according to the family's lawyer, that they had falsified the log showing a check on her an hour before she was found.²⁸ In 2016 Waller County and the Texas Department of Public Safety agreed to pay her family $1.9 million.²⁹
9. 2017Governor Greg Abbott signed the Sandra Bland Act, which requires an outside law enforcement agency to investigate every death in a county jail and requires jails to divert people with mental illness and substance use toward treatment.²⁷¹⁰
10. 2017-2018A 13-year-old boy died by suicide in May at the Ron Jackson state juvenile facility in Brownwood, and a 16-year-old boy died in May 2018 at the Evins Regional Juvenile Center in Edinburg in what the department called a possible suicide.³⁰
11. 2018TDCJ settled a class action over heat at the Wallace Pack Unit, a prison for older people, and agreed to air-condition it.³¹
12. 2020During the COVID-19 pandemic, at least 700 people died in TDCJ custody, according to the department's records released to the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project, up from 447 the year before.³²
13. 2021-2022Jaquaree Simmons, 23, who had mental illness, died in his cell in the Harris County jail in February 2021, about a week after his arrest. The medical examiner ruled his death a homicide. The sheriff's office found that detention officers had used excessive force, failed to document it or intervene, and made false claims to investigators; it fired 11 employees and suspended six, and in 2023 a grand jury indicted former detention officer Eric Morales for manslaughter. At least 27 people died in the Harris County jail in 2022, the most on record.³³
14. 2022-2023Researchers led by Julianne Skarha of Brown University found that extreme heat likely caused 13% of the deaths in Texas prisons without air conditioning in the hot months of 2001 through 2019, about 271 people. TDCJ's executive director, Bryan Collier, had told lawmakers that no one had died of heat in its prisons since 2012.³⁴ At least 41 people died in prisons without air conditioning during the heat wave of 2023.³¹
15. 2024On April 21, at the Tarrant County jail, detention officer Rafael Moreno knelt for about 90 seconds on the back of Anthony Johnson Jr., 31, a Marine veteran with schizophrenia, while he lay handcuffed, and Lt. Joel Garcia filmed it. The sheriff's office first said he had been pepper-sprayed, "leading to a medical emergency"; the medical examiner ruled his death a homicide by chemical and mechanical asphyxia. A grand jury indicted both men for murder.³⁵³⁶³⁷ Garcia had also been there in 2019 when another jailer knelt on Derick Wynn, 35, as he lay face down in his cell; Wynn died the next morning, and the jailer who knelt on him was later promoted.³⁸ On August 1, the U.S. Department of Justice found that at all five state juvenile facilities it investigated, staff used excessive force and prolonged isolation on children, failed to protect them from sexual abuse by staff and other children, and did not give them adequate mental health care.³
16. 2025An investigation for the Texas Board of Criminal Justice, requested by U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman, found that staff at the Stiles Unit in Beaumont had falsified temperature logs in the summer of 2022, recording 58 to 60 degrees on a day when the lowest reading was 76, and that the warden likely knew.³⁹ In March, Pitman called the heat in the prisons "plainly unconstitutional."³¹
17. 2025-2026At least nine people died in ICE detention in Texas from January 2025 to February 2026, six of them in December and January. Geraldo Lunas Campos, 55, a Cuban man, died in January 2026 at Camp East Montana, a tent camp at Fort Bliss in El Paso that holds more than 3,000 people. The medical examiner ruled his death a homicide by suffocation; the autopsy says he became "unresponsive while being physically restrained by law enforcement." ICE first said he died of "medical distress," then said he had tried to kill himself; federal investigators later wrote that staff had used force on him.⁴⁰
18. 2026On September 22, Judge Pitman found TDCJ deliberately indifferent to the heat and ordered it to air-condition all of its prisons by the end of 2029. TDCJ said it would appeal.¹ By October 7, the State of Texas had executed at least 603 people since 1982, at least seven of them in 2026.¹³ At least 18 people sentenced to death in Texas have been exonerated.¹⁹

How far the official numbers can be trusted

Texas has required these reports for decades, but the Texas Justice Initiative found that reporting was sporadic until 2005, and that until January 2013 TDCJ reported every death to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics but only some of them to the Attorney General.⁷ The Attorney General's list shows the gap: TDCJ filed reports on at least 147 deaths in 2012 and at least 434 in 2013,⁸ while the federal tables count 462 people who died in Texas prisons in 2012.⁴¹

The state's own plan for federal reporting lists the problems that remain: agencies unsure what counts as a death in custody, several agencies filing on the same death, agencies waiting for the autopsy before they report, and small rural agencies assuming the Texas Rangers will file for them.⁶ Investigations can stall. Of 60 jail deaths from 2023 and 2024 that the State Auditor sampled, 30 were still under investigation in 2025, three of them for more than two years, and the commission told auditors it has no power to make the investigating agencies finish.²

Heat deaths are the plainest dispute. TDCJ said in 2022 that no one had died of heat in its prisons since 2012, while researchers attributed about 14 deaths a year to extreme heat in prisons without air conditioning.³⁴ After the 2023 heat wave, a TDCJ spokesperson said underlying medical conditions, not heat, caused the deaths, and at a hearing in August 2024 prison officials conceded that heat had contributed.³¹ The prisons' own temperature records were falsified at the Stiles Unit.³⁹

First accounts often change. The Tarrant County sheriff's office first described Anthony Johnson Jr.'s death as a medical emergency; video later showed a jailer kneeling on him while he was handcuffed.³⁵³⁷ The log at the Waller County jail recorded a check on Sandra Bland that two jailers admitted, according to her family's lawyer, they had filled in ahead of time.²⁸ ICE gave three different accounts of how Geraldo Lunas Campos died.⁴⁰