0 people, most recent first. Choose a name, or a dot on the map.
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.
The Utah Department of Corrections (UDC) runs the state prisons. County jails, which are run by county sheriffs, also hold people for the state prisons, federal agencies and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).1 Since 2023, health care in the prisons has been the responsibility of the Utah Department of Health and Human Services rather than UDC.2
Each county jail must report to the Utah Department of Criminal Justice before June 15 of each year the number of people who died in its custody the year before and, for each person, their name, gender, race, ethnicity, age and any known medical diagnosis or disability, the date, time and place of death, the arresting agency, a brief description of the circumstances, and the known causes and contributing factors.1 UDC must report its own count of deaths with their causes and contributing factors, including deaths during transport for medical care or in an outside hospital, but not deaths of state prisoners held in county jails, which fall to the jails.3 The Department of Criminal Justice compiles the reports, removes identifying information as the law requires, and sends the compilation to the Legislature's Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice Interim Committee and the Utah Behavioral Health Commission before November 1.3
What the public sees is a set of yearly counts. The Department of Criminal Justice publishes a dashboard, "Utah Mortality in Custody," with the number of deaths each year in county jails and in UDC prisons since 2017, broken down by cause, age, time served, sex, race and legal status, and with jails grouped by size and county population; it names no one and no facility.4 Earlier reports in PDF covered 2013 to 2021.56 Names are public only on request: a county jail must, when asked, release a report giving the name, cause of death and facility of each person who died in its custody, a requirement first added in 2020.17 UDC announces few deaths. In 2025, when the dashboard counted 20 deaths in UDC custody, the department's press release page announced one.48
For the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act, agencies enter each death in a form in the Utah Criminal Justice Information System. The state's plan counts 25 jails and 140 arresting agencies and says no agency is known to have refused to report.9 The dashboard covers only county jails and UDC prisons; no count is published for juvenile detention or police lockups.4 ICE publishes its own report on each death in its custody.10 Its list for 2003 to 2017 includes two people who died in Utah hospitals after being held in county jails: Amra Militec, held at the Weber County Jail, who died in Ogden on March 20, 2011, and Santiago Sierra-Sanchez, held at the Utah County Jail, who died in Provo on July 12, 2014.11
The jail counts rest on what each county chooses to send. In the first state report, ten counties gave no numbers at all for 2013 and 2014. That report counted 16 jail deaths in 2016, when the Tribune had counted at least two dozen from county records.17 The state later raised its 2016 count to 19, still below the 25 jail deaths the Standard-Examiner documented that year.19 The 2013-2021 report lists 20 of the 120 jail deaths it counts with no age or sex given, all from 2013 to 2016.5
The published figures do not always agree with each other. The 2013-2021 report counts 11 jail deaths in 2021, while the dashboard shows 12.54 For prisons, the dashboard's counts for 2017 to 2019 (20, 17 and 21) match those UDC reported to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.420 Because neither source names anyone, a reader cannot check whether a particular death was counted.