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 Washington State Department of Corrections publishes a yearly count of the people who died in its prisons and in partial confinement, such as work release, broken down by manner of death, for 2020 through 2024. It does not report the deaths of people on community supervision.1 Under RCW 72.09.770, passed in 2021, the department must convene a review of every unexpected death, and of any death the Office of the Corrections Ombuds asks it to review, and publish a report within 120 days unless the governor grants an extension.21 Each report gives the person's year of birth, the month they were incarcerated, the month they died and the cause and manner of death. It gives no name and may say only that the person was housed in "a prison facility."3 Deaths the department considers expected, such as those from a terminal illness, are not reviewed unless the ombuds refers them. In the year ending June 2025, 58 people died in the department's custody and the department published 21 reviews.4
Washington's roughly 57 jails, 39 run by counties and 18 smaller ones serving cities, are each run locally. The state's 2023 plan for federal reporting counted Washington among 17 states with no state oversight of county jails.5 The same 2021 law requires a jail to review any death in its custody that was not the expected result of a diagnosed illness, wherever the death occurred, and the Department of Health must post the reports.6 In October 2026 the department's list held 108 reports, a few of them posted more than once, from jails in no more than 18 of the state's 39 counties.7 The reports give an age and dates of booking and death, but no name.8 Outside these reports, state law keeps the records of a person confined in jail confidential, open only to criminal justice agencies and a few others.9
No state law requires police agencies to report deaths in their custody. For the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act, the Department of Commerce's Office of Firearm Safety and Violence Prevention collects the data. In 2023 only about 20 of roughly 250 police agencies reported, as a condition of federal grants, and only four counties had reported jail deaths consistently. The department planned to draw on quarterly reports from the Department of Corrections and the Department of Health and on the new Office of Independent Investigations.5 In King County, the medical examiner, the prosecutor and every police agency must notify the county's Inquest Program of a death in police custody or after contact with police, and the program publishes a list of names from 2017 on.10
Deaths in immigration detention are counted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which Congress requires to publish a report on each death within 90 days.11 The Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, formerly the Northwest Detention Center, is run for ICE by The GEO Group. Mergensana Amar tried to take his life there on November 15, 2018, after a two-month hunger strike; ICE gives November 18 as the day he died, and the medical examiner gives November 24, when life support ended.12 Charles Leo Daniel died there on March 7, 2024, after nearly four years in solitary confinement.13 José Manuel Sánchez-Castro died there on October 27, 2024; the Pierce County Medical Examiner found a perforated duodenal ulcer, and his widow sued ICE for the records of his detention.14 At the federal detention center at SeaTac, the U.S. Justice Department's inspector general found in December 2024 that health services were staffed at 50 percent and that treatment of serious conditions was delayed.15
No law requires the Department of Corrections to publish a count of all deaths; the statute covers only reviews of unexpected deaths.2 The department's yearly totals are its own, and its fiscal-year table stops at June 2024.1 Earlier counts come from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, which recorded 674 deaths in Washington prisons from 2001 through 2019.26 The department decides which deaths are unexpected. Three of the 21 deaths reviewed in the year ending June 2025 had been called expected by the department and were reviewed only because the ombuds referred them.4 Reviews also run late: the report on one death in December 2024 was published in August 2025.3
For jails there is no statewide count. The reviews cover only deaths a jail does not consider expected, and in 2023 the state reported that only four counties had filed them consistently.65 The list of reviews has none from more than half of the state's counties.7 The fullest counts of jail deaths have come from reporters and lawyers who gathered records themselves.2122
None of the state's official series names the people who died. The one public list with names is King County's, which covers that county only.10