Wisconsin

At least 1,384 people have died in custody in Wisconsin

219 of them are recorded here one by one, 180 by name. Another 1,165 are known only as numbers: deaths the official yearly counts report, for the same years, beyond the people recorded here.

At least 10 people have died in custody in Wisconsin so far in 2026. The most recent named here is Gregory A. Gubernot, who died on September 14, 2026 at Eau Claire County Secure Jail / Huber Center.

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.

Records go back as far as 1854 and are current as of October 25, 2026Get email alerts for Wisconsin

Their stories

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 Wisconsin Department of Corrections reports how many people die in its prisons each year. Most of those deaths, especially from illness, never appear in the news, so far fewer are recorded here. The gap is people still to be identified.

The department publishes no report or list of deaths. These counts come from its dashboard of people released from its adult prisons and contracted facilities, where death is one type of release.¹ People held in prison on a temporary hold from community supervision are left out, so the dashboard showed 54 deaths for 2023 while the department's own death review committee counted 55.¹² The committee's yearly report is not posted; the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel obtained the 2023 report through an open records request, and the department withheld its recommendations.²³

Source: The Wisconsin Department of Corrections Prison Releases dashboard, which counts deaths as a type of release. The counts include people serving another state's or a federal sentence in a Wisconsin prison, and leave out people serving Wisconsin sentences in other states' prisons and people who serve a prison sentence entirely in a county jail.¹ Deaths in county jails, juvenile facilities, police custody and immigration detention are not in them.¹⁴

Year	Reported by DOC	Recorded here
2025	58	5
2024	60	5
2023	54	10
2022	51	3
2021	49	0
2020	72	7
2019	49	2
2018	52	1
2017	42	3
2016	66	4
2015	46	1
2014	56	0
2013	43	1
2012	44	0
2011	46	0
2010	25	0
2009	41	1
2008	43	0
2007	40	0
2006	44	0
2005	30	0
2004	37	0
2003	39	0
2002	50	0
2001	44	0
2000	31	0

Where the most deaths are recorded

The facilities in Wisconsin with the most deaths recorded here. Each has its own page, with everyone recorded as dying there; see all facilities.

Milwaukee County Correctional Facility 16 deaths
Waupun Correctional Institution 10 deaths
Dane County Public Safety Building Jail 9 deaths
Dodge Correctional Institution 9 deaths
Rock County Jail 9 deaths

Where these records come from

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.

Historical newspapers1842–1931 · Searched once · Library of Congress digitized newspapers, searched for people taken from jails and officers and killed
1842 to 1931
Local news2000–today · Searched again every night · News coverage searched county by county and year by year
2000 to today
Official yearly counts (DOC)2000–2025 · Checked every month · Totals only; the agency does not publish names
2000 to 2025
Official yearly counts (BJS)2001–2019 · Checked every month · Totals only; the agency does not publish names
2001 to 2019
1842Today

What these deaths have cost taxpayers

These deaths have cost taxpayers in Wisconsin at least $13 million: the amount governments have agreed or been ordered to pay the families and estates of at least 3 people recorded here, in settlements and court awards reported in the news. Families sued over at least 28 of these deaths. Many suits end with no amount made public, and many settlements are kept confidential, so the true cost is higher.

Person	Paid by	Amount
Terrill Thomas	Milwaukee County	$6.8 million
Donald Maier	Wisconsin Department of Corrections	$3.8 million
Keishon Thomas	City of Milwaukee	$2.5 million

How deaths in custody are reported in Wisconsin

The Department of Corrections' Committee on Inmate/Youth Deaths reviews every death in a state prison or youth facility. Department policy requires it to write a yearly report of the deaths it reviewed and to make that report available to outside agencies on request.³ When someone dies in a prison, the facility calls the coroner or medical examiner and reports the death to law enforcement;⁵ the department does not tell the public right away, and gives few details.² Its press releases have announced only a handful of deaths.⁶

County jails are run by sheriffs. Under the state jail rule, chapter DOC 350 of the administrative code, a sheriff must notify the Department of Corrections in writing within 48 hours after anyone dies in the jail, and must notify the next of kin as soon as possible.⁷ The department publishes nothing from these notices.

Wisconsin has no law requiring deaths in custody to be reported to one state agency. For the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act, the Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Information and Analysis uses its authority to collect use-of-force data. County jails and police agencies report each month through an electronic form, and the Department of Corrections sends the bureau its own deaths, including those in juvenile facilities.⁴ The deaths reported by police and jails appear on the department's Use-of-Force and Arrest-Related Death dashboard.⁴⁸ When a death results directly from an officer's action or failure to act, state law requires at least two investigators from an outside agency; their report is released only if the district attorney decides not to prosecute.⁹ In Milwaukee County, at least ten people died in the sheriff's custody from June 2022 to August 2026; the Waukesha County Sheriff's Office investigated the latest.¹⁰

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement holds people in the Kenosha County and Dodge County jails, under agreements the counties signed with the U.S. Marshals Service.¹¹ ICE publishes a report on each death in its custody.¹² Its list of deaths from 2003 through 2017 includes none in Wisconsin.¹³

What has changed

1848–1910Nineteen attempted lynchings in Wisconsin ended in death, and with one exception no one was punished.¹⁴
1851–1853John McCaffary was hanged in Kenosha before a crowd of about 3,000, the only execution in the state's history. On July 10, 1853, Wisconsin repealed the death penalty.¹⁵
1881On November 19 in Durand, as officers led Ed Maxwell back to his cell after a court hearing, a crowd seized him and hanged him from an oak on the courthouse lawn, still handcuffed and shackled.¹⁶
2014A revised jail rule took effect on September 1, requiring sheriffs to report each death in a jail to the Department of Corrections within 48 hours.⁷
2016Terrill Thomas died of profound dehydration in April in the Milwaukee County Jail, after staff cut off the water to his cell for seven days. In 2018 the former jail commander and two jail staff members were charged.¹⁷
2023Cindy Schulz-Juedes, 68, was found unresponsive in her cell at Taycheedah Correctional Institution on July 19; she had been killed by her cellmate.¹⁸² In June the department asked federal law enforcement to investigate possible crimes at Waupun Correctional Institution.¹⁹
2024On June 5, the Dodge County sheriff announced charges against Waupun's former warden, Randall Hepp, for misconduct in public office and against eight staff members for abuse of a prisoner. The charges concern the deaths of Cameron Williams, who died of a stroke in October 2023, and Donald Maier, whose death in February 2024 was ruled a homicide from malnutrition and probable dehydration.²⁰

How far the official numbers can be trusted

The release dashboard shows 1,212 deaths from 2000 through 2025, from 25 in 2010 to 72 in 2020.²¹ Its figures are close to, but not the same as, those the state gave the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics: for 2001, for example, the dashboard shows 44 deaths and the federal tables 48.²² Because the dashboard counts releases, a person who dies while held on a supervision hold is missing from it, as one was in 2023.²

For jails there is no state count. The Bureau of Justice Statistics recorded 161 deaths in Wisconsin's local jails from 2008 through 2018.²³ The sheriffs' 48-hour notices to the Department of Corrections would give a full count, but they are not published.⁷

None of these sources names the people who died. Names reach the public through news reports, court cases and the rare press release.²⁶