As Big-City Jail Deaths Rise, Data Transparency Is More Important Than Ever

Earlier this month, five people died in New York City law enforcement custody  over the course of just two weeks, bringing the total to more than twice the number of jail deaths from 2024. The deaths have cast additional scrutiny onto the city’s troubled jail system, which has seen surging violence among a population that has more than doubled over the past five years. In May, a federal judge put the New York City Department of Correction under receivership, appointing an outside official to take control of the city’s jails.

New York isn’t the only big city that has seen spikes in jail mortality over the past few years. In Los Angeles, at least 38 people have died in county jails so far this year, the highest number of deaths to date ever recorded. Chicago’s Cook County saw 18 deaths in 2023, the highest figure since 2013, when the jail population was twice as large. A 2024 investigation by the Arizona Republic found that Maricopa County, where Phoenix is located, now has one of the highest jail mortality rates in the nation. 

There is no comprehensive publicly available data on jail deaths nationwide, ever since the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) stopped collecting mortality data in 2019. That’s why the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project, with the support of Arnold Ventures and other generous funders, has launched an ambitious effort to fill in the gaps, drawing on our experience tracking prison deaths in all 50 states to collect death records from more than 500 jail systems across the country. 

What Makes Jail Deaths Different 

In contrast to prisons, where chronic illnesses like cancer and cardiovascular disease account for most deaths, jails typically hold people for a short period of time—days or weeks in most cases. An analysis of jail deaths between 2000–2019 by the BJS found that most jail deaths occur within 17 days of arrest. Most deaths in jail are the result of suicide, homicide, or accidental causes of death like drug overdoses. Rampant medical neglect has also led to deaths that could have been preventable, such as that of Alan Willison, who died after a Georgia county jail failed to diagnose and treat his testicular cancer, which has a 99-percent survival rate with proper treatment. 

Jails also hold large populations of people with significant mental health needs and substance use disorders—nearly half of all people in jail have diagnosed mental health conditions, and more than a quarter report severe psychological distress during incarceration; the Los Angeles County jail system is the largest mental health provider in the United States. Poor training and inadequate treatment can lead people with mental illnesses to die in ways that would be inconceivable outside of the jail context. For instance, an investigation by the New Yorker earlier this year found more than 50 jail deaths caused by starvation since 2010. The Marshall Project reported that at least 20 people died between 2014 and 2019 because of asphyxiation from restraint chairs used to control people experiencing mental distress. 

Why Jail Deaths Are Hard to Track 

The Death in Custody Reporting Act requires states to report all deaths in law enforcement custody to the federal government. Despite this requirement, the Department of Justice estimates that nearly 40 percent of all jail deaths are missing from the federal data. Making matters worse, the agency responsible for collecting the data, the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) doesn’t publish the data it does collect, leaving the public without any comprehensive nationwide picture of who’s dying in custody and why. (The BJA briefly maintained a data dashboard summarizing aggregated data in late 2024, but earlier this year, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) canceled the agency’s contract with the software vendor that powered the dashboard.) 

Since 2020, the UCLA Behind Bars Data Project has tracked prison mortality in all 50 states, cataloging nearly 17,000 deaths across several hundred facilities nationwide. Gathering data on jail deaths, however, is much more difficult. In contrast to prisons, most jails are managed by county sheriffs, with nearly 3,000 separate jail jurisdictions nationwide. Only a handful of states require local jails to report deaths to a central authority. As a result, researchers who want to compare jail deaths nationwide must piece together a patchwork of fragmented and incomplete data. 

Filling in the Gaps 

In 2020, Reuters published a groundbreaking investigation into jail deaths across the United States, using public records to compile a database of deaths spanning 523 jurisdictions for 2008–2019. The UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project is building on this resource by filing records requests to update the database to cover the years since Reuters published its report. 

We are also investing in academic research to better understand the limited data that’s already available. In a forthcoming paper produced in collaboration with the UCLA Carceral Ecologies Lab, we analyze deaths in Los Angeles County jails between 2008 and 2023, finding notable differences in mortality patterns compared to the nation as a whole. For example, the BJS analysis of nationwide jail deaths found that most overdose-related deaths occur within 24 hours of booking, which suggests that most deaths occur due to drugs consumed before entering jail. In contrast, our review of jail deaths in Los Angeles County found a median time to death from overdose of 75 days, which implies that most overdose deaths in Los Angeles County jails result from contraband drugs consumed during incarceration. 

In the same paper, we found a large increase in mortality rates over time. The crude monthly mortality rate in the Los Angeles County jail system more than tripled between 2010 and 2022, rising from 1.13 deaths per 1,000 people incarcerated to 3.40 per 1,000. As the authors of the paper note, the county jails experienced a “perfect storm” of fatal conditions: spiking overdoses, deaths from COVID-19, and policies and practices that contributed to deteriorating jail conditions. 

American jails are uniquely opaque and unaccountable institutions. At the same time, what happens in jails doesn’t stay there; people walk in and out of jailhouse doors more than 10 million times each year. By ensuring each jail death is counted, we seek not only to bring much-needed transparency and accountability to these institutions; we also hope to empower policymakers to save lives by arming them with the knowledge of who is dying and why.