UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project Releases 2024 Prison Death Counts

Today, the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project (UCLA BBDP) is proud to announce the release of prison death data for nearly every state in the nation for 2022 through 2024. Our new figures are the most comprehensive and up-to-date prison death statistics available to the public, providing researchers, journalists, advocates, policymakers, and the general public with an invaluable resource for understanding mortality behind bars. These death data have never before been reported in one place. Indeed, some of the deaths captured in this data have never been reported at all.

The new release includes:

• Full or partial data from 48 states, covering nearly 99 percent of the U.S. prison population 
• More than 15,000 deaths from 2022–2024 
• Individual-level data for 44 states

Who Is Dying and Why?

Congress passed the Death in Custody Reporting Act (DCRA) to answer the critical question: Who is dying in custody and why? To date, the federal government has largely failed to carry out this mandate. A required report by the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) on in-custody deaths is nearly a decade overdue.

UCLA BBDP has filled this gap by collecting the data ourselves, with the goal of facilitating  opportunities to better understand the main drivers of mortality in prison. Even without complete data for 2024, our findings show that carceral mortality remains elevated above pre-pandemic levels, even as deaths have fallen from peak COVID-19 highs.

How We Did It

The BBDP requested data from all 50 state prison systems, as well as the federal Bureau of Prisons. We asked each corrections department (DOC) for a list of each person who died in custody, including their name, age, date of birth, race, sex, assigned facility, location of death, manner of death, and any available additional details concerning the circumstances of their death. Under DCRA, states are already required to report all this information to the Department of Justice. Unfortunately, compliance with DCRA is spotty at best. Many states, upon receiving our requests, declined to provide all of the information we asked for. Five states did not give us any death data at all, and our efforts to get complete data for 2024 are ongoing. Other states only filled our requests after weeks or months of consistent follow-up.

Getting responses from each prison system was only the first step. DOCs sent us records in myriad formats, including a few that went through the trouble of printing Excel spreadsheets before scanning them into non-machine-readable PDFs. Even when data came in electronic formats, we still had to contend with inconsistently named columns and duplicate or out-of-scope records, such as deaths of people released on parole. Compiling each DOC’s records into a uniform database requires many hours of work to extract, clean, and verify data before we can publish it.

Validating the Data

In past years, UCLA BBDP validated the data we received against the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) Mortality in Correctional Institutions data collection. This allowed us to confirm that we weren't missing deaths reported to the federal government and also to check that states were providing us the same information they gave to BJS. Unfortunately, BJS stopped collecting in-custody death data in October 2019, and the current data collection by the federal Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) is plagued by under-reporting and non-compliance.

Without reliable figures to cross-check our work, we had to take other approaches to ensure our data is as accurate as possible. These included:

• Checking data across states to confirm individuals housed out-of-state weren't double counted 
• Researching facility names to ensure we excluded deaths in local jails, re-entry centers, civil commitment facilities, or while on parole 
• Comparing our counts with other publicly available data

We also gave particular scrutiny to states that reported large swings in mortality compared to previous years. In some cases, these swings represented changes in reporting practices. Vermont, for example, reported deaths of prisoners that occurred in hospitals, which it had not reported in previous years. In other cases, increased mortality reflected deadlier prison conditions. A report by the Arkansas Department of Corrections concluded that overcrowding and understaffing had contributed to a spike in suicide rates over the past few years.

Other DOCs reported large decreases in mortality since 2021 as death rates in prison returned to pre-pandemic levels.

What’s Next

In future publications and blog posts, we will share more details about the data itself and the obstacles we have faced in collecting information about deaths in custody that should have already been in the public domain. We will also continue our work to collect and maintain the most comprehensive and accurate data on prison deaths possible. In a time of waning government transparency, our mission remains as essential as ever.