Why Does In-Custody Death Data Matter?

A prison or jail sentence should never be a death sentence. And yet, far too often and for far too many people, it is.

Two years ago, the UCLA Covid Behind Bars Data Project expanded its national mission. The Project pivoted from tracking Covid cases and deaths inside prisons, jails, and detention centers to a focus on all-cause carceral mortality. (We also dropped “Covid” from our name—now we’re just the UCLA Behind Bars Data Project.) We made this change for the simple reason that nobody else is currently maintaining a nationwide database tracking this information, and we believe it’s important for stakeholders and policymakers—as well as, of course, those inside and their loved ones on the outside—to have accurate information about what’s happening in our nation’s carceral system. The centerpiece of our Project is a data dashboard that provides information about in-custody deaths in all 50 states.

If it seems odd that the government doesn’t make this data publicly available, it is. They do (as far as we know, at least) collect some of this data: The Death in Custody Reporting Act (DCRA) mandates states and federal law-enforcement agencies collect data on carceral mortality and submit it to the Attorney General. Until 2019, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) collected and publicly reported some of this data (albeit in an inadequate and incomplete form). That year, it announced it would transfer responsibility for this data collection to the Bureau of Justice Affairs (BJA), an agency under-equipped and unprepared to do this work. The BJA subsequently announced it would stop making this data publicly available. In May 2024, BJS issued a solicitation for a program that would collect in-custody death data, but the current status of that project is unclear. A separate but related problem is state-level intransigence, as many states simply fail to meet their legal requirements in reporting the data to the federal government in the first place.

When BJS stopped publishing this information, it left a gaping hole in the public’s knowledge of the effects of the criminal justice system. Without this data, the public doesn’t know the most basic facts about life and death behind bars, including how many people die each year in state and federal prisons; what disparities exist in mortality among racial, geographic and other groups; and how and where people are dying in prisons and jails. Unless they have this information, policymakers will find it difficult or impossible to structure policies to reduce deaths of incarcerated individuals, and it will be difficult for the public to understand the true consequences of our carceral system.

That leaves the Behind Bars Data Project as the only organization making this data publicly available. The data on our website currently covers deaths in custody in all 50 states for 2019, 2020 and 2021 and we are hard at work updating the data to make more recent information available. It’s slow and often arduous work: many states do not make the data easily accessible and we often have to file public records requests state by state or even county by county.

We do it because we believe this information is critically important for the functioning of a democratic society. What happens to those behind bars is a reflection of our societal values and it implicates all of us, whether we’ve been personally system-impacted or not. Roughly two million Americans are currently system-involved (either incarcerated, on probation or parole or otherwise in the grip of the criminal justice system) and tens of millions more have family or loved ones caught up in the criminal justice system. Many of the human beings behind bars have not yet been convicted of any crime, and in any case, those that have are also deserving of respect and dignity. People who were not sentenced to death are dying in custody anyway, and our project aims to help decisionmakers and the public understand why.

We believe secrecy in the carceral system is antithetical to the functioning of a democratic society. “Prisons and jails are public institutions, operated on behalf of society as a whole. Corrections officials are not sovereign over the people in their custody,” Project Director Sharon Dolovich wrote in an essay tracing the history of our enterprise. “They are public servants whose sole job is to administer carceral facilities in ways consistent with the public interest. In order to ensure that the public’s interests are served, we need a full and complete accounting of what goes on inside.”

The data also helps us to answer specific research questions that would be impossible to evaluate without the nationwide database that we have created. Our current research includes investigating the effect a prison sentence has on life expectancy, the relationship between the duration of incarceration and the likelihood of death by overdose, and the role of racial disparities, restrictive housing (such as solitary confinement), and environmental factors in driving mortality in prisons and jails. We have a number of research papers that will be published in the coming months focusing on these and other questions; watch this space for more information on the papers when they’re released.

Our previous work has included a study of racial and ethnic disparities in deaths in Texas prisons during the pandemic, a report on the ways a lack of transparency harms women prisoners, and two quantitative analyses of Covid mortality in prisons and jails versus the general public, the first of which became the standard citation on the question of infection and death rate disparity. We helped compile oral histories of incarcerated people’s experiences during the pandemic. We maintained a running scorecard of prison and jail data transparency surrounding Covid cases and deaths. And we put together an extensive database of policy changes in prisons and jails in response to the pandemic. Our team has included law students and professors, experienced attorneys, public health and medical specialists, data scientists and formerly incarcerated people, all working to increase transparency in a routinely brutal and highly secretive carceral world.

The guiding principle for everyone involved in this project, and our partners and funders, is the shared humanity of incarcerated people. We believe in the dignity and worth of every living human being, including those individuals locked up in our nation’s prison system. We cannot leave them behind if we hope to build a more just and humane world.

And the first step towards transformation is understanding the contours of the current system that locks away so many human beings. Without this data, it would be nearly impossible for the public to obtain even a top-level view of mortality inside carceral facilities. Our project’s work has been an invaluable resource for journalists, attorneys, judges, policymakers, incarcerated people and those that care about them, as well as for the public at large. We believe that shining a light into one of the darkest and least-transparent spaces of our society is critically important for the functioning of a healthy democracy and, perhaps even more importantly, for the safety of those on the inside.