Why Our Work is (Unfortunately) Necessary

A core mission of the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project is to collect national-level data on all deaths in custody and to make that data publicly available. There’s one question we get over and over again. “Wait, doesn’t the government already release that data?”

The short answer is they’re supposed to. Under the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act (DCRA), states are required to report in-custody deaths to the United States Department of Justice (DOJ). But many states fail to comply with DCRA’s requirements. And when they do comply, the public doesn’t have access to underlying data.  Without more detailed data, the public lacks a full picture of the problem.

This means there is no publicly accessible nationwide database of deaths or injuries in custody at the state or federal level—other than the one we make available on our website. That's why we set out collect mortality data from all 50 state departments of corrections as well as the federal Bureau of Prisons. (We are also in the process of expanding our dataset to include deaths in local jails and ICE detention facilities.)

When the feds can't—or won't—fulfill their responsibility to collect and publish accurate data, independent research efforts like ours are crucial for helping the public understand who is dying in custody and why.

Paradoxically, DCRA itself was born out of the very same question people now ask us: why aren’t the feds doing this? In 1994, New Jersey-based investigative reporter Mike Masterson decided to try to figure out how many people were dying in custody. He sent public records requests to jails and oversight bodies around the country, but few could give him an accurate count of deaths, even in states that required jails to report deaths to a central authority. Masterson supplemented these records by collecting news reports of jail deaths across the United States.

Masterson ultimately uncovered more than 1,500 jail deaths over a seven-year period, the vast majority of which had received only cursory investigations from local authorities. “Deaths usually are reported by police as suicides or accidents and validated by local coroners or law enforcement medical examiners. Local prosecutors, police, or a grand jury headed by the local prosecutor then investigate, finding no police wrongdoing or negligence. The case is closed. The family of the deceased must live with this decision,” Masterson wrote.

In 1995, Masterson took the train down to Washington, D.C., and distributed copies of his reporting to any member of Congress who would listen. He found two key allies, Republican Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, whom Masterson knew from his days as a reporter in Little Rock, and Democrat Bobby Scott of Virginia, who had unsuccessfully attempted to amend the infamous 1994 crime bill to include a requirement that states report in-custody deaths to the Attorney General.

Hutchinson and Scott introduced the first version of DCRA that year. It passed unanimously in the House of Representatives, but five years passed before the Senate took up the bill. President Bill Clinton signed DCRA into law on October 13, 2000, kicking off the federal government’s efforts to accurately track deaths in custody. A quarter-century later, they still haven’t succeeded.

Though its findings are no longer released publicly, DOJ is still collecting DCRA data from the states. But the quality of that data is highly questionable. Non-public DCRA data was accidentally made available last year due to a web error by the Bureau of Justice Assistance. The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news outlet focused on criminal justice, analyzed that data and found nearly 700 missing deaths, noting that number “would almost certainly rise if more complete data were available nationwide.”

To make matters worse, there is reason to think that federal data collection is getting even less complete and even less accurate. Since Donald Trump took office for the second time, the federal government has rolled back or eliminated a wide variety of data-collection efforts across an array of issues, including many in the criminal justice space.

To cite just a few examples: in August, the Department of Homeland Security removed from its website the Homeland Infrastructure Foundation-Level Data (HIFLD), which provided geospatial information on carceral facilities and other infrastructure throughout the country. The Trump administration cut funding earmarked to help states improve DCRA data collection earlier this year. The administration also deleted a database of federal law enforcement misconduct and cut $37 million in grants to support criminal justice data collection and analysis at the state and local level. And a variety of other issues continue to plague federal data, including debilitating web outages and politically motivated changes to reporting categories.

The UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project began as an effort to track information about Covid-19 in carceral facilities around the country. As the pandemic wound down, we pivoted from tracking a natural disaster to responding to a man-made one: the extreme lack of transparency in the carceral system as to who is dying inside and why. Our primary focus became collecting data on all-cause mortality in prisons, and we recently released the most up-to-date data available, running through 2024. As noted above, our team is currently working on adding morbidity data to the mortality data and adding data from jails to our dataset, which currently only covers prisons.

This work is expensive and labor-intensive. The team has collected the data state-by-state through an arduous process of sending individual public records requests. In addition to our team members, we have a small army of student volunteers helping to write and send public-records requests and clean and analyze the data. We often have to pay states for the data, which can cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars. And even when we get the data, wrangling it into a form that can be displayed on our website can take days or weeks per state.

This is why, unfortunately, our work is still necessary and will be for the foreseeable future. It’s unlikely (to say the least) that the federal government will become more transparent with this data under the Trump administration. And it’s simply not feasible for individual journalists or researchers to gather this data themselves, given the high costs in both time and money. In fact, journalists often look to us to gather the information they need, and our data has been featured in nationwide news outlets including the Washington Post and the New York Times.

Our work of collecting, disseminating and preserving access to carceral data is more important than ever as data of all kinds comes under threat of discontinuation or removal by the federal administration. The UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project tracks changes to federal data availability and provides updates to the public when there are major changes to the type or amount of data available. Our team engages with policymakers to defend against harmful changes to federal data infrastructure and works with key stakeholders to help improve public access to the data. And, through blogs, speaking engagements, and participation in conferences, our team members build new narratives to elevate the importance of public data on prisons and jails.

Thanks to the generous support of Arnold Ventures, the Vital Projects Fund, the UCLA Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research & Creative Activities, and the UCLA School of Law—and the hard work of our team members and volunteers—we’re able to shed light on critical issues in the American penal system. Without our work, policymakers and the public would be missing a crucial source of information about the lethal harm inflicted by the U.S. carceral system. This work is critically necessary, and we will keep at it as long as we can—and as long as we must.