For almost 20 years, from about 2000 until 2019, the federal government offered at least some idea of how many people across the U.S. die in prisons and jails each year, thanks to the Death in Custody Reporting Act (DCRA). But for the past six years, as the DCRA implementation goes through turmoil, policy changes have left researchers, journalists, and advocates on their own when it comes to learning of deaths in custody.
As a result, the prison and jail mortality data that was once irregularly published by the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) are now far less detailed, and consistently underreport deaths, writes Leah Wang from the Prison Policy Initiative in a new brief that highlights the work of the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project, which allows users to compare prison death counts and rates across states.
The Behind Bars Data Project, like the Incarceration Transparency Project covering Louisiana and South Carolina, is working to fill that void.
The UCLA project “tirelessly submit public records requests, compile and web-scrape publicly-available mortality data, and work with partner organizations to pull together data by state,” Wang writes. The resulting website allows users to examine deaths in each state’s prisons, with helpful context like the total prison population and a calculated crude mortality rate for recent years. Still, not all jurisdictions reveal basic mortality data, such as the name, race, or sex of those who have died, where they died (i.e., inside a cell, a medical unit, or an outside hospital), or the circumstances of their deaths.
The UCLA team is also analyzing the mortality data, examining possible drivers and correlates of prison deaths such as restrictive housing (also known as solitary confinement), racial disparities, length of incarceration, and other factors.
But even the existing data is helping advocates and public officials urge lawmakers and correctional officials to implement common-sense reforms, like releasing medically vulnerable and/or elderly people from prisons, overhauling bail practices to reduce jail time, and improving access to medical care and basic life-sustaining measures like air conditioning and adequate food in prisons.
The limits of the data itself and how heavily redacted some of it is has also led some advocates to simply ask for more transparency and stronger reporting systems.
For further reading, the Prison Policy Initiative suggests other valuable resources on justice-involved deaths:
Reuters’ investigation of jail deaths in 2020, which led to the largest and most comprehensive database of jail deaths to date;
The Washington Post’s database of police shootings, covering over 10,000 fatal police shootings from 2015 to 2024;
A front-page article from The New York Times on the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on prison deaths, which prominently featured the work of the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project;
Ongoing investigations by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on scores of deaths and tight-lipped corrections officials in the Georgia prison system;
A multi-year data collection effort of facility-level prison deaths in Louisiana led by law professor and leading expert on prison conditions Andrea Armstrong;
Finally, Ida B. Wells, who courageously tracked extrajudicial lynchings in the late 19th century, leading to her statistical bombshell, A Red Record.
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