In 2019, 143 inmates of state and federal prisons in the United States were killed by homicide. This is a significant increase from 2008 levels, when 40 inmates were killed in state or federal prisons in the United States.

Two inmate deaths were classified as suicide in federal prisons in Canada in the fiscal year of 2023. A further 59 deaths were attributed to natural causes in that year.

Mortality in Correctional Institutions (MCI) (formerly, the Deaths in Custody Reporting Program (DCRP)), is an annual data collection conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). The MCI collection began in 2000 under the Death in Custody Reporting Act of 2000 (P.L. 106-297). It is the only national statistical collection that obtains detailed information about deaths in adult correctional facilities. MCI collects data on persons dying in state prisons, local jails and in the process of arrest. Each collection is a separate subcollection, but each is under the umbrella of the MCI collection. This deals with the prison subcollection, which has a prison death file. The prison portion of Mortality in Correctional Institutions began in 2001 after the passage of the Deaths in Custody Reporting Act of 2000 in October of 2000. The prison component of MCI collects data on inmate deaths occurring in the 50 state departments of corrections while inmates are in the physical custody of prison officials.

In 2024, there were *** deaths in prison custody in England and Wales, compared with *** in the previous year, and *** in 2022, which was the most deaths reported during this time period.

The Deaths in Custody Reporting Program (DCRP) is an annual data collection conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). The DCRP began in 2000 under the Death in Custody Reporting Act of 2000 (P.L. 106-297). It is the only national statistical collection that obtains detailed information about deaths in adult correctional facilities. The DCRP collects data on persons dying in state prisons, local jails and in the process of arrest. Each collection is a separate subcollection, but each is under the umbrella of the DCRP collection. This deals with the prison subcollection, which has a prison death file. The prison portion of the Deaths in Custody Reporting Program began in 2001 after the passage of the Deaths in Custody Reporting Act of 2000 in October of 2000. The prison component of the DCRP collects data on inmate deaths occurring in the 50 state departments of corrections while inmates are in the physical custody of prison officials.

Between 2012 and 2020, the number of self-inflicted deaths among white prisoners in public prisons in England and Wales went up from 49 to 57.

In 2019, there were 3,853 state prisoner fatalities in the United States. This is a decrease from the previous year, when there were 4,137 state prisoner fatalities. All causes of death have been considered. A list of the countries with the largest number of prisoners is accessible here.

Overview

The Marshall Project, the nonprofit investigative newsroom dedicated to the U.S. criminal justice system, has partnered with The Associated Press to compile data on the prevalence of COVID-19 infection in prisons across the country. The Associated Press is sharing this data as the most comprehensive current national source of COVID-19 outbreaks in state and federal prisons.

Lawyers, criminal justice reform advocates and families of the incarcerated have worried about what was happening in prisons across the nation as coronavirus began to take hold in the communities outside. Data collected by The Marshall Project and AP shows that hundreds of thousands of prisoners, workers, correctional officers and staff have caught the illness as prisons became the center of some of the country’s largest outbreaks. And thousands of people — most of them incarcerated — have died.

In December, as COVID-19 cases spiked across the U.S., the news organizations also shared cumulative rates of infection among prison populations, to better gauge the total effects of the pandemic on prison populations. The analysis found that by mid-December, one in five state and federal prisoners in the United States had tested positive for the coronavirus -- a rate more than four times higher than the general population.

This data, which is updated weekly, is an effort to track how those people have been affected and where the crisis has hit the hardest.

Methodology and Caveats

The data tracks the number of COVID-19 tests administered to people incarcerated in all state and federal prisons, as well as the staff in those facilities. It is collected on a weekly basis by Marshall Project and AP reporters who contact each prison agency directly and verify published figures with officials.

Each week, the reporters ask every prison agency for the total number of coronavirus tests administered to its staff members and prisoners, the cumulative number who tested positive among staff and prisoners, and the numbers of deaths for each group.

The time series data is aggregated to the system level; there is one record for each prison agency on each date of collection. Not all departments could provide data for the exact date requested, and the data indicates the date for the figures.

To estimate the rate of infection among prisoners, we collected population data for each prison system before the pandemic, roughly in mid-March, in April, June, July, August, September and October. Beginning the week of July 28, we updated all prisoner population numbers, reflecting the number of incarcerated adults in state or federal prisons. Prior to that, population figures may have included additional populations, such as prisoners housed in other facilities, which were not captured in our COVID-19 data. In states with unified prison and jail systems, we include both detainees awaiting trial and sentenced prisoners.

To estimate the rate of infection among prison employees, we collected staffing numbers for each system. Where current data was not publicly available, we acquired other numbers through our reporting, including calling agencies or from state budget documents. In six states, we were unable to find recent staffing figures: Alaska, Hawaii, Kentucky, Maryland, Montana, Utah.

To calculate the cumulative COVID-19 impact on prisoner and prison worker populations, we aggregated prisoner and staff COVID case and death data up through Dec. 15. Because population snapshots do not account for movement in and out of prisons since March, and because many systems have significantly slowed the number of new people being sent to prison, it’s difficult to estimate the total number of people who have been held in a state system since March. To be conservative, we calculated our rates of infection using the largest prisoner population snapshots we had during this time period.

As with all COVID-19 data, our understanding of the spread and impact of the virus is limited by the availability of testing. Epidemiology and public health experts say that aside from a few states that have recently begun aggressively testing in prisons, it is likely that there are more cases of COVID-19 circulating undetected in facilities. Sixteen prison systems, including the Federal Bureau of Prisons, would not release information about how many prisoners they are testing.

Corrections departments in Indiana, Kansas, Montana, North Dakota and Wisconsin report coronavirus testing and case data for juvenile facilities; West Virginia reports figures for juvenile facilities and jails. For consistency of comparison with other state prison systems, we removed those facilities from our data that had been included prior to July 28. For these states we have also removed staff data. Similarly, Pennsylvania’s coronavirus data includes testing and cases for those who have been released on parole. We removed these tests and cases for prisoners from the data prior to July 28. The staff cases remain.

About the Data

There are four tables in this data:

• covid_prison_cases.csv contains weekly time series data on tests, infections and deaths in prisons. The first dates in the table are on March 26. Any questions that a prison agency could not or would not answer are left blank.

• prison_populations.csv contains snapshots of the population of people incarcerated in each of these prison systems for whom data on COVID testing and cases are available. This varies by state and may not always be the entire number of people incarcerated in each system. In some states, it may include other populations, such as those on parole or held in state-run jails. This data is primarily for use in calculating rates of testing and infection, and we would not recommend using these numbers to compare the change in how many people are being held in each prison system.

• staff_populations.csv contains a one-time, recent snapshot of the headcount of workers for each prison agency, collected as close to April 15 as possible.

• covid_prison_rates.csv contains the rates of cases and deaths for prisoners. There is one row for every state and federal prison system and an additional row with the National totals.

Queries

The Associated Press and The Marshall Project have created several queries to help you use this data:

Get your state's prison COVID data: Provides each week's data from just your state and calculates a cases-per-100000-prisoners rate, a deaths-per-100000-prisoners rate, a cases-per-100000-workers rate and a deaths-per-100000-workers rate here

Rank all systems' most recent data by cases per 100,000 prisoners here

Find what percentage of your state's total cases and deaths -- as reported by Johns Hopkins University -- occurred within the prison system here

Attribution

In stories, attribute this data to: “According to an analysis of state prison cases by The Marshall Project, a nonprofit investigative newsroom dedicated to the U.S. criminal justice system, and The Associated Press.”

Contributors

Many reporters and editors at The Marshall Project and The Associated Press contributed to this data, including: Katie Park, Tom Meagher, Weihua Li, Gabe Isman, Cary Aspinwall, Keri Blakinger, Jake Bleiberg, Andrew R. Calderón, Maurice Chammah, Andrew DeMillo, Eli Hager, Jamiles Lartey, Claudia Lauer, Nicole Lewis, Humera Lodhi, Colleen Long, Joseph Neff, Michelle Pitcher, Alysia Santo, Beth Schwartzapfel, Damini Sharma, Colleen Slevin, Christie Thompson, Abbie VanSickle, Adria Watson, Andrew Welsh-Huggins.

Questions

If you have questions about the data, please email The Marshall Project at info+covidtracker@themarshallproject.org or file a Github issue.

To learn more about AP's data journalism capabilities for publishers, corporations and financial institutions, go here or email kromano@ap.org.

This submission includes publicly available data extracted in its original form. Please reference the Related Publication listed here for source and citation information: Ann Carson, E. (2021, December 1). Mortality in state and federal prisons, 2001–2019 – Statistical tables. Bureau of Justice Statistics. https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/mortality-state-and-federal-prisons-2001-2019-statistical-tables Use of specific publications should reference the specific authors listed in the downloaded PDF. If you have questions about the underlying data stored here, please contact Bureau of Justice Statistics (AskBJS@usdoj.gov). If you have questions or recommendations related to this metadata entry and extracted data, please contact the CAFE Data Management team at: climatecafe@bu.edu. "Collects inmate death records from each of the nation's 50 state prison systems, Federal Bureau of Prisons, and approximately 2,800 local jail jurisdictions. Between 2003 and 2014, BJS also collected data on persons who died while in the process of arrest. Death records include information on decedent personal characteristics (age, race or Hispanic origin, and sex), decedent criminal background (legal status, offense type, and time served), and the death itself (date, time, location, and cause of death, as well as information on the autopsy and medical treatment provided for any illness or disease). Data collections covering these populations were developed in annual phases: Annual collection of individual death records from local jail facilities began in 2000, followed by a separate collection for state prison facilities in 2001. Collection of state juvenile correctional agencies began in 2002 but was discontinued in 2006, and collection of arrest-related death records began in 2003. Due to concerns regarding data quality and coverage issues, BJS temporarily suspended the arrest-related death (ARD) portion of the DCRP in 2014. Datasets are produced in an annual format. In 2016, the Department of Justice (DOJ) decided to place more emphasis on the section of Death in Custody Reporting Act reauthorization law (P.L. 113-242) that concerned non-compliance with the data collection. Per the law, states that did not report on a quarterly basis individual-level data on deaths occurring in local jails, in state prisons, or in the process of arrest, could be penalized up to 10% of their DOJ-sponsored Justice Assistance Grant (JAG) awards. As a federal statistical agency, BJS data may not be used for enforcement purposes. Therefore, DOJ determined that the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) should manage collection of the data pursuant to the law, since BJA is not under similar requirements to collect data for statistical purposes only. (The Report of the Attorney General to Congress Pursuant to The Death in Custody Reporting Act, December 16, 2016, is located at: https://www.justice.gov/archives/page/file/918846/download) BJS finished collection of deaths that occurred during the 2019 calendar year in December, 2020, and formally closed the MCI collection on March 31, 2021." Quote from https://bjs.ojp.gov/data-collection/mortality-correctional-institutions-mci-formerly-deaths-custody-reporting-program

This statistic shows the number of inmate deaths in federal and provincial prisons in Canada for the fiscal years 2005 to 2022. In the fiscal year of 2022, 59 inmates died in federal prisons in Canada.

Abstract: Mortality in prisons, a basic indicator of the right to health for incarcerated persons, has never been studied extensively in Brazil. An assessment of all-cause and cause-specific mortality in prison inmates was conducted in 2016-2017 in the state of Rio de Janeiro, based on data from the Mortality Information System and Prison Administration. Mortality rates were compared between prison population and general population after standardization. The leading causes of death in inmates were infectious diseases (30%), cardiovascular diseases (22%), and external causes (12%). Infectious causes featured HIV/AIDS (43%) and TB (52%, considering all deaths with mention of TB). Only 0.7% of inmates who died had access to extramural health services. All-cause mortality rate was higher among prison inmates than in the state’s general population. Among inmates, mortality from infectious diseases was 5 times higher, from TB 15 times higher, and from endocrine diseases (especially diabetes) and cardiovascular diseases 1.5 and 1.3 times higher, respectively, while deaths from external causes were less frequent in prison inmates. The study revealed important potentially avoidable excess deaths in prisons, reflecting lack of care and exclusion of this population from the Brazilian Unified National Health System. This further highlights the need for a precise and sustainable real-time monitoring system for deaths, in addition to restructuring of the prison staff through implementation of the Brazilian National Policy for Comprehensive Healthcare for Persons Deprived of Freedom in the Prison System in order for inmates to fully access their constitutional right to health with the same quality and timeliness as the general population.

In 2019, 2,144 white state prison inmates died in the United States. A further 1,174 Black or African American inmates died in that same year. In total, 3,853 United States state prison inmates died in 2019.

Analysis of the risk of suicide and drug-related deaths among prisoners, including the number of deaths, standarised mortality ratios and age-standardised rates, England and Wales, 2008 to 2019.

The prison murders are broken down by the age of the perpetrators.

Prison newcomer murder inmates by age.............

The U.S. government does not release jail by jail mortality data, keeping the public and policy makers in the dark about facilities with high rates of death. In a first-of-its-kind accounting, Reuters obtained and is releasing that data to the public.

What if the jail in your community had an outsized death rate, but no one knew? For decades, communities across the country have faced that quandary. The Justice Department collects jail death data, but locks the information away, leaving policymakers, investigators and activists unaware of problem facilities.

Reuters journalists filed more than 1,500 public records requests to gain death data from 2008 to 2019 in the nation’s biggest jails. Today, jail by jail and state by state, it is making that information available to the public. Reuters examined every large jail in the United States, those with 750 or more inmates. And, to ensure it examined deaths across the country, it obtained data for the 10 largest jails in each state. The data covers 523 jails or jail systems.

Original Data

Acknowlegement

Foto von Hasan Almasi auf Unsplash

This data provides annual figures for the number and rate of prisoner escapes\r (secure and open custody), deaths in custody (total deaths, unnatural deaths,\r and Aboriginal unnatural deaths), and prisoner self-harm and attempted\r suicide, as well as the percentage of positive random drug tests in prisons,\r average visits per prisoner, and the percentage of prisoners employed.\r \r

As of February 2025, El Salvador had the highest prisoner rate worldwide, with over 1,600 prisoners per 100,000 of the national population. Cuba, Rwanda, Turkmenistan, and the United States, rounded out the top five countries with the highest rate of incarceration. Homicides in El Salvador Interestingly, El Salvador, which long had the highest global homicide rates, has dropped out of the top 20 after a high number of gang members have been incarcerated. A high number of the countries with the highest homicide rate are located in Latin America. Prisoners in the United StatesThe United States is home to the largest number of prisoners worldwide. More than 1.8 million people were incarcerated in the U.S. at the beginning of 2025. In China, the estimated prison population totaled 1.69 million people that year. Other nations had far fewer prisoners. The largest share of the U.S. prisoners in federal correctional facilities were of African-American origin. As of 2020, there were 345,500 black, non-Hispanic prisoners, compared to 327,300 white, non-Hispanic inmates. The U.S. states with the largest number of prisoners in 2022 were Texas, California, and Florida. Over 160,000 prisoners in state facilities were sentenced for rape or sexual assault, which was the most common cause of imprisonment. The second most common was murder, followed by aggravated or simple assault.