Resource spotlight: UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project leads the way in prison mortality statistics

There is less transparency about prison deaths than ever before. A new central resource aims to bring carceral mortality data out of the shadows.

by Leah Wang, March 24, 2025

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, policy changes have left researchers, journalists, and advocates on their own when it comes to learning of deaths in custody.¹ Prison and jail mortality data — now irregularly published by the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) — are now far less detailed, and consistently underreport deaths.²

Fortunately, a passionate team of data-wranglers at UCLA Law — an extension of the invaluable UCLA Law Covid Behind Bars Data Project — has shifted their focus to report on all-cause mortality in state and federal prisons, filling the void left by the DCRA implementation turmoil.

Given the current administration’s values and priorities, it’s reasonable to expect less criminal legal system data transparency from federal agencies over the next few years, not more. At a time when the public is paying increasing attention to what happens behind bars, we highly recommend checking out academic and grassroots resources like the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project (we’ve curated a list of others at the end of this post).

Tracking prison deaths

Led by two of the country’s leading scholars on prison and jail conditions, UCLA Law professors Sharon Dolovich and Aaron Littman, the Behind Bars Data Project is “the country’s most comprehensive public resource tracking prison deaths nationwide.” Project team members tirelessly submit public records requests, compile and web-scrape publicly-available mortality data, and work with partner organizations to pull together data by state. The 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.

This screenshot from the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project website shows how users can compare prison death counts and rates across states.

Even with all the hard work of the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project team, not all jurisdictions are forthcoming with all aspects of 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. Helpfully, each state’s Data Reporting Summary indicates what details each state has made available.

The 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. They anticipate completing more research, blog posts, and peer-reviewed publications in the near future.

Prison deaths in context: Using the data to demand transparency and change

A wide swath of academics, journalists, and advocates have been utilizing UCLA’s mortality datasets for a few years at this point. (We, for example, wrote extensively about the COVID-19 pandemic ravaging prisons and jails using the team’s data). Data users are urging 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. Meanwhile, some of the mortality data being published by states are heavily redacted and limited, so some advocates are simply asking for more transparency and stronger reporting systems.

As the Behind Bars Data Project team continues to collect and analyze prison mortality data, they also have plans to look more broadly at measures of the health of people in carceral institutions using creative sources of information on healthcare access, expanding our collective understanding of how incarcerated people contend with illness and death in “death-making institutions.” As we at the Prison Policy Initiative are among those working to shed more light on correctional health issues and the inadequate healthcare in prisons and jails, we are excited for what’s to come from the Behind Bars Data Project.

For further reading, check out some 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.