How Journalists Can Investigate Deaths in Prisons and Jails

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Deaths that occur either when a person is in the custody of law enforcement or housed in a correctional facility are largely underreported. That’s because reporting requirements are not enforced federally or in most states. Without accurate data, circumstances leading to unnatural deaths can continue unchecked, including instances of medical negligence and excessive use-of-force. Many researchers, lawmakers and advocates view this issue as a public health emergency.

The Marshall Project has a team of reporters who have covered deaths in custody, including staff writers Brittany Hailer and Mark Puente on our Cleveland news team and our senior data reporter Anna Flagg. Their expertise has informed this reporting toolkit. Here is guidance and context based on their years of experience shedding light on this dark corner of our criminal justice system.

Along with using these tips, you can schedule a consultation to discuss specific reporting hurdles in your jurisdiction or get general advice on navigating the criminal justice beat. Expect that an investigation of this nature could take you or your newsroom months rather than weeks.

Specific records you can request

When a person dies in custody, getting records isn’t always easy. But there are many documents you can request from agencies inside and outside of the system. Below is a list of the various “receipts” that can help you verify the rough series of events that ultimately led to a death behind bars.

What to do if you don’t have the name of the deceased

First: Without a name you can still reach out to the county medical examiner, forensic pathologist or coroner to explain what you are trying to find.

Next: Share any details you have, such as the age of the deceased or the date and location of their death.

Finally: Ask for any death records that match those circumstances. In most states, their name, death date, age at time of death, cause of death and manner of death should be public information.

Get the autopsy and more from your medical examiner or coroner

First: Check this database maintained by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press to see if autopsy or coroners’ reports are available in your state.

Next: Request the autopsy or coroner’s report from the state or county medical examiner’s office, if an autopsy was performed.

Always: Ask for supplemental notes to the autopsy beyond the toxicology report, which may be called coroner’s notes, medical examiner’s notes, or investigator’s notes. These notes are really where you’re going to get the information that’s most pertinent to your investigation.

Note: The explanation of the circumstances surrounding the death is important, but the level of detail will vary from report to report based on the reviewing pathologist. Some autopsies don’t even tell you that the person was in jail when they died, while other autopsies are incredibly detailed and walk you through the whole series of events. With more thorough accounts, you may learn details such as if the person was released back to jail from the hospital or if they later died at the hospital.

Finally: Ask for supplementary documents, photos, and video, but even if the reports are considered open records, these items may not be available, especially if the autopsy is being used by law enforcement for an ongoing investigation.

Collect their booking records from the local jail

First: Once you have a name, you can go to your local jail, sheriff or county spokesperson and request a host of records. You can ask for the following documents:

• Booking information, which includes booking or intake records
• Intake survey
• Documentation of the personal items they had upon entering the facility

Note: Some state laws mandate that surveillance and body cam footage are all public record. If you know when someone was booked, but you don’t know when they died, you can ask for footage of their booking to help paint a picture of how well or unwell the person was as they entered the facility. Keep in mind that a lot of states don’t offer access to this footage and some states make it expensive to acquire.

Get the arrest report from your local police department

First: Request the arrest record for the deceased person from the police department, sheriff’s office, clerk of courts or magistrate. This will help you determine if they were harmed or injured before they entered the jail and where they were before they entered the jail. For example, someone could suffer an injury due to excessive use-of-force during their arrest and then die in jail soon after from a ruptured spleen.

Note: Details about the location and circumstance of the arrest can help inform what their physical and mental state would have been upon entering the jail. For example, you may want to know if someone was previously in the hospital for a medical emergency before being arrested.

Records from inside the jail

First: Several records are produced after someone is booked into jail. You can request:

• Housing records, including transfers or movements through the jail
• Grievances they have filed, such as if they complained of any medical issues
• Disciplinary records or negative contacts with staff, which will show you any discipline that was administered, including if the person was put in solitary confinement for any reason or if they had a suspension of visits
• Classification notes, which will show how the jail has classified the incarcerated person related to their charge and where they are housed
• Any mail or books they received
• Commissary records, such as receipts of items they have purchased
• Records of their recreational time
• Discharge and release records

Always: Ask for the jail’s policies and procedures for when a death occurs in your local jail. When there’s a death in jail, standard operating procedures vary by facility. You may want to ask:

• What is the policy for notifying the family?
• What are the standard operating procedures for notifying the state or any other oversight agency?

Working with the family will open more doors

If you are in touch with cooperative family members, they can request medical records for their loved one, although many jails will deny those requests.

First: Ask the family to request Emergency Medical Service (EMS) records if the person died at a hospital. They can also ask the hospital for records.

Note: The EMTs who respond to deaths at the jail ask questions and take notes so they can update the doctor. Their notes can give a narrative sense of what happened from the time the EMT entered the jail and removed the body, though there will be a gap in information regarding what happened between the emergency and the death.

Does your jail have an oversight entity?

It’s important to learn how your jail works. Who oversees the jail? Does your state have an oversight agency for the jail? What kinds of records do they keep? What kinds of investigations do they manage?

First: Check this graphic from the National Resource Center for Correctional Oversight to see if your state has external oversight agencies for their prisons. The oversight of jails and prisons is not uniform nationwide, and while internal oversight agencies are common, many states don’t yet have external oversight by parties outside of their correctional agency.

Next: If your state has an oversight agency, you can request all critical incidents for your county in a given year. States have different names for these records. For example, Ohio uses the term “critical incidents” while Pennsylvania uses the term “extraordinary occurrence reports.” You should get a dataset tracking events like suicides, fires, assaults and deaths. The state may be faster at providing records than the county, and state documents can help you fact-check what the county is telling you.

Note: If you identify interesting data points, you can ask for supporting documents to help clarify what the investigation entailed, any conclusions that were drawn, if there was a corrective action plan and other details.

Finally: We imagine there are many terms across different states for these types of incident reports. If your state uses a different term, please let us know.

Common obstacles you may encounter

Most often, denials for records requests will reference HIPAA or the documents will be so redacted that they are essentially useless. Small errors, such as incorrect dates or misspellings, can slow things down or be grounds for denial. So, triple-check your request before submitting.

Note: Consider broadening your records request to make it unclear exactly what incident or issue you’re looking into. For example, if you know there was one death in January 2024, you could ask for records related to all deaths from January 2021 through January 2025. Keep in mind, however, that if your request is too broad, an agency can deny it for being overly burdensome.

Always: Remember that public officials can say whatever they want and it’s critical to:

• Get documentation to confirm the validity of what you’re being told
• Assume there will be delays with records requests, which will require you to follow up often, and brainstorm creative avenues to access the information you need
• Be on the lookout for false or incorrect records by double-checking what you’re hearing or reading against other information sources

For more information about common roadblocks, check out this behind-the-scenes look at a Marshall Project investigation of the Cuyahoga County Jail from staff writers Brittany Hailer and Mark Puente.

Request your state’s Death in Custody Reporting Act data annually

First: Every state has a reporting agency for the Death in Custody Reporting Act, or DCRA. These agencies are required to send quarterly reports to the federal government in order to adhere to DCRA. You can find your state’s agency here.

Always: Request information from your state’s reporting agency at the start of the new year. You can request those reports for the previous year, which provide a sense of how many people died in custody in the state during that time frame.

Note: The report won’t provide an accurate number since many sheriffs and wardens don’t report every death in their facility; however, the reports can at least make you aware of deaths that your local jail did not report to the press.

What to know about DCRA

When investigating deaths in local jails and prisons, you will encounter the Death in Custody Reporting Act (DCRA). Enacted in 2000, the DCRA mandates that the federal government collect data from local jurisdictions on deaths in prisons and jails. This includes arrest-related deaths such as police shootings and use-of-force incidents, as well as other deaths that occur during arrest.

It’s important to know that the Department of Justice is legally obligated to collect this information. If a local jurisdiction claims they are not required to report deaths in their jail or prison, that statement is false; however, because the Department of Justice cannot compel agencies to report data or report it correctly, this data still may not be available or may not be accurate.

To learn more about DCRA download our tipsheet.

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Get advice from our reporters

There are a few more strategies you may want to deploy. To learn more, schedule a consultation through this form so we can diagnose your situation and offer tailored guidance on ways to proceed.

Expert sources

The following experts have provided critical insights for news coverage on deaths in custody and facility oversight. We’ve indicated their areas of expertise below.

• Andrea Armstrong, Loyola University New Orleans, Dr. Norman C. Francis Distinguished Professor of Law: Armstrong is a 2023 MacArthur Fellow and incarceration law scholar who runs the Incarceration Transparency database. Armstrong works with law students to file records requests and document jail and prison deaths in Louisiana and South Carolina.

• Jay D. Aronson, Center for Human Rights Science at Carnegie Mellon University, founder and director: Aronson is a professor of science, technology and society at Carnegie Mellon and co-author of Death in Custody: How America Ignores the Truth and What We Can Do about It.

• Michele Deitch, The University of Texas at Austin School of Law, distinguished senior lecturer: Deitch directs the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas and runs the National Resource Center for Correctional Oversight.

• Terence Keel, University of California, Los Angeles Lab for BioCritical Studies, founding director: Keel is a UCLA professor of human biology and science, and African American Studies. He runs the In-Custody Death Project: Death under the U.S. Medical Examiner-Coroner System, which produces reports on in-custody deaths and is the basis for Keel’s forthcoming book States of Loss: Police Violence and the Limits of Death Investigation in America.

• Dr. Roger A. Mitchell, Jr., Howard University College of Medicine, professor and chair of pathology: Mitchell is board certified in anatomic and forensic pathology, a past chief medical examiner for Washington, D.C., and co-author of Death in Custody: How America Ignores the Truth and What We Can Do about It.

• Orion Taylor, Public Safety Lab, New York University, lead data scientist: Taylor oversees the Jail Data Initiative, which scrapes “daily county jail rosters in over 1,300 counties.” Check out their dashboard to see if your jail is included.

• Dr. Homer Venters, Community Oriented Correctional Health Services, senior health and justice fellow: Venters is the author of Life and Death in Rikers Island, which draws on his previous experience as the chief medical officer for the New York City jail system.

Style and standards

Here are two thorny issues that could come up during the reporting process and guidance on how to resolve them. For a more general overview of our styles and standards, please review our resources page.

Medical histories

When a source’s medical history is relevant to the story, you’ll need to confirm or verify any information included in the story. For stories that include important medical details about a deceased person that you obtained from a family member, make sure the family member is authorized to speak on their loved one’s behalf. You will still need to verify their information with a secondary source.

People-first language

You’ll notice throughout this toolkit that the words “inmates,” “prisoners,” “convicts” and “felons” are not used to describe the people who have died while in custody.

Instead, we use “people-first” language — such as “incarcerated people,” “people behind bars,” “people convicted of felonies” or “formerly incarcerated people.” These words avoid stigmatizing euphemisms and emphasize accuracy and clarity.

We make an exception for “prisoner” or “prisoners” in headlines, for brevity’s sake, and because it’s less fraught with stigma.

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