Recently, the U.S. Department of Justice released a new report assessing deaths in federal prisons. The report responds to the Death in Custody Reporting Act (DCRA) of 2013, requiring the tracking of deaths in custody. Among the nearly 2 million people incarcerated in the U.S., federal prisoners make up less than 13% of the total U.S. prisoner population with the remainder in state prisons. The DCRA covers all people in custody, including federal and state prisons. Yet, since 2019, the federal government has not released information on deaths in state prisons, and according to a recent Government Accountability Office report, has no plans to release information on deaths.
Because of this gap, the number of people who die in U.S. prisons is unknown to the public — an omission that takes on enormous significance given the COVID-19 pandemic.
During the pandemic, prisoners were especially susceptible to COVID-19 infection and death. Prisons, along with other “closed” institutions —such as nursing homes, immigration detention facilities and jails — have dense living arrangements that can make social distancing impossible, often constrained resources for personal protective equipment and generate frequent movement of staff between prisons and their communities. Prisons also imposed policies attempting to decrease infection, including lockdowns, visitor prohibitions and solitary confinement in lieu of medical isolation, which increased stress, mental health issues and violence.
These conditions, along with medical vulnerabilities of incarcerated people, are concentrated within prisons. In the states that reported COVID-19 information, prisons emerged as epicenters of outbreaks and death.
In new research, based primarily on an analysis of public records requests to jurisdictions, my colleagues and I provide the most comprehensive understanding to date of the number of deaths in U.S. prisons in 2020, the first year of COVID-19 onset. Our analysis of 48 jurisdictions (46 states, the Federal Bureau of Prisons and Washington, D.C.) finds that:
- Mortality in prisons increased by 77% in 2020 relative to 2019, corresponding to 3.4 times the increase in the general population, with substantial variation across states and jurisdictions
- Mortality in prisons increased across all age groups (49 and under, 50 to 64, and 65 and older)
- COVID-19 was the primary driver for mortality increases due to natural causes, but some states also experienced large increases due to unnatural causes. Georgia and Tennessee, for example, reported high increases in deaths due to unnatural causes.
And we found that many states attributed deaths to “unknown” causes. Of the 41 jurisdictions that reported any manner of death, over one-third (or 15 jurisdictions) reported at least 10% of deaths as “unknown” in 2020. Some of this missing information is likely related to the constraints of the pandemic. But even in pre-pandemic years, some jurisdictions (including California, Maryland, Missouri, New York and Oregon) routinely reported a high prevalence of “unknown” causes of death. Alongside this troubling gap in information, our team was not able to receive any information, from public records requests, from Virginia and Wisconsin. Because of this, our analyses completely exclude these two states.
This research highlights what advocates, academics and other stakeholders have long believed: U.S. prisons were especially vulnerable to COVID-19 and its collateral consequences for health. Responding early in the pandemic, jurisdictions enacted some policies to control infection (such as lockdowns, programming suspensions and visitor prohibitions) but often ignored other recommended policies and practices (such as releases of medically vulnerable prisoners, universal screening of officers and staff coming in and out of prisons, as well as strict enforcement of mask-wearing among officers and staff). Evaluations of these policies and practices — to understand the mortality toll of the pandemic in prisons and to prepare for future pandemics — are critically needed.
This research also points to the systematic failure of our government to identify and report deaths in custody, despite the federal mandate of the DCRA. Our research can fill in some of these fundamental gaps in knowledge, including the number and cause of deaths in prisons — but not all jurisdictions report these basic facts. We were also unable to consistently identify race/ethnicity and gender across jurisdictions, preventing an analysis of inequalities in prison deaths.
In a country with extremely high and racially disparate incarceration rates, the lack of transparency regarding the health and care of incarcerated people is not only a failure of accounting, it’s also a social justice issue.
Naomi F. Sugie is an associate professor in the criminology, law and society department at the University of California, Irvine. She has a Ph.D. in sociology and social policy, as well as a specialization in demography, from Princeton University.
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