By Audrey Sawyer and Ruby Mota
LOS ANGELES, CA – The UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project earlier this month released a comprehensive public resource that documents prison deaths nationwide, including that, in 2020, about 6,182 people died in U.S. prisons.
According to the project, that total “is a 46 percent increase in the lives lost behind bars from 2019, despite a 10 percent decrease in the overall prison population,” and the U.S. has seen a gradual increase in prison deaths over the past 20 years, but never before such a vertical increase year after year.
In addition to relying on each state’s public records law and publicly available reports, the project team requested and gathered information on each death in U.S. prisons, covering approximately 2019-2020.
The project said the federal government has failed to reliably and transparently collect data on deaths in custody and has effectively halted its own reporting of these data. The project said it released this database because of the government’s relinquishment of a congressionally-mandated responsibility of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) since 2000.
Summary tables generated by the project show crude mortality rates and total death counts. Crude rates and shifts in population size were calculated using the Vera Institute of Justice’s People in Prison Spring 2021 Data, showing data for the years 2019-2021.
According to the summary table findings, the project said mortality rate increased higher in percentage than the number of deaths as a result of the population confined by agencies declining by 10 percent between 2019 and 2020.
The project reports agencies which provided finished data in 2020 showed that there were 1,942 more deaths in 2020 when compared against 2019, a 46 percent increase. The crude mortality rate had increased by 62 percent to 47 deaths per 10,000 incarcerated individuals.
In the states of North Dakota, Alaska, Montana, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Michigan, the number of deaths in prison more than doubled between 2019 and 2020. Forty-three states saw increases in deaths in prisons among the same time frame.
The project said with the usage of 2019 and 2020 data across 27 prison agencies, the following facilities show the highest percent of changes in annual deaths from each state. The purpose of such analysis is to identify facilities with potential failures in management practices that may have caused preventable deaths, and to highlight facilities successfully reducing prevalence of custodial deaths.
The project noted state-specific analysis is provided, with Georgia as one example. Georgia (between 2015 and 2020) saw the annual number of prison deaths double.
And, the project uncovered COVID mortality by different racial groups in the Texas state prison system. Research indicates that Hispanic and Black people in Texas prisons died of COVID at two and 1.6 times the rate of their white peers. 
The UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project has been collecting data since the pandemic’s beginning from carceral agencies to document the impact of COVID on incarcerated people.
Despite the COVID case rates and related deaths reported by carceral agencies, the project said it does not reveal the full impact of the pandemic on incarcerated people.
“Due to inadequate and opaque testing regimens, a large and uncertain number of infections went unidentified, and at least some deaths were not properly attributed to COVID,” said the project.
The project has documented that many state prison systems have been lacking in transparency over the course of the pandemic, and “(t)wenty-one state prison agencies no longer post data on the state of COVID in their facilities at all. These agencies were responsible for the health and welfare of over 380,000 incarcerated individuals in 2020.” COVID data did not reflect the deaths that occurred within the prisons that were non-COVID related.
Because the production of detailed federal reports on prison morality stopped in 2019, the project’s efforts to produce public and transparent monitoring of mortality in prisons became essential in 2020, noted the project, adding, between 2000 and 2019, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), the statistical agency for DOJ, produced Mortality in Correctional Institution (MCI) reports that summarized the data BJS collected under the Death in Custody Reporting Act (DCRA).
The project said the DOJ determined the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) will take over stewardship of data on mortality in prisons and jails through DCRA from 2019 forward, but it will not publish any of the data or even report them in its entirety.
The project began collecting records on deaths from all causes in prisons in June 2020. As of February 2023, the project has gathered records on prison deaths from the federal Bureau of Prisons and every state department of corrections.
The project obtained records on prison deaths using public records requests from 43 prison agencies.
The project said: It has gathered complete data for 2019 and 2020 from 49 states and the BOP. The New Mexico Department of Corrections is the only U.S. prison agency that has not provided complete records for 2020; while there has been a request for this data pending with the agency since November 2022. Complete records for deaths in 2021 have been obtained from 28 state prison agencies.
The project also notes: Prison agencies provided different variables for reported prison deaths: Twenty-eight agencies provided a name for individuals who died in their facilities; 45 agencies provided the facilities in which deaths occurred; 24 agencies provided information on the race of individuals who died in their facilities; 37 agencies provided descriptions of the circumstances of deaths in their facilities.
The project reported it has a summary sheet with the variables available for each state prison agency. The sheet will be updated as more data is collected.
The project began validating records they were collecting to help ensure they were accurately capturing deaths in U.S. prisons and were comparable to the now-defunct MCI reports. The project compared each agency’s collected annual death count recorded in past MCI reports with collected annual counts of pre-2020 deaths in prisons produced from gathered records. Most agency totals roughly matched.
According to the summary table for the project for the largest single-year discrepancy for each state among pre-2020 data provided, a total of twelve states were found to have six death differences or greater.
The project reported only three states provided records that matched annual totals from MCI reports, and “the largest difference was in 2005 in California, where there were 32 more deaths in prisons reported in MCI reports compared with data obtained by our project from the California Department of Justice.”
The project sought explanations from the prison agencies with a maximum discrepancy of six or more deaths and presented a table of states they contacted and the agency’s response status.
A crucial difference between the Behind Bars Data Project provided by UCLA and the data provided by the DOJ in the MCI reports is that Behind Bars is showing facility and individual level information on prison deaths for most jurisdictions, explained the project.
BJS said it will not release data publicly (individual or facility level) as it believes that doing so will allow members of the public to identify individuals who died in carceral facilities and would violate its mandate as a federal statistical agency.
The concern, said the project, is that many state prison agencies, in accordance with state law, regularly release information to the public on individuals who have died in their custody, such as in press releases or their website. As highlighted by the initiative, there is a national norm for prison agencies to release facility (and individual) level information on deaths in custody upon request.
The project said claim of purpose for data collection shown in the DCRA is to produce a report determining how to reduce the prevalence in deaths in custody. The DOJ is meant to “evaluate the relationship” (if existing) between number of deaths and the response or management between jails, prisons, and other similar facilities.
The UCLA report added while a report was due to Congress in 2016, the DOJ has not replied.
Gaps can be filled using the open source database. As of February 2023, facility level data has been collected from 45 prison agencies, the BOP included. Information has since been able to be connected (from 30 prison agencies) to the database, combining information such as county code, geographical location, security level, and federal facility IDs. With this information, data has been used to provide facility level analysis on vaccination rates, mortality, and COVID infection.
The project repeatedly noted the purpose of the initiative is to support the DOJ in fulfilling its congressionally mandated responsibilities to collect data on all U.S. custodial deaths and study the data to reduce the prevalence.
Another intention is to further national and local endeavors indicated to better monitor and reduce significant health consequences of mass incarceration in the U.S. 
