Deaths in Alabama Prisons

In 2019, we began keeping track of escalating deaths inside Alabama prisons. We aimed to confirm and document all available information about each individual death, including the person’s name, age, race, cause and manner of death, facility, date of death, and any other contributing circumstances. The result is a dynamic database showing the comprehensive human cost of a prison system in crisis.

When a person dies in state custody, it is in the public interest to know why and how they died, especially in Alabama, where the prison mortality rate is exceptionally high^[1]. In 2019, the U.S. Department of Justice attributed the rising death toll in the Alabama Department of Corrections to the system’s failures in keeping people safe from violence, drugs, sexual assault, and other sources of harm.

Since then, as our database reveals, deaths have increased to the highest numbers on record. Meeting this disaster with urgency requires a full accounting of the lives lost, so we present our findings here in dynamic form with the best available data and information at present. As we continue this work, reporting on and researching deaths in Alabama prisons, findings are subject to change as new information on individual cases becomes available.

There is no government agency that reports a comprehensive record of prison deaths in Alabama. State law passed in 2021 requires the department of corrections to publish quarterly data, but the information on deaths is limited and does not include individual names. The law requires the department to include “top-level”^[2] autopsy findings, but in 2022, the agency dropped autopsy details from these reports without explanation, limiting answers about why someone died in custody to the manner of death only.

In May of 2024, the agency scaled back its longstanding practice of conducting autopsies on the majority of in-custody deaths. The department cited state law that only requires autopsies “for deaths resulting from unlawful, suspicious or unnatural causes.” Deaths outside those categories, in which ADOC includes suspected overdoses, will only undergo a toxicology screening, but results are not included in the quarterly statistical reports. Subsequently, the agency created a new category for closed death investigations: “autopsy not authorized.” For these deaths, ADOC has not provided the manner of death from the death certificate, despite state law requiring this information to be included, regardless of autopsy.

The decision on whether to authorize an autopsy appears to be left to the facility’s discretion. Furthermore, not publishing all available data on cause of death, including toxicology results, obfuscates just how many drug-related deaths are occurring in Alabama prisons, despite a staggering increase in the number of confirmed fatal overdoses. That’s why we decided to triangulate information and data from many sources, instead of relying on incomplete or inaccurate reports published by the Alabama Department of Corrections. Based on this information, we can sort roughly 85 percent of all deaths into a category, with additional details for around 65 percent of the deaths.

We’ve consulted and cross-referenced multiple data sources obtained from public agencies, detailed in our process below. We also sourced information about deaths from media reports, incarcerated people inside the prisons, their family members, and prison officers or staff. Throughout the project, we’ve conducted various in-depth investigations into specific deaths, compiling case studies that uncovered inconsistencies and complicated circumstances that are often not reflected in government reports.

Our process

We began by submitting a request to ADOC under Alabama’s Open Records Act for a list of names, dates and facilities for each in-custody death between 2019-present.^[3] This list served as our baseline; however, the list did not include the cause and manner of death. In order to compile our database, we cross-referenced ADOC’s initial list with other sources including data on prison deaths collected by the Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs (ADECA) for the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act (DCRA) and the unredacted data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which largely reflects the ADECA data, but includes more details, like names and brief circumstances about the death.

Additionally, we obtained hundreds of autopsy reports from the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences (ADFS), which cost approximately $24 each, and are only available once a death investigation is closed. In addition to ADFS, the Jefferson County Medical Examiner performs autopsies for deaths in several facilities in the state. Using a process similar to ADFS, we obtained dozens of autopsy reports from Jefferson County for $20 each^[4]. Until 2024, University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) performed some autopsies on deaths in ADOC that were suspected of overdoses or natural causes,^[5] but so far, we have not been successful in obtaining those reports through open records requests.

In comparing these various sources of information, we encountered many inconsistencies between ADOC’s public reporting and the latest information the agency sent to the federal government. We also found inconsistencies or limited information in ADOC’s public reporting on these deaths compared with information from witnesses inside the prisons, family members, or autopsy reports from pathologists. For example, ADOC’s own reporting to the federal government is not updated as investigations are closed, so nearly half of cases report the cause of death as “investigation pending.” Despite these discrepancies, we have gathered enough information from across various sources about how and why people died while in ADOC custody to categorize the deaths as outlined below.

Our categories

Drugs: These are deaths where drugs are a main factor causing death. The majority are classified as overdoses on the autopsy, but there are a handful in which pathologists listed “natural” as the manner of death, but the cause included factors related to drug use while incarcerated, like “sepsis due to recent IV drug use.”

Suicide: These are deaths ruled as suicides by a pathologist or medical examiner who performed an autopsy. The vast majority involved suicide by hanging.

Homicide: These are deaths ruled homicide by a pathologist or medical examiner, or have been reported as homicides in our various data sources. In some cases, ADOC confirmed to media that an incarcerated person was killed in custody.

Officer Violence: Three of these deaths were ruled homicide by a pathologist or medical examiner, caused from beatings by officers, which were confirmed by ADOC.

Accident: These are deaths that have been ruled “Accident” by autopsy or other data sources, and include vehicle accidents, falls, and other incidents inside the prisons.

Execution: These are deaths by state execution, which is categorized as “judicial homicide.” Some were killed by lethal injection, some by nitrogen hypoxia, an experimental method involving suffocation by nitrogen gas that ADOC introduced in 2024.

Natural: These are deaths from causes ruled natural by autopsy or reporting agencies, to include illness and medical causes, or other circumstances for death that do not have a clear connection to the prison environment.

Undetermined: These are deaths in which a pathologist was unable to determine the manner of death due to unclear clinical findings or evidence and information connected to the death. “Undetermined” is a specific manner of death finding reported in some autopsy results and death certificates.

Unknown: These are deaths with pending investigations or a lack of information that we’ve been able to obtain. We plan to update deaths in this category as new information is made available.

Conclusions

The information presented in this database should be considered fluid, meaning we rely on the best available data and information at the present time, but this is subject to change given the dynamic nature of death investigations. In some cases, before 2021, all of the data is simply not available. If ADOC released a statement confirming a death, which the agency did regularly in the era before quarterly reports, we adopted that information in our research. However, these statements sometimes conflicted with later findings from other sources, which is why we consider all information in pursuit of the truth.

We also encountered conflicts in comparing data from various sources. For example, an autopsy in one case listed manner of death as “undetermined,” but ADOC’s quarterly report listed the manner in the same death as “natural.” We investigated them further, considering as much information as we had through our own sources or official data to reach a final determination. In some cases, we are keeping the cause as “unknown” until we receive more intelligence.

Each entry in the database should be considered a high-level summary and not exhaustive. On each, we note the sources used to determine the type of death and any other additional pertinent details. Additional information that we’ve collected can be requested by interested parties.

In our database, we made the decision to pair photos of individuals from the official ADOC prisoner database, when available, with the information collected. The photos are a public record, and we acknowledge that state mugshots are often unflattering, but they also provide something that simple data and information cannot - a rendering of the humanity lost to this crisis.

Everyone serving a sentence inside Alabama’s overcrowded and understaffed prisons continues to face an extraordinary risk of death. We hope our reporting on the deaths in this database creates better transparency and understanding about who is dying in Alabama prisons and why, bringing us closer to urgently-needed accountability and change.

The research and reporting behind this project was done by Andrew Jarecki, Charlotte Kaufman, Beth Shelburne, Chris Izor and Gabe Murray, with support from Eddie Burkhalter.

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