On August 8, 2024, the Data Liberation Project filed a FOIA request to the Bureau of Prisons seeking data records representing each federal inmate death since 2005.
September 4, 2024, the agency responded to the request 📄 and provided a spreadsheet with most of what we requested.
The spreadsheet contains 8,242 entries, each representing a deceased inmate. It contains the following columns:
RegisterNum: BOP Register NumberNameLast: Last name; no first names providedSex: Either “Female” or “Male”Race: Either “Asian”, “Black”, “Black-Hispanic”, “Native American”, “White”, “White-Hispanic”, “Unknown”, or “Other”DOD: Date of deathInstID: Assigned institution/facility (represented via BOP’s standard three-letter codes)DeathCategory: One of 35 categories, such as “Cancer”, “Drug Overdose”, or “Pending Autopsy”ICD10 Prime: ICD-10 code for the primary cause of death, or “UNK”ICD10 Second: ICD-10 code for the secondary cause of death, or “UNK”
The deaths date from January 1, 2005 through August 9, 2024.
The data do not contain several of the fields we requested, as BOP’s response letter indicates (emphasis added):
Specifically, the BOP does not track the assigned housing location within the institution, the security level designation, or the institution entry date for the time frame you requested. Obtaining that information would require the BOP to conduct an unreasonably burdensome search through the records of each listed adult in custody (AIC).