This request is a collaboration with Data Liberation Project volunteer Jake J. Smith.
This FOIA request 📄 to the Bureau of Prisons seeks data records representing each federal inmate death from 2005 to the present. The request asks that the records include, for each death, the inmate’s:
- Registration number
- Name
- Sex/gender
- Race
- Ethnicity
- Date of death
- Manner of death
- Specific cause of death
- Categorization of death (e.g., “Cancer”, “Cardiac”, “Drug Overdose”)
- ICD-10 code for primary diagnosis
- Assigned institution
- Assigned housing location with that institution
- Security level designation
- Institution entry date
We believe that such records are available and can be produced in a structured, machine-readable format for the following reasons:
-
In 2024, the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General released a report, “Evaluation of Issues Surrounding Inmate Deaths in Federal Bureau of Prisons Institutions,” which states: “We analyzed BOP-provided data as of October 27, 2023, on inmate deaths by suicide, homicide, accident, and unknown manner from FY 2014 through FY 2021. Specific data points included a deceased inmate’s registration number, name, sex, race, manner of death, specific cause of death, date of death, assigned institution, assigned housing location within the institution, security level designation, and Mental Health Care Level (MHCL) designation at the time of death.”
-
In response to a previous FOIA request, BOP provided a subset of prisoner death data that included inmate name, registration number, date of death, institution ID, death category, and ICD-10 primary cause of death code and description.
-
Although the records in that PDF provided via FOIA go back only to 2019, we believe that BOP possesses earlier records, as evidenced by a 2023 article published by National Public Radio describing “[r]ecords obtained from the Bureau of Prisons (BOP)” that date back to at least 2009.