How many individuals die every year in Missouri prisons? The query ought to be easy to reply by way of a public data request to the state’s Division of Corrections. However my makes an attempt to confirm the state’s knowledge become a reporting course of filled with twists and turns that finally led to the DOC offering complete dying knowledge for the primary time.
The saga started whereas I used to be trying into jail deaths at South Central Correctional Heart, a jail in Licking, Missouri. In April, a coroner who dealt with South Central’s dying investigations from 2018 to 2024 turned over seven years of experiences that provided perception into how individuals had been dying on the jail. I in contrast these data with the Missouri DOC’s dying logs, which our staff obtained that very same month by a public data request. In a number of years, the coroner reported extra deaths than appeared in state data.
In these seven years, the division’s record was lacking 10 individuals.
Maybe the data our staff obtained had been outdated? In October, I re-requested the jail’s dying logs from 2018 to 2024: an inventory of all in-custody deaths within the state jail system throughout that timeframe.
The DOC’s preliminary response to my request was complicated. “The Division has accomplished its assessment of its data, and the open data attentive to this request are being despatched,” the division’s lawyer wrote in an electronic mail. “Nonetheless, our offender dying log info solely goes again to 2019.”
I knew this wasn’t true, as a result of the DOC had already supplied my colleague Katie Moore with jail dying data from 2018. After I in contrast the sooner data to what I’d simply obtained, I seen that two extra individuals had been now additionally lacking from the 2024 knowledge.
Was the DOC sending completely different units of dying data to completely different individuals? I requested the Missouri Justice Coalition, a felony justice advocacy group that requests jail dying data from the state each month, if I may examine their data to mine. Of their database, I discovered 5 further deaths in numerous prisons from 2023 that had been lacking from data supplied to our staff by the state.
The whole variety of lacking individuals was now 17.
The rising record of lacking deaths raised a brand new, extra troubling query: Was the Missouri Division of Corrections deleting individuals from its data?
I wrote again to the division to remind the lawyer that the DOC’s data do embrace 2018 knowledge, and that he had already supplied The Marshall Undertaking – St. Louis with these data earlier this yr. I requested him to verify that these data had been correct, and in addition identified that the data I’d obtained had been lacking a number of individuals from 2023 and 2024. I requested if the division may present me with an entire depend with no lacking deaths.
A number of days later, I obtained an electronic mail with two spreadsheets hooked up. “Please discover the corrected information hooked up to this electronic mail,” the message learn. “Once more, we apologize for the confusion and recognize your persistence.”
One of many spreadsheets listed deaths from 2024, with two of the lacking individuals now again on the record. The second spreadsheet was for 2018 — nonetheless lacking six individuals I knew had died in jail that yr due to the coroner’s data. There was no new spreadsheet for 2023, a yr with eight deaths that had been unaccounted for.
I wrote again asking for an up to date 2023 spreadsheet and to talk with somebody who may clarify why these individuals had been lacking. Finally, the division despatched over one other electronic mail with the 2023 spreadsheet hooked up. They chalked the lacking data as much as “an error in document retrieval.”
However eight individuals had been nonetheless lacking from the 2023 data.
Possibly the Division of Corrections didn’t really know the way many individuals had been dying in its prisons? I requested the division a number of instances to verify the data they despatched had been full and correct, emphasizing that there ought to be “no further lacking deaths.” Every time, I obtained an unwavering Sure. “The info you’ve been despatched is correct,” the division insisted.
Even with the brand new spreadsheets, the state’s data had been nonetheless lacking at the least 15 individuals.
The subsequent day, I despatched the division an inventory of the names and dying dates of each individual I knew was nonetheless unaccounted for. Why, I requested, had been these individuals not within the state’s data?
Within the subsequent reply, the division modified its story. The DOC really hadn’t been holding monitor of the whole quantity of people that died in jail till final yr, the communications director, Karen Pojmann, stated in an electronic mail. Deaths are reported one after the other as they happen, she defined, and for years weren’t compiled or tallied in any document.
The general public data I’d obtained had been a partial whole, cobbled collectively from a number of sources, every of which was enter manually. It was solely in 2024, she defined, that the DOC started utilizing a single knowledge supply to document all jail deaths routinely, and updating it weekly with the brand new whole.
The next day, the division despatched me a brand new spreadsheet. This record, based on Pojmann, was “a complete report of deaths from 2018 by final week” that the division’s analysis staff created.
The brand new report revealed how severely Missouri’s jail deaths had been undercounted: The unique dying log our staff obtained listed 15 individuals who died in Missouri state prisons in 2018. The precise whole is 107.
Not yearly is that this stark: In 2019, just one dying was lacking from the unique data. In 2020, the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been 78 lacking deaths. In 2021, there have been three individuals lacking, and none in 2022. The final yr that the state used the outdated record-keeping system — 2023 — had 12 deaths lacking.
Pojmann acknowledged that the division’s record-keeping instruments are outdated, and stated the “very outdated and quite simple” know-how is a part of why the jail system by no means utilized its new dying data system from 2024 to earlier years. The division additionally isn’t required to report year-end dying totals to anybody, she stated, that means there was no incentive to calculate the whole variety of jail deaths till now.
“We’ve made many requests for a contemporary offender administration system (OMS),” Pojmann added. “However to this point, funds haven’t been appropriated to the division for this goal.”
