How many people die each year in Missouri prisons? The question should be straightforward to answer via a public records request to the state’s Department of Corrections. But my attempts to verify the state’s data turned into a reporting process full of twists and turns that ultimately led to the DOC providing comprehensive death data for the first time.
The saga began while I was looking into prison deaths at South Central Correctional Center, a prison in Licking, Missouri. In April, a coroner who handled South Central’s death investigations from 2018 to 2024 turned over seven years of reports that offered insight into how people were dying at the prison. I compared those records with the Missouri DOC’s death logs, which our team received that same month through a public records request. In multiple years, the coroner reported more deaths than appeared in state records.
In those seven years, the department’s list was missing 10 people.
Perhaps the records our team received were outdated? In October, I re-requested the prison’s death logs from 2018 to 2024: a list of all in-custody deaths in the state prison system during that timeframe.
The DOC’s initial response to my request was confusing. “The Department has completed its review of its records, and the open records responsive to this request are being sent,” the department’s attorney wrote in an email. “However, our offender death log information only goes back to 2019.”
I knew this wasn’t true, because the DOC had already provided my colleague Katie Moore with prison death records from 2018. When I compared the earlier records to what I’d just received, I noticed that two more people were now also missing from the 2024 data.
Was the DOC sending different sets of death records to different people? I asked the Missouri Justice Coalition, a criminal justice advocacy organization that requests prison death records from the state every month, if I could compare their records to mine. In their database, I found five additional deaths in various prisons from 2023 that were missing from records provided to our team by the state.
The total number of missing people was now 17.
The growing list of missing deaths raised a new, more troubling question: Was the Missouri Department of Corrections deleting people from its records?
I wrote back to the department to remind the attorney that the DOC’s records do include 2018 data, and that he had already provided The Marshall Project – St. Louis with those records earlier this year. I asked him to confirm that those records were accurate, and also pointed out that the records I’d received were missing several people from 2023 and 2024. I asked if the department could provide me with a complete count with no missing deaths.
A few days later, I received an email with two spreadsheets attached. “Please find the corrected files attached to this email,” the message read. “Again, we apologize for the confusion and appreciate your patience.”
One of the spreadsheets listed deaths from 2024, with two of the missing people now back on the list. The second spreadsheet was for 2018 — still missing six people I knew had died in prison that year because of the coroner’s records. There was no new spreadsheet for 2023, a year with eight deaths that were unaccounted for.
I wrote back asking for an updated 2023 spreadsheet and to speak with someone who could explain why these people were missing. Eventually, the department sent over another email with the 2023 spreadsheet attached. They chalked the missing records up to “an error in record retrieval.”
But eight people were still missing from the 2023 records.
Maybe the Department of Corrections didn’t actually know how many people were dying in its prisons? I asked the department several times to confirm the records they sent were complete and accurate, emphasizing that there should be “no additional missing deaths.” Each time, I received an unwavering Yes. “The data you’ve been sent is accurate,” the department insisted.
Even with the new spreadsheets, the state’s records were still missing at least 15 people.
The next day, I sent the department a list of the names and death dates of every person I knew was still unaccounted for. Why, I asked, were these people not in the state’s records?
In the next reply, the department changed its story. The DOC actually hadn’t been keeping track of the total number of people who died in prison until last year, the communications director, Karen Pojmann, said in an email. Deaths are reported one by one as they occur, she explained, and for years were not compiled or tallied in any record.
The public records I’d received were a partial total, cobbled together from multiple sources, each of which was input manually. It was only in 2024, she explained, that the DOC began using a single data source to record all prison deaths automatically, and updating it weekly with the new total.
The following day, the department sent me a new spreadsheet. This list, according to Pojmann, was “a comprehensive report of deaths from 2018 through last week” that the department’s research team created.
The new report revealed how severely Missouri’s prison deaths had been undercounted: The original death log our team received listed 15 people who died in Missouri state prisons in 2018. The actual total is 107.
Not every year is this stark: In 2019, only one death was missing from the original records. In 2020, the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, there were 78 missing deaths. In 2021, there were three people missing, and none in 2022. The last year that the state used the old record-keeping system — 2023 — had 12 deaths missing.
Pojmann acknowledged that the department’s record-keeping tools are outdated, and said the “very old and very simple” technology is part of why the prison system never applied its new death records system from 2024 to earlier years. The department also isn’t required to report year-end death totals to anyone, she said, meaning there was no incentive to calculate the total number of prison deaths until now.
“We’ve made many requests for a modern offender management system (OMS),” Pojmann added. “But so far, funds have not been appropriated to the department for this purpose.”
