Since the beginning of 2023, the Vera Institute for Justice has chronicled in-custody LA County Jail deaths, compiling demographic information and, when made publicly available, which they have not been for more than 18 months, the names of the deceased. As of today, there have been 35 in-custody deaths, most recently on Saturday August 23rd, and another just the day before. 2025 is shaping up to be a deadlier year-to-date than any on record. At several points in 2025, the rate of deaths has matched or exceeded that of 2021, the deadliest year in the county’s jail system in the past 20 years.
Since the start of 2023, 112 people have died in LA County jails.
In 2021, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors (LACBOS) voted to close the city’s deadliest facility, Men’s Central Jail (MCJ), with the aim to place detainees in community treatment programs; almost one-fifth of the people who died in custody this year were detained at MCJ. Four years later, progress on closing MCJ remains at a standstill. There is also the possibility that LACBOS could backtrack from its initial pledge; at a board meeting in August 2024, some supervisors inaccurately argued that the original plan to rely on diversion and other alternatives to incarceration was no longer viable for 75 percent of the population because of the nature of their charges.
Los Angeles County’s new jail deaths record comes shortly after California voters passed Proposition 36 in November 2024, extending harsh “three-strikes”-style sentencing to low-level nonviolent drug and theft offenses. As of May 2025, 529 people were detained on Prop 36–related charges, up from 12 people in December 2024, representing a 4,308 percent increase.
Los Angeles County does not provide the names of the people who have died in its custody. In November 2023, after successfully filing a Freedom of Information Act request, journalist Keri Blakinger was able to secure a list of names to date that year from sheriff’s department records. The 63 people who died since then were not publicly identified.
Of those who died and had identities exposed, more than half had yet to be sentenced for a crime. Many were young, with 23 percent under 35 years old. Aligned with recent Vera research showing that older people’s incarceration rates are rising, over a quarter of people who died in LA County jails were older than 55 years old, with the oldest person being 73 years old. The county reported that six of the deaths were “accidental” and four were by suicide; eight still await a final autopsy report.
“Overcrowding and staff prone to both negligence and flagrant mistreatment towards incarcerated people have continued to make MCJ, and the county jail system at large, a dangerous, even fatal, place to be,” said Michelle Parris, director of the Vera California initiative. “This current inertia—stalling on closing MCJ, dismissing alternatives to incarceration, and failing to make real strides toward solving the issues that drive incarceration, like homelessness and substance use—cannot continue.”
You can read more at “112 Dead in LA Jails Since Start of 2023” at the Vera Institute website. The Vera Institute for Justice is a non-profit organization working to end the criminalization and mass incarceration of people of color, immigrants, and people experiencing poverty, and to help create safe, healthy, empowered communities and a fair, accountable justice system.
