Missouri Journalists: How to Access the State Prison System’s Comprehensive Death Data

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In response to questions from The Marshall Project – St. Louis in October about how Missouri prison deaths are tracked and recorded, the research team at the Missouri Department of Corrections generated a new report: a spreadsheet with every prison death recorded from January 2018 to October 2025.

This report differs from previous death records, which were cobbled together from multiple sources, and were often missing people. According to the department, this report is the most “current and comprehensive data” about Missouri prison deaths.

You can access the data below. But first, here’s some information to help you better understand the data and its limitations.

Data dictionary

The Marshall Project – St. Louis asked the Missouri DOC to define the fields, or categories, that appear in the data. Here is a key, based on their responses:

• First Name: The first name of the person who died.
• Last Name: The last name of the person who died.
• Date of Death: The date the person died (or is presumed to have died, if exact time of death is unknown).
• DOC ID: The person’s “offender ID number,” or the number assigned to them by the prison system. When a person is still alive, their ID number can be used to look them up in the Missouri prison database.
• CYC: The person’s “cycle number,” which corresponds roughly to the date the person was arrested. It is in the format YYYY/MM/DD.
• Institution: The prison where the person was assigned at the time of their death, abbreviated. The acronyms for each facility correspond to their full names, which can be found here. Note that the DOC has closed or consolidated prisons over the last decade, so some facilities may only have death records up to a certain date. Note also that a person may have been transferred to a hospital or other facility shortly before their death, so the location in this column is not necessarily where the person died. Rather, it is the facility that had custody of them at the time of death.
• Status: An internal code used to describe, in general terms, where someone died. Each status code corresponds to a description (see table below).
• Description: An abbreviated field which includes the manner of death, plus whether the death was at the prison or another location, such as a hospital (see table below).

Verifying or updating the data

While the Missouri DOC’s research team provided this data exclusively to The Marshall Project – St. Louis, this data is technically part of the public record, and therefore, anyone should be able to request it in the future.

The data provided below is only current through October 2025. To verify and request more recent data from the Missouri DOC, you are welcome to adapt this Freedom of Information/Sunshine request email template:

To: OD.SunshineRequest@doc.mo.gov

Subject: Request for comprehensive report of prison deaths

Hi,

I’m writing to request the department’s comprehensive report of deaths from 2018 through [insert calendar date here].

Your office previously provided an earlier version of these records to The Marshall Project (see attachment below)

and I am writing to confirm these records are still accurate, and to request these same records current through [insert calendar date here].

As a reminder, you are required by the state’s Sunshine open records law to respond to this request within three business days.

If you have any questions on the above, please don’t hesitate to reach out. All the best,

[Your name]

Limitations and other sources of data

Finally, it’s important to recognize that all data has limitations. While this data represents the most comprehensive view currently available of Missouri prison deaths over the last eight years, it is far from perfect. A Department of Corrections spokesperson said the department has moved away from a manual entry system to an automated one, but there is always the possibility of error: a misspelled name, incorrect date, or even another missing person.

Because autopsy reports take several weeks to complete, the DOC often lists the manner of more recent deaths as “unknown” until the autopsy becomes available. This means that, particularly if you’re looking at deaths from the last year, the data is likely incomplete. Deaths currently marked as unknown might be replaced with suicide or accident in a few weeks or months. The data also does not include demographic information — race/ethnicity, age, or gender/sex — or a detailed description of how the person died.

To assess prison deaths in greater detail, we recommend seeking additional information, such as the autopsy report and death certificate from the county coroner or medical examiner’s office. The Marshall Project compiled a list of every county with one or more prisons, and the contact information for most coroners and medical examiners can be found on the Missouri Coroners and Medical Examiners Association website here.

Keep in mind the record-keeping system for coroners in Missouri is not especially standardized, so you may get different responses from different counties: some coroners are quite helpful and forthcoming; others, not so much.

If you’re interested in the deaths of specific people, you can also try requesting the internal investigative report of their death from the DOC: The document is called a “Death Investigation Report” and is under the DOC’s Office of Professional Standards. These internal reports are often heavily redacted or withheld from the public, but sometimes can contain useful information. Also, if a person did not receive an autopsy, it’s unlikely the prison conducted an internal investigation.

For any additional records, The Marshall Project put together a pair of guides with step-by-step instructions about which records you can request and how to obtain them — one for the loved ones of someone who dies in prison and another for journalists investigating deaths behind bars.

Get the data

To access the data, click here. This is a read-only version in Google Sheets, so you will be prompted to make a copy of the spreadsheet in order to use the data. The Marshall Project has not updated or modified the data since receiving it from the Missouri Department of Corrections.

If you have additional questions about the data, please email us at investigatethis@themarshallproject.org or request a consultation with a Marshall Project staff member here.

Style and standards

For years, the Missouri DOC provided “annual” death totals to media and other organizations that were cobbled together from multiple sources, passing these numbers off as an accurate count for the year. If you have reported totals based on DOC information, we suggest double-checking your previous posts with this new dataset.

In such cases where you find a discrepancy, make sure to correct or update the information in the copy and any data visualizations. You should also include a dated note at the top of the story, indicating that an update or correction was made, and explain why the change was made (i.e. new information about the data becoming available) — without repeating the previous incorrect or incomplete information.