And all my thanks to the wonderful Jacilet Griffin.

Thanks my fearless reporting partners Ilica Mahajan & @asankin.bsky.social for all their work in the last year. Thanks Rahim Fortune for incredible photos, Celina Fang for inspired art direction & Josie Norton for beautiful illos. Get in touch to share your thoughts about deaths in custody.

Read Jacilet and Evan's story here: www.themarshallproject.org/2025/08/06/h...

The official failure to adequately track these deaths puts enormous burdens on families. Jacilet Griffin's son Evan Lee died in a Texas jail in 2022; ever since, she's been a warrior for her family and others facing grief and lack of answers after a loved one's death behind bars.

Interviews with dozens of people from the Justice Department, law enforcement, Congress, research groups and advocacy showed that the federal government has simply never prioritized the DCRA law enough to build a workable system to track deaths in custody.

One of the law's requirements is to use the data to prevent future deaths in custody. But about 1 in 6 of the records didn't include manner of death.

How can you figure out how to reduce deaths if you don't know how people are dying?

More here with @wbur.org: www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2...

We found hundreds of people who died in custody but weren't listed in the official data. The overwhelming majority of records didn't meet the Justice Department's standards for accuracy and completeness. Still, the DOJ has never once penalized a state for poor reporting.

One example of the problems plaguing the government's tracking of deaths in custody: an inadvertently leaked federal dataset showed that George Floyd's death—one of the most well-known cases of police use of force—is not called police use of force in the official records.