A December 2025 report from New Jersey's state prison watchdog — the Office of the Corrections Ombudsperson — documented a troubling paradox in the state's prison system: as New Jersey's incarcerated population has declined, the absolute number of deaths in state prisons has held roughly steady — meaning the death rate per 1,000 inmates has risen. The New Jersey Monitor and the Jersey Vindicator both analyzed and reported on the findings, which cover the period from 2018 through 2024.
The Core Numbers
Between 2018 and 2024, 336 people died while in New Jersey state Department of Corrections custody. Of those 336 deaths:
- 83 percent were attributed by medical examiners to natural causes — disease, organ failure, and age-related conditions in an aging incarcerated population
- One in seven deaths — approximately 14 percent — was from "unnatural causes": overdose, suicide, homicide, or accidents
The rise in the death rate, despite declining population, suggests that the underlying conditions producing prison deaths — healthcare quality, mental health support, contraband drug availability, and violence — have not improved proportionally with the population reduction.
Suicides and Disciplinary Housing: A Documented Link
The watchdog report highlighted a particularly stark finding about suicide deaths: of the 13 suicide deaths recorded between 2018 and 2024, more than half — 54 percent — involved people being held in disciplinary housing units. Disciplinary housing — sometimes called restrictive housing or "the hole" — places inmates in near-total isolation for 22 or more hours per day as punishment for rule violations.
The link between prolonged isolation and suicide is well-documented in the research literature. Solitary-type confinement dramatically worsens mental health conditions, creates sensory deprivation, and removes the social support structures that provide even marginally protective effects in general population housing. The finding that 7 of 13 suicide deaths occurred in disciplinary housing — when disciplinary housing houses a small fraction of the total population at any given time — suggests an outsized risk concentration in that setting.
In response, NJDOC has taken steps including establishing a self-harm task force and expanding mental health observation protocols for people in disciplinary housing.
Drug-Related Deaths: Mail Scanning as a Response
Overdose deaths — driven by fentanyl entering facilities through mail — represent a significant share of the unnatural deaths. NJDOC has implemented a mail scanning system — photocopying or digitizing letters before delivery to prevent fentanyl-soaked paper from reaching inmates. This is the same approach that Michigan and other states have adopted as fentanyl's extreme potency makes drug-infused paper a fatal vector.
The Healthcare Question
The rising death rate in the context of declining population also implicates healthcare quality. As the prison population has fallen — through reforms, sentence reductions, and declining admissions — the people who remain in New Jersey's prisons are disproportionately those serving longer sentences for serious offenses. This population skews older and has higher rates of chronic illness than the general population. Without healthcare investments keeping pace with this demographic shift, mortality rates will continue to rise even with a shrinking headcount.
New Jersey's Compassionate Release law — designed to allow gravely ill inmates to die at home rather than in prison — was reported in July 2025 to have released very few people since passage, despite the population of seriously ill long-term inmates the law was intended to serve.
NJDOC headquarters: Whittlesey Road, PO Box 863, Trenton, NJ 08625. Phone: (609) 292-4036. Website: nj.gov/corrections. Office of the Corrections Ombudsperson: nj.gov/oag/eps/ombudsperson.