In 2024, the Oklahoma Department of Corrections launched a new public-facing Deaths in Custody dashboard — an online database accessible through oklahoma.gov/doc that lists deaths occurring in Oklahoma state prisons including the facility where the death occurred, the date, the age of the person who died, and the manner of death when available. The launch represented a meaningful step toward transparency in a state where families, attorneys, and journalists had struggled to obtain basic information about how people died in DOC custody.
What the Dashboard Contains
The Oklahoma DOC deaths dashboard, starting with 2024 data, includes:
- Facility name — where the death occurred
- Date of death
- Age of the deceased
- Manner of death — when available, categories like natural causes, homicide, suicide, accident, or undetermined
The dashboard is updated with new deaths as they are documented and cleared for public release. It does not include the name of the deceased or the cause of death in medical detail — but it provides the basic accountability data that allows public scrutiny of mortality patterns across facilities and over time.
Why This Dashboard Matters
Before the dashboard, families and journalists who wanted basic information about prison deaths in Oklahoma had to submit individual public records requests — a process that the Oklahoma DOC had reportedly been using to keep death information confidential, particularly incident reports. The Frontier, an Oklahoma investigative news outlet, filed a lawsuit against the DOC over access to prison incident reports related to inmate deaths — a case that reflects the opacity that preceded the dashboard launch.
The dashboard represents a shift from opacity to proactive disclosure. By publishing death data directly, DOC reduces the need for individual records requests and creates a public record that advocates, families, journalists, and the legislature can use to track mortality trends without needing institutional cooperation on a case-by-case basis.
The Context: An Ongoing Transparency Debate
The dashboard launch came alongside ongoing tension about what information the DOC would and would not disclose. In the same period, an Oklahoma state representative accused the DOC of covering up an inmate murder — a statement that sparked a broader legislative debate about the appropriate scope of transparency for prison death records.
Oklahoma DOC's official position, articulated in a December 2025 statement, was that it was committed to transparency while opposing what it described as misinformation. The department launched the deaths dashboard as a concrete demonstration of that commitment, while continuing to resist release of detailed incident reports through FOI channels.
How Families Can Use the Dashboard
The deaths dashboard is accessible at oklahoma.gov/doc/deaths-in-custody.html. Families can use it to:
- Confirm that a death at a specific facility on a specific date is in the public record
- Identify mortality patterns at a specific facility over time (which facilities have higher death rates or unusual concentrations of homicides)
- Build a factual baseline for conversations with DOC or attorneys about the circumstances of a loved one's death
- Identify whether a death was categorized as "undetermined" — a classification that warrants further inquiry when the circumstances were suspicious
Oklahoma DOC headquarters: 3400 North Martin Luther King Avenue, Oklahoma City, OK 73136. Phone: (405) 425-2500. Website: oklahoma.gov/doc.