More Than One-Third Of PA Jail Deaths Went Unreported, New Study Shows

PENNSYLVANIA — A new investigation says that more than two dozen deaths last year in Pennsylvania’s jails went uncounted, because they were not properly reported.

The report from PennLive and the Pittsburgh Institute for Nonprofit Journalism identified 65 people who died in custody around the state last year. Of these, 25 were not properly reported, the study found. This is despite federal and state laws requiring counties to report the deaths of people who are in the custody of police, jails or prison staff.

The majority of in-custody deaths in 2022 were in Philadelphia (10), Allegheny (6) and Bucks (6) counties, records show.

The report said that because of “breakdowns in the system” and a lack of proper reporting, there could be even more deaths than those 65 reported in 2022.

The report found that Joshua Patterson, a Bucks County inmate who died last August of a fentanyl overdose, was among those unreported deaths. Patterson died in a local hospital after another inmate snuck the drug into the jail and distributed it, records show. Because he was not in custody at the moment he was pronounced dead, county officials did not report his death to state or federal authorities.

“That is a common tactic used by counties in Pennsylvania and across the nation to skirt reporting requirements, making it extremely difficult to know if any count of deaths in jails is accurate,” said report authors Joshua Vaughn and Brittany Hailer.

Click here to read the full report.