What we know about the 55 people who died inside Wisconsin prisons last year

Fifty-five people died in the custody of Wisconsin's prison system last year, according to newly released data.

Of the deaths, almost half were deemed "unanticipated," a description used by the state Department of Corrections that includes suicides, homicides and unexpected illness.

The other half were listed as "anticipated," a term used when a prisoner was in the terminal stage of an illness and had an anticipated life expectancy of a year or less, according to a recent report from the agency's Committee on Inmate and Youth Deaths.

The state Department of Corrections has faced growing scrutiny after four prisoners died at the maximum-security Waupun Correctional Institution over eight months.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has published in-depth accounts of two of the four deaths, piecing together information from witnesses inside the facility and families of those who died. The news organization obtained the DOC committee's annual report through an open records request.

Advocates for those incarcerated and their families have criticized the agency for its lack of transparency. It does not immediately notify the public when a prisoner dies in custody and generally provides few details about the circumstances.

"They will withhold as much information as they can," said David Liners, the executive director of WISDOM, an advocacy organization aimed at supporting incarcerated individuals.

"It's a pattern in the Department of Corrections that they don't readily come forth with information like this — about when people have died and how they've died," he added.

Instead, the public is left to rely on aggregate reports released months or even years after the fact. The reports often are the only window into broad trends about who is dying in custody.

Here is what we know about those who died in custody last year.

The Wisconsin Department of Corrections tracks death data in multiple places

The agency's Committee on Inmate and Youth Deaths meets at least quarterly to review the causes and circumstances surrounding the death and identify policies or procedures that need to be improved.

Separately, the DOC also has a public-facing dashboard that is periodically updated to provide details of when prisoners are released from their custody, including in the case of death.

Prisoner death data sometimes does not match among sources

Although the report and the dashboard track deaths, there sometimes are discrepancies between the two sources.

In 2023, the committee reported 55 deaths. The dashboard only reported 54.

Beth Hardtke, an agency spokeswoman, said the additional death was of an "individual who was in one of our facilities on a hold from the Division of Community Corrections," which oversees people released on extended supervision.

This meant that the death did not technically fall under a prison release and did not appear on the dashboard, she added.

A hold occurs when someone who is under the supervision of the Division of Community Corrections is brought into a state prison or county jail while a possible violation of the rules of supervision is being investigated, according to Hardtke.

The annual committee report classifies a death as 'anticipated' or 'unanticipated'

The agency's Behavioral Health Services medical director must determine whether any in-custody death is "anticipated" — meaning a prisoner had a terminal illness — or "unanticipated" — representing other causes, including suicides, homicides and unexpected illnesses.

The Committee on Inmate and Youth Deaths report for last year showed that 26 of the 55 deaths listed were unanticipated. The remaining 29 were anticipated.

One of the unanticipated deaths was a homicide. Prosecutors say Cindy Schulz-Juedes, 68, was killed by her cellmate who faces charges in her death at Taycheedah Correctional Institution.

The Department of Corrections only released the report's data and withheld any information about the committee's policy recommendations.

The public dashboard gives demographic data of prisoners who died

The majority of those who died in custody last year were white, male, and 65 and older, data shows.

Other details include:

• White prisoners accounted for 39, or 72%, of the deaths, while Black prisoners made up 12 deaths, or 22%. Three American Indian or Alaskan Native prisoners died last year.

• Eleven of the prisoners who died were listed separately as being Hispanic or Latino.

• Prisoners over the age of 50 accounted for almost 75% of the deaths. Almost a quarter of Wisconsin's total prison population is older than 50, according to DOC data.

• Three prisoners in their 20s and six in their 30s died while in Wisconsin prisons. This includes the deaths of Cameron Williams, 24, who died of a rare stroke and Tyshun Lemons, 30, who died of a fentanyl overdose.

Most of the deaths occurred at Dodge Correctional Institution

Just under half of the deaths occurred at Dodge Correctional Institution, a maximum-security prison that serves as the central reception center for all sentenced adult male prisoners, according to the dashboard.

Dodge serves as the central medical center for male prisoners, providing both in and out-patient care.

Three of the deaths happened at two community reintegration correctional centers, Winnebago Correctional Center and the Marshall E. Sherrer Correctional Center.

The dashboard provides data from January 2000 through January 2024.

Seven prisoner deaths were reported in January: Three at Dodge Correctional Institution, three at Oshkosh Correctional Institution and one at Fox Lake Correctional Institution.

The federal government used to release death data about jails and prisons

For two decades, the state Department of Corrections also reported in-custody death data to the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics.

The federal Mortality in Correctional Institutions program began in 2000 and collected annual data that included the age, race or ethnicity, sex, and cause of death of the people who died in jails and state correctional systems across the country.

This stopped, however, in 2021 when the program quietly shuttered. The last year of data collected was in 2019.

Now, the federal department's Bureau of Justice Assistance is in charge of data collection; no data has been made publicly available to date.

High-profile deaths in custody have occurred at prison in Waupun

The Journal Sentinel has reported on four in-custody deaths at Waupun Correctional Institution, one of the state's five maximum security prisons.

The most recent person to die in custody at Waupun was 62-year-old Donald W. Maier. The medical examiner has not yet released a determination for his death.

Investigations into all four deaths remain ongoing, according to local law enforcement.

Contact Vanessa Swales at 414-308-5881 or vswales@gannett.com. Follow her on X @Vanessa_Swales.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: How many people died in Wisconsin prisons in 2023