“I really wanted to bury my son,” said Jennifer Shelton. “He wanted to be buried.”
Shelton’s son, Calvin Atkins, was killed in a homicide at Florida Gulf Correctional Institution last July. He wanted to be laid to rest in a place where his kids could visit him. Atkins was a Muslim, and his blue-and-white prayer rug was among the personal items Shelton had returned to her after he passed.
Islam forbids cremation, but Atkins’ ashes still ended up divided between a clear container in his mother’s purse and a black one atop her refrigerator because Shelton got tangled in a web of rules and regulations governing what happens after someone dies behind bars.
In Florida, if someone dies in custody and no one claims their body, the rules state that the body should be buried or cremated at the discretion of the prison’s warden as long as “cremation is not prohibited by the tenets of the faith preference of the deceased inmate.”
However, Shelton was never told the state would consider a burial for Atkins if she did not claim his body. When the bill for a burial was more than she could afford, she had no choice but to let a local funeral home cremate her son. It was free — the only option she could afford.
While Florida did not offer financial assistance to Shelton for a burial, other states potentially would have, if Atkins had died in their care. In Massachusetts, Shelton could have declined to sign a consent for cremation form, and Atkins would have been buried at the Department of Correction’s burial ground. In Maryland, regulations state that family members can be considered for assistance with burial. If a family is found to be eligible, the state would assume all financial responsibility, paid directly to a funeral director of a family’s choosing.
Navigating the maze of regulations that Shelton experienced after her son died behind bars is a common challenge. A new report from the Princeton Policy Advocacy Clinic titled “Dignity of the Dead in Government Custody in the United States and on Online Platforms” found that protections for people who die in government custody are inconsistent, opaque, and frequently lack consideration for both religious preferences and the wishes of the families of the deceased.
The report evaluated the public written policies that dictate what happens after someone dies in prison or jail in all 50 states, three federal detention agencies, and six other U.S. jurisdictions like Puerto Rico. The researchers evaluated each jurisdiction across 59 metrics, like how families are notified of a death, whether the dead person’s religious beliefs are taken into consideration, and whether independent oversight is mandated when a death occurs.
“The most shocking part of our findings is the lack of dignity afforded to people who die in prisons and jails and immigration detention,” said Udi Ofer, the professor leading the clinic. “How can we treat people with dignity when they're alive when we can't even treat them with dignity when they are dead?”
The report collected and studied laws and publicly available policies that correctional departments had issued. In some cases, the researchers filed freedom of information requests for non-public policies, but some agencies do have internal policies that were not incorporated into the study. Since these aren’t readily accessible, it's difficult for families to understand their rights or advocates to push for reforms.
The Findings: A Lack of Respect for Individuals and Families
The report found that nearly half of the jurisdictions did not meet the researchers’ standards on over half of each of the 59 different metrics evaluated. Some of the issues they identified include:
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More than three-quarters of the jurisdictions, such as Wyoming, did not have publicly available policies recognizing people’s wishes for what they would like to happen to their remains.
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Nearly half the jurisdictions, including Hawaii, could cremate unclaimed bodies, even without consent from a next of kin. And more than three-quarters could cremate a body even if it went against a person’s religious beliefs.
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Almost a quarter of jurisdictions allowed someone's body to be donated for medical research without consent, which is the case in Mississippi.
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The overwhelming majority did not require any public reporting of a death in custody, making it difficult for journalists, advocates and lawmakers to identify patterns that would prevent future deaths in custody, like a lack of medical care leading to preventable deaths from treatable illnesses.
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Nearly half of the jurisdictions had no clear timeline to notify families of those who die behind bars.
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Two-thirds had no public rules on how long families have to collect the remains of loved ones before the prison or jail buries or cremates their bodies. What policies did exist were often vaguely written, using language like “as soon as possible” rather than exactly how many hours or days are in the notification window. Many policies then failed to specify a clear fallback when a next of kin couldn't be reached. For jurisdictions that did have a specified time window for collecting a loved one’s remains, the median time was just five days. Families often face extreme logistical and financial burdens in retrieving affects and remains — especially for families whose loved ones were incarcerated far away when they died, like in Shelton’s case.
Families also often lose precious keepsakes, with states like Mississippi having no public policy about what is done with the deceased’s personal property.
Per state policy, Shelton had 30 days to pick up her son’s belongings, or else they would be donated to charity. The personal items, like a torn notebook and her son’s prayer rug, were eventually sent by mail after Shelton, who didn’t have transportation that could get her to the pickup location, broke down over the phone. “The least you could do is send me his shit. That’s all I have left of him,” she told them.
The researchers found myriad issues with policies around what happened to deceased people's bodies:
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Nearly three-quarters of jurisdictions did not recognize a right to a private autopsy, which families can seek if they want to contest the government’s official record of how someone died. Only about one-in-six jurisdictions explicitly allowed cause of death information to even be shared with the family if it is known to officials.
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Religious considerations are also often ignored. While religions like Islam and Judaism prohibit cremation, nearly half of jurisdictions allowed government officials to cremate an unclaimed body, even if doing so went against the dead person’s faith.
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At least 14 jurisdictions allowed bodies to be claimed by a medical or scientific research institution without the deceased’s prior documented consent.
Variation Across States
The state of California scored the highest of any jurisdiction, with acceptable policies on over 80% of the metrics evaluated. Unlike many other jurisdictions, California had accessible policies requiring an investigation into each death, extremely well-detailed protocols for family notification, and public disclosure requirements following each death.
But, the disparity in policies between jurisdictions is striking. Some — like California, New Jersey and New York — had comprehensive sets of policies on investigation and accountability for every death and policies addressing the handling of property or funds. States like Wyoming, Mississippi and Missouri, on the other hand, had relatively few of such policies on the books, the report found.
Wyoming’s rules, for example, did not specify who is responsible for notifying the next of kin, on what timeline, how that notification is documented, or what information officials should be sharing. Nor did the state have any public policies laying out an internal review process to audit deaths or required independent oversight from an institution other than the department of corrections of that state. While the Wyoming Department of Corrections does, in practice, regularly issue press releases about the deaths of incarcerated people, the report’s authors could not identify the sorts of rules around the public reporting system that exist in other jurisdictions.
Determining the cause of an incarcerated person’s death can sometimes require additional investigation, including an internal mortality review, but fewer than half of states have such policies, which can leave many deaths with lingering questions. While Washington state, for example, convenes a review committee for each person who dies under its custody, states like Wyoming lack similar policies.
“We take great pride in our comprehensive end-of-life care,” said Erica Kachner, Public Information Officer at the Wyoming Department of Corrections, who added that some of the department’s policies are internal and therefore not publicly available. “This includes an outstanding hospice program for terminally ill inmates, permitting family visitations during severe illnesses, respecting religious and end-of-life wishes, and covering all final costs.”
‘How Else Things Could Be Done’
The report was commissioned by Morris Tidball-Binz, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial summary or arbitrary executions, to help the international organization better understand a government’s responsibilities when a person dies in its custody. The ultimate goal is to create a set of model policies from which countries could draw when setting their own rules around in-custody deaths.
However, Ofer, who spent two decades as a constitutional rights lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union before founding the Policy Advocacy Clinic in 2022, found more things that were concerning than were worthy of emulation. “Can you imagine not having a say in what happens when you die to make sure that your cultural rights, your religious rights, your personal preferences are respected?” he asked.
The study only looked at official policies, not necessarily the day-to-day compliance with those policies. “Having the policies is a good first step, and they need to be effective and meaningful policies, but that's no guarantee the policies will get followed,” explained Michele Dietch, the director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at UT Austin.
Even so, Dietch added, having a wide survey of policies from across the country collected into a single location could be an important starting point for widespread reforms. “Reports like this provide a baseline of the landscape of this issue,” she said. “It's a way to allow states to compare themselves to each other, for advocates to and policy makers to look at how else things could be done, if there are better ways to do them, to realize the gaps in their own policies.”
More than a year after her son’s death, Shelton still hasn’t been given information about what happened from state officials. The case, she’s told, is still under investigation. None of the rules in the books dictate how long a mother must wait to understand what happened to her son.
“They won’t tell me anything,” Shelton said. “They leave it impossible for people to do anything.”
