Inside Illinois Jails

Jails around Illinois subject detainees to unsanitary conditions, violence from sheriff’s deputies and other inmates, and little effective oversight.

Illustration: figures climbing, falling from and standing among the columns of a bar chart.

Illinois Answers Project reporters spent years collecting, cleaning and analyzing more than 65,000 pages of government documents to construct the largest known database of jail conditions in the state.

59%of annual jail inspections ended in noncompliance

63deaths the state never counted

28,000+incidents reported, 2019–2025

90county jails in Illinois

The system of state oversight for Illinois jails fails to capture major incidents, like deaths of detainees, and regulators haven’t updated jail safety standards in over a decade. Experts say that this system is underprepared to keep people safe in jails and hold jail administrators accountable.

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Here’s what we found

Jails regularly fail their annual inspections, often for similar reasons year after year

Of more than 800 inspections between 2017 and 2025, about 480 found jails weren’t following state regulations. These failures include understaffing, failure to supervise detainees and structural problems with jail facilities.

More than half of jails are noncompliant most years

Read our reporting on jail inspection standards

Dozens of detainees died in Illinois jails but were not reported correctly to the state

More than one in four deaths in Illinois jails from 2019 to 2025 were not counted in state data.

63 of 238 deaths Illinois Answers identified — 26% — were never counted by the state.

Read our reporting on in-custody deaths

Jails report thousands of incidents, including fires, fights, escapes, rebellions and more

Jail administrators reported more than 28,000 “extraordinary or unusual” incidents between 2019 and 2025. Some jails underreport incidents and reports aren’t always recorded accurately.

Violence and uses of force from staff are the most common reported incidents

Fight among detainees6,858
Battery6,753
Restraints used4,561
OC spray used3,838
Suicide attempt2,135
Hospitalization2,012

A single report can fall into more than one category.

Read our reporting on jailhouse incidents

Find your county

Find data on each county jail in Illinois, including inspection history, reported incidents and deaths in custody.

Browse all 102 counties

See the statewide trends

See major trends and findings from our statewide investigation around the state, including links to our in-depth reporting.

See statewide data