About

Still from Letters to Lost Loved Ones, Jose Luis Benavides, 2022 – Click to view trailer.

Illinois Deaths in Custody Project seeks to document, archive, highlight and mourn the deaths of all people in custody in Illinois.

Approximately 80-100 people die in custody in Illinois prisons every year. IDCP facilitates an interactive website as exhibit and memorial to archive, highlight and mourn the deaths of all people in Illinois prisons. Through community events, engagement within the prisons, and research and investigation outside, IDCP works to create an archive of eulogies and letters from people incarcerated in Illinois, and documents attained through Freedom of Information Act requests about the deaths of incarcerated people in Illinois from 2010 to the present. IDCP aims to reveal the ways the carceral state processes, records and simultaneously erases the deaths of people in Illinois prisons.

2010-2019 Factsheet

IDCP