22 deaths classified as homicides

Twenty-two inmate deaths were classified as homicides between 2024 and 2025, accounting for almost half of all inmate homicides since 2015, according to data from the state’s Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services.

The number of inmates whose death was classified as a homicide while in a Maryland state prison reached 14 in 2025, the highest within the last decade, according to department data. Previously, the highest number of inmate homicides in a single year was eight in 2024 and five in 2019.

There had been three inmate homicides in 2026 as of April, according to Keith Martucci, the public safety department’s social media and media relations manager.

Maryland State Police homicide detectives have been called in to investigate three other deaths in state prisons, including the May 6 death of Christopher White, an inmate in the Western Correctional Institution, and the May 20 death of Colin Wolf, an inmate at the Roxbury Correctional Institution.

The death of Larry Horton, a 51-year-old inmate at North Branch, is being investigated by Maryland State Police as a homicide. Horton was appealing a life sentence for a murder in Baltimore County when he was found unresponsive in his cell by correctional staff on Jan. 10, 2026.

But none of those deaths have been classified yet as a homicide.

“Some people are like, it’s just an inmate, and that’s the wrong attitude,” said Paul Gibson, chief operating officer of the Prison Education and Reform Alliance and former associate warden with the Federal Bureau of Prisons. “It’s someone’s husband and someone’s father. It’s someone’s son that was just killed.”

Of the deaths investigated as possible homicides so far this year, only one occurred outside a cell, said Martucci, where correctional staff are able to constantly monitor inmates.

He said the department has also boosted its Crisis De-escalation Training program; upgraded surveillance camera technology; employed intelligence gathering to prevent violent conflicts before they occur; and deployed specialized surveillance and K-9 units to confiscate contraband, among other efforts.

About 70% of inmate homicides since 2015 occurred at one of three correctional facilities: North Branch, Jessup and Western correctional institutions, according to an analysis of DPSCS inmate homicide data by Capital News Service (CNS).

North Branch Correctional Institution, a maximum-security-level prison in Allegany County, reported five homicides in 2025, the most at a single facility in one year. North Branch has had two inmate homicide cases in 2026 so far, according to Martucci.

Maximum-security-level prison Jessup Correctional Institution in Anne Arundel County had four inmate homicides in 2025, according to DPSCS data.

For six of the last 10 years, both North Branch and maximum-security-level prison Western Correctional, in Allegany County, had at least one inmate homicide reported, according to a CNS analysis of the public safety department’s data. The Jessup correctional facility saw five years with at least one inmate homicide during the same time.

Nationally, inmate homicides in state prison have increased by about 27% since 2021, to 136 during fiscal 2024, the most recent year data is available from the Bureau of Justice Assistance.

Nationwide inmate deaths data are reported to the bureau by state correctional departments and may not be completely up to date, according to the Bureau of Justice Assistance website. For example, the bureau reported that Maryland had six inmate homicides in state prisons between fiscal 2020 and 2024, while the state’s public safety department reported to CNS that there were 13 homicides during the same time period.

“We should see lower homicide and suicide rates in prison if we take people’s freedom away and we put them under perpetual surveillance,” said Keramet Reiter, a professor at the University of California, Irvine Department of Criminology Law and Society. “They should be safer than this.”

Post-COVID-19 correctional officer understaffing may have been a factor that contributed to correctional facilities seeing exacerbated violence from inmates in recent years, Reiter said.

Between fiscal year 2019 and 2024, the most recent years data is available, there has been a loss of more than 38,000 correctional officer positions at state correctional facilities nationwide, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Since fiscal 2015 there has been about a 20% loss of correctional officers working at these correctional facilities.

The number of allocated correctional officer positions across Maryland’s 13 state correctional prison has decreased by 18% between July 2019 and July 2025, according to department of public safety’s data on correctional officers. Across all facilities under in Maryland that are under the department of  public safety there has been about a 27% decrease of correctional officer positions allocated during the same time period.

Martucci noted that the overall department vacancy rate was close to 17% when the Moore administration took over in 2023, but that a concentrated hiring effort has cut that rate in half.

About 93% of correctional officer positions were filled at Maryland state prisons as of July 2025, in July of 2015 about 96% of correctional officer positions were filled.

At North Branch Correctional Institution, where five inmates were killed in 2025, the total number of correctional officer positions allocated decreased by more than 100 between July 2019 and July 2025, according to an analysis of the department’s correctional officer data by CNS. The percent of vacant correctional officer positions also increased from about 11% to about 16% during the same time period.

Short staffing decreases a facility’s safety and security for both inmates and correctional staff, according to a 2025 report by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union. The report analyzed the department’s staffing issues between 2022 and 2023.

“In recent years, correctional staff vacancy rates have reached an alarming level,” the report read. “Mandatory overtime, burnout and lack of communication between management and line staff have created dangerous working conditions inside the facilities and institutions within DPSCS.”

The report found that all institutions operated with a ratio of more than 100 inmates to 1 officer that hurt staff’s ability to respond to incidents at the facility.

Since 2021, Maryland prisons have become more violent as assaults against inmates and staff have more than doubled, according to the public safety department’s 2027 Fiscal Budget Overview. About 15 out of 100 inmates were assaulted by other inmates in 2025, in 2016 about 6 out of every 100 were assaulted.

Gibson said that there may be other reasons behind the increase in violence. He said that other state prison systems with similar inmate populations and high correctional officer vacancies have not seen high inmate homicide numbers like Maryland.

The increase of inmate homicides may be caused by many factors including overpopulation per prison, staffing issues, conflicts between prison gangs and poor institutional leadership, he said.

“People want to take the easy answer and just blame one thing,” Gibson said, “and there’s probably a deeper issue than what you can scratch the surface on right now.”

Capital News Service is a student-staffed reporting service operated by the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism. Stories are available at the CNS site and may be reprinted as long as credit is given to Capital News Service and, most importantly, to the students who produced the work.