Prisoners are more likely to be killed in Maryland than in nearly any other state, with a homicide rate last year that was nearly four times the national average, based on available data gathered by The Banner.
Since 2023, 32 incarcerated people in state-run correctional facilities have been killed. That’s more than all of Maryland’s neighboring states combined.
State correctional leaders largely frame the problem of prisoners killing other prisoners as a national one, describing Maryland’s facilities as beset by a population increasingly made up of people serving long sentences for violent crimes.
The corrections department’s top official said she has made changes to its senior leadership, stepped up efforts to keep drugs out of prisons and rolled out body cameras for its officers, among other measures.
Critics, however, insist that the state’s system is fundamentally broken, hobbled by a lack of staff and a culture of neglect. Correctional union officials held a press conference Tuesday blasting the administration of Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat.
“It’s a crisis,” Tony Sines, a union representative, said in an interview. “There’s more deaths, more assaults on staff, and before it’s over, a staff will lose their life over it.”
Union officials say critical staffing shortages in state prisons have contributed to the rise in killings by creating dangerous conditions, including insufficient supervision and programming for the roughly 16,000 people held in 13 state facilities.
As a result, the union says people may be locked up for up to 23 hours a day, which is akin to solitary confinement. Incarcerated people say increasingly long stints in isolated settings have become more frequent and have led to pent-up frustrations and violence among prisoners and against staff.
Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services Secretary Carolyn Scruggs, an agency veteran appointed in 2023 to the post by Moore, declined an interview request.
In a statement responding to questions, Scruggs wrote that Maryland’s prison system was experiencing challenges shared with many other states, including a spike in smuggled synthetic drugs as well as problems related to prisoners’ poor mental health.
“The department has significantly lowered its staff vacancy rate, improved staff safety, and created pathways to opportunity for our incarcerated population,” Scruggs said in the statement.
But the problem in Maryland still sharply outpaces most of the nation. Homicides in its prisons quadrupled between 2023 and 2025, from three to 14, and are on a similar pace this year, with seven killings so far.
Michele Deitch, who directs the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas, said virtually every prison system in the country is dealing with staffing shortages. Maryland officials, she said, cannot abdicate their duty to keep the people in their facilities safe.
“That’s a constitutional obligation,” Deitch said. “It’s not just a good idea.”
Among those killed was Shane Lanham Jr., whose cellmate at the Eastern Correctional Institution received a life sentence last month for the murder. In letters to his family before his death, Lanham, 28, wrote that he was worried about his safety.
“It’s devastating to me that I feel like they didn’t do what they needed to do to protect him,” his father, Shane Lanham Sr., told The Banner. “I just don’t understand.”
His son had been serving a 10-year sentence, with five years suspended, for second-degree assault related to a domestic violence case in Carroll County.
Correctional officers in court described Lanham’s killing as the worst they’d ever seen. The convicted killer, Tyjuan Chapple, had 20 prior violations in prison — 11 of which involved a weapon or an assault on a prisoner or correctional officer.
Chapple did not offer any explanation or apology at his sentencing last month. Lanham’s mother sought to remind the court that “my son was not defined by the circumstances of where he was at the time of his death.”
“He was loved deeply; he was a person whose life still had value,” Amy Lanham said.
How Maryland compares
To back up their assertion of a national phenomenon, Maryland prison officials cited a study that sampled 12 states and found a nearly 50% increase in prison deaths between pre-pandemic 2019 and 2024.
But citing that study blurs the focus on prisoner homicides because it covered all deaths, including those from natural causes.
The Banner’s survey of 42 states and the Federal Bureau of Prisons showed a 38% jump in killings from 2023 to 2024, followed by a 5% decline in 2025.
And Maryland stood apart.
Its prisons, for example, have outpaced those of all its neighbors combined.
- In Pennsylvania, the state system has had eight prisoner homicides since 2023, despite a prison population more than double that of Maryland’s.
- Virginia, with about 23,000 prisoners, had three killings during that time frame.
- West Virginia had two killings and Delaware experienced none.
Among states with similarly sized prisoner populations, Maryland also remains an outlier.
South Carolina had 16 prisoners killed during the same period, and none through May. Colorado experienced nine between 2023 and 2025; Kentucky had just three.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons houses more than 150,000 prisoners, nearly 10 times the number in Maryland. And while it reported 70 homicides between 2023 and 2025, it reported only seven homicides this year through May.
Some of the worst violence is taking place in Maryland’s rural prisons, where staffing challenges are especially acute.
In one prison alone, North Branch Correctional Institution in Cumberland, which has about 1,100 prisoners, there have been eight homicides since the start of 2025. One 27-year-old there was charged eight times with assaults on other prisoners and other infractions before prosecutors allege he eventually killed his 50-year-old cellmate.
At Roxbury Correctional Institution in Hagerstown, Colin Wolf was found dead in his cell in May. Though correctional officers are required to perform checks on prisoners every 30 minutes, investigators told Wolf’s father that his son may have been dead for days before his body was discovered.
As a result, the prison system, along with state police, launched a “potential criminal misconduct” investigation, but has declined to release details. In the wake of the death, the facility’s warden retired, while state officials administratively charged 19 correctional officers and banned eight medical staffers from all state facilities.
A retired assistant warden at Eastern Correctional Institution in Westover, meanwhile, is convening a community meeting later this month to address “the plight of ECI and State Corrections.”
“It is imploding right before our eyes and we as staff, retirees and community need to step up,” Ronnie Dryden wrote in a Facebook post.
Lacking accountability
Family members of those killed in prisons are often left almost completely in the dark when it comes to the details of their deaths, said Cary Hansel, a civil rights attorney in Baltimore who specializes in litigation over in-custody deaths. Often, he said, much of the information families receive comes from other incarcerated people.
Hansel said some of the lack of transparency can be attributed to ongoing criminal investigations, which are conducted by Maryland State Police. But finding justice for those killed in prison can take a long time.
“Almost immediately, there are people involved in the process whose self-interest is to mitigate state involvement and state failures,” Hansel said.
Hansel has pored over many internal investigative reports, which he said included “glaring examples of misconduct that clearly led to the homicide at issue, either through negligence or through actual cooperation with the murderer.”
Even so, as is the case in other states, Maryland lawmakers have shown little appetite to push for more consequential reforms or even transparency measures.
One exception was the formation of a correctional ombudsman’s office in 2024 after an effort by Democratic state Sen. Shelly Hettleman of Baltimore County. Initially, the ombudsman’s duties were limited to certain prisons. The current ombudsman, Yvonne Briley-Wilson, did not respond to an interview request.
Hettleman said in an interview that she and her colleagues are alarmed and set aside $200,000 in the state budget last session for the governor’s public safety office to coordinate a study of prison killings.
“I want some experts to come in, and look at, and dig into ... why is it that it seems like our system of incarceration is as violent as it is,” Hettleman said.
Chronic understaffing
A 2023 staffing study found that 3,400 additional correctional officers are needed for the prison system to operate safely.
Data shows that Maryland has fallen well short of that goal.
Nearly 1,800 correctional positions were eliminated between 2015 and 2023. State officials said most have since been restored, but the shortfall remains.
In 2025, the department hired 684 new correctional officers — more than in any other year over the last decade. And state prison officials say the staff vacancy rate today is 8.4%, which is half of the rate in 2022, shortly before Moore took office.
That does not jibe with reality, critics say.
State Sen. Paul Corderman, a Republican from Western Maryland, recently made an unannounced visit to Roxbury Correctional following a series of stabbings.
In a letter to Scruggs earlier this month, Corderman said that the vacancy rate reduction is “disingenuous at best and difficult to reconcile with the experiences of employees working inside the institution every day.”
Patrick Moran, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Maryland Council 3, wrote in a statement to The Banner that correctional department leaders have been “attempting short-sighted and patchwork solutions to move around staff and incarcerated individuals between facilities while relying on mandatory overtime.”
Staffing shortages can also reduce the time prisoners spend outside their cells to blow off steam during recreation and other programming, limiting their mobility and raising tensions inside the prison. In 2024, the most recent year available, the number of people in disciplinary segregation reached a seven-year high despite a declining prisoner population.
“Ever since COVID, we are fed in our housing units, there is little to no recreation, the food that is served is so bad that 90% of it” ends up in the trash, one incarcerated individual told The Banner in an electronic message. The Banner is not identifying the person because they fear reprisal for speaking out.
At this rate, they said they “see bigger problems coming.”
Prison system officials blame, in part, the changing makeup of the prisoner population, including a larger share of people convicted of violent crimes.
Among those prisoners killed in Maryland, though, were men serving sentences for lesser offenses, including burglary, drug distribution and even indecent exposure.
State correctional officials also cited widespread mental illness among those incarcerated — nearly 1 in 3 people, according to some research. In more than half of recent homicides, both the victim and suspected killer suffered from a mental health disorder, officials wrote.
At the same time, experts say prisons have seen an increase in illicit synthetic drugs that can heighten paranoia and violent behavior among prisoners.
These drugs can be soaked into paper and smuggled into facilities. The state has a pilot program at Eastern Correctional Institution to digitally scan mail for drugs. Ten full-time officers are dedicated to contraband enforcement, state officials say.
Though there’s nothing that can be done now for his son, Shane Lanham Sr. said he does not want another family to go through what he’s experienced.
“I do want to say that if something happens to me while I am here and it is something that leads to me not making it home alive please tell people that I really wanted to come home and turn my whole life around,” his son wrote in a letter to his family postmarked in March 2025.
Lanham said he tried reaching out to the warden at the time as well as the governor’s office but has received no response.
“These prisons, these jails, they need to do something better,” Lanham said. “I just know that the answers they have right now are not the right ones.”
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