Inmate Search 101: The Basics You Need to Know
Knowing your inmate’s whereabouts is crucial, as it not only helps you know their place of incarceration but also brings peace and calmness to your mind. In addition, knowing where the inmate is incarcerated may help you understand how you can help them.
Inmates in the United States are incarcerated in prison for various crimes. These crimes revolve around state, county, federal, international, or immigration laws. Any violations may see an individual charged and sentenced to serve time in the state, federal, or county jails.
Other violations will see them fall into the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement inside their detention facilities. A handful of inmates in private and Indian Country jails, juvenile facilities, and others on community supervision release. Note that some states run a unified prison system where the Department of Corrections runs all incarceration and detention facilities in the state.
All departments responsible for inmates at various levels of incarceration in the United States are required by law to create, maintain, update, and keep information on all individuals under their care. They keep this information in a special docket known as the inmate records.
Why do you need to conduct an inmate search?
You must conduct an inmate search to know where your inmate is. The question of “where the inmate is incarcerated” is crucial as it determines the other ways of contacting or helping your inmates.
It is common sense that when you want to send a letter, package, or mail to a prisoner, you need to indicate their location on the address in addition to their name or prisoner ID or number. If you are unsure of the prison’s address, you must conduct an inmate search, as the search results will indicate the exact jail where the inmate is incarcerated.
Different prisons have their own visitation policies, and your inmate’s “whereabouts” may determine the policies. You need to conduct an inmate search of the facility where they are incarcerated so you can find the prison’s visitation rules, guidelines, policies, dates, and hours.
Again, contacting inmates by phone differs with states, departments, incarceration levels, and location. You need to be assured of how inmate calls work, and you can only find that out by conducting an inmate search.
Although inmates in the United States prison system are well fed with balanced diet meals, clothed, and medically cared for, they will still require financial assistance to meet their additional needs, such as food, and pay for prison services. To send them financial aid, you must know where they are.
Where to Conduct Inmate Search
Although “inmate search” sounds complicated, numerous methods exist for locating inmates in the United States. You can find inmates by:
- Accessing the various government agencies’ websites involved in incarceration services
- Requesting inmate records from government agencies
- Conducting a criminal background check
- Third-party websites that deal with the provision of access to inmate records
- Accessing inmate’s court records
- Prison visits
- Phone calls to the prisons or agencies involved in the maintenance and running of the prisons
Basic Information Necessary for Inmate Search
According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics, there were 1,675,400 prisoners in 2020. These prisoners are adult offenders or individuals charged as adults despite their age. Finding one inmate in such a large number seems impossible and challenging, especially if you have no idea how to try to find them. However, here are the fundamentals you must understand when looking for an inmate across the country.
Inmate records in the US usually contain all the information you need about an inmate. In inmate search aids, these records include the location, level, and address where they are incarcerated. Moreover, inmate records contain the offender’s personal information, court, arrest, and criminal records.
On the personal records, the information there includes the offender’s official name, gender, race, sex, date of birth, age, and personal description. The person’s height, eye and hair color, mugshot, visible tattoos, and scars are written down in these records.
The court records include the inmate’s charges, sentencing, proof that they did something wrong, court dates, the judges or juries involved, and any other information about the sentencing. On the other hand, criminal records indicate their current and previous conviction histories, details of the crimes committed, and their prison disciplinary records.
Arrest records detail the reason, time, location, and date of the arrest, the arresting officer and agency, and the nature of the arrest.
You can’t find or find your inmate without the information in the inmate records.
Understanding the Basic Information on Where and How to Find Inmates
The means and ways of locating an inmate depend on the type, location, and level of the prison. This means that the methods for finding inmates differ in the city/municipal jails, county and regional jails, state and federal prisons, and agency-owned, private, and Indian country prisons.
If you are unsure where to begin, do not be afraid to start your search in the world’s largest incarceration system. With the basic information necessary to find inmates, as indicated above, you can find literary anyone incarcerated in this prison system.
What you need to know about inmate search in Municipal/City Jails
The inmates in the municipal or city jails are mostly newly arrested individuals charged with violating city, municipal, and county ordinances and state or federal laws. These inmates are usually in these jails, run by the local police department or specific agencies, for an average of 36–72 hours, depending on the state laws for handling arrestees.
If that’s the case, most city or municipal jails don’t keep a list of these people online. Instead, they have their inmate database accessible locally and manually. However, this does not mean you cannot find inmates in these facilities, as there are other ways to locate them. You can call them or go to the police station or other place where your loved one is being held to find them.
In the precinct or jail, you may demand to view the police department’s jail database. Note that you do not have to provide any reason why you wish to view their database, as arrest and inmate records are public information in almost all states.
Most inmates in these jails are usually brought here after a judge determines their eligibility for release on bail. This means that inmates in these jails have not been convicted yet, and if released on bail, they will have to appear in court for sentencing. Those denied bails must be transferred to the county jails or the DOC detention and classification facilities in the event of a unified prison system.
What you need to know about inmate search in County Jails
Except for states utilizing the Unified Prison System, all other states run a county jail system. These jails are usually maintained by the county’s local sheriff’s departments or the Department of Justice in the case of regional county jails. In other states, these jails are maintained by state troopers. The US county jail system accommodates around 549,100 pretrial and short-term inmates.
These jails are utilized as detention facilities for pretrial inmates. These arrestees could not pay the bail set by the court, or the court denied them one. They are not criminals, as they have not yet received their court verdict and are supposed to stay in jail until their cases are completed in court.
Note that cases may last for years, if not months or weeks. In that case, these individuals stay in these prisons as county guests and receive daily meals, beds, and showers.
On the other hand, some inmates are sentenced to serve prison time in these facilities. However, inmates who serve a sentence in these facilities must have short-term sentences for common misdemeanors that require less than a year of prison time. In addition, they are usually non-violent offenders.
You can always visit or call the county sheriff’s department or jail administration to find inmates. They will provide you with the information you need to find your inmate, but you will have to give them information such as their names or charges.
On the other hand, unlike municipal jails, most county jails maintain an online inmate database that contains information about or the names of the inmates in their care. This database is known as the “Inmate Roster.” Some facilities maintain a searchable database, whereas others keep an inmate list instead. You can search or read through the inmate roster by the offender’s name, date of arrest, or incarceration.
Pretrial prisoners are sent to state, federal, or private prisons, depending on what they are accused of and how long they will be in jail.
What you need to know about inmate search in State Prisons
After conviction, inmates charged with violating state laws are transferred to state prisons. There are 1,677 state adult correctional and rehabilitation facilities run by the Department of Corrections, Public Safety, or Criminal Justice, depending on the state. While some states run a state prison system, others run a unified one.
These prisons incarcerate minimum, medium, and maximum-security inmates and accommodate over 975,000 state prisoners. Almost all of these departments maintain a searchable inmate database for all state prisoners in state correctional, rehabilitation, and detention facilities. When your loved one was arrested for violating state laws and sentenced to over a year in prison, there is a high probability they will end up in these facilities.
To find them, you need to find the department’s official website and find the ways they have suggested interested individuals can find their loved ones. Different DOCs have different ways they have put in place for you to access their inmate database. While some run their own search tools, others contract with agencies like VINELink to help interested individuals locate their loved ones.
What you need to know about inmate search in Federal Prisons
People who break federal laws and are put in prison are charged and given a sentence to serve time in the federal prison system. These prisons are managed, funded, and supervised by the Federal Bureau of Prisons with the help of the Bureau of Prisons’ regional offices.
Of all incarceration levels, finding a federal inmate is the simplest. The federal BOP maintains one national federal inmate database accessible using the BOP inmate locator. This means that federal inmates incarcerated anywhere can be easily identified using their official names or inmate numbers.
Various agencies issue inmate numbers in the federal system. They include the following:
- Federal Bureau of Prison (FBI-Number)
- Bureau of Prisons Register Number (BOP-Register Number)
- Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS-Number)
- The District of Columbia Department of Corrections (DCDC-Number)
Unlike the name search option, where you may find inmates with similar names, the number search option is direct, as each federal inmate has their own unique number, known only to them since 1982. However, to find the prisoner, you must indicate the correct form or number and the actual number to avoid pulling up search results belonging to another inmate.
Juvenile Offenders Inmate Search
However, prisons in the United States do not mix juvenile and adult facilities. Instead, juveniles charged as minors are incarcerated in juvenile detention, correctional, or rehabilitation facilities generally run by the juvenile correctional services or the state department of corrections or juvenile justice. Again, the departments that supervise these juveniles depend on the state.
The same applies to accessing their records to find their incarceration locations. Most states in the US don’t have public records for juveniles, which means that they can’t be accessed like records for adult inmates. You can still find out where they are; in some states, juvenile records are open to the public.
Unlike adult inmate records, juvenile records require the interested parties to have a legal and probable reason why they need to find the whereabouts of the inmate. If you are not a direct parent or guardian, you must go to court and request a court order to view these records.
Inmates in Other Prisons
There are some inmates in private prisons that are managed by private corporations like Core Civic, GEO Group, Management and Training Corporation, and LaSalle Corrections. You need to contact the prison’s specific corporation to find information on inmates in these jails.
These corporations have specific ways of running their facilities that differ from the state, federal, county, and municipal jails. These facilities also run juvenile correctional facilities in some states. However, note that not all states utilize the private prison system.
Others are detained in the ICE detention facilities; to locate them, you need to search for the ICE detainee locator system, available on the ICE official website. You can search the database by the detainee’s name, country of birth, or ICE detainee-issued number.
