Find an inmate. Anywhere in the country.
Someone you care about has disappeared into a system with three levels and thousands of separate websites. Search all of them at once by name, find the facility holding them, and get the address, phone number and visiting rules in one place.
One lookup instead of forty‑odd separate ones
Locating someone in custody normally means guessing which system holds them, then working through a different website for every agency.
There is no single national inmate register in the United States. Custody is administered separately at the federal, state and county level, and each of those authorities publishes its own records on its own schedule, in its own format, on its own website. The Bureau of Prisons runs one search. Fifty state Departments of Corrections run fifty more. Beyond that sit more than three thousand counties, most of which publish a jail roster through a sheriff's office site that was built at a different time by a different vendor and looks nothing like its neighbour's.
For anyone doing this professionally that fragmentation is an inconvenience. For a family trying to find out where someone was taken last night, it is a wall. You are asked to know, before you begin, which of three systems has the person you are looking for — which is exactly the thing you are trying to find out.
This page collapses that into a single lookup. We index publicly released inmate and booking records from federal, state and county sources and let you search all of them at once by name. Every match links to a profile with the details on record, and from there to the facility page, where you will find the address, the phone number, and the visiting information you need to actually make contact. Searching costs nothing and does not require an account.
What we do not do is generate any of this information ourselves. Every line comes from a record an agency chose to publish under its own state's open-records law. We aggregate and organise that public data so it can be searched in one place; we do not add to it, verify it, or make any judgement about it.
Four steps from a name to a phone number
Most searches resolve in under a minute. The detail that matters is in step four — write the number down.
Enter a first and last name
Use the legal name as it would appear on identification, not a nickname or a shortened form. Agencies record the committed name taken at booking. If you only have part of it, start with the surname and read through the matches rather than guessing at a spelling.
Compare the matches
Common names return several people. Use the middle initial, the approximate age and the facility location to work out which record is the right one. If two entries look plausible, open both — a profile costs nothing to check.
Open the facility page
Every profile links through to the institution holding that person, with its address, its phone number and its visiting rules. Read the visiting rules before you travel; they vary enormously and are frequently changed at short notice.
Write down the ID number
The booking, DOC or BOP register number on the record is the key to everything that follows. Phone accounts, commissary deposits and mail all require it, and an incorrect identifier is the single most common reason a deposit fails or a letter is returned.
What a custody record can tell you
Coverage depends entirely on what the releasing agency publishes. A profile may include any of the following.
The facility on record
The institution currently or most recently listed as holding that person, linked to a page carrying its full address, its mailing rules and its phone number.
Prison directoryCustody status
Where the agency publishes it — in custody, released, or transferred to another jurisdiction. Status is a snapshot of the last update, not a live feed.
Booking and intake detail
The date a person was taken into custody and, where the agency releases it, the booking number and the initial charge description recorded at intake.
Identifying numbers
The booking, DOC or BOP register number. This is the field that matters most: nothing you want to do afterwards — call, write, deposit money — works without it.
Where to go, and when
Facility pages carry visiting hours, approved-visitor requirements and the mailing address, so you can check the rules before making a journey that may be several hours each way.
A projected release date
When the source provides one. Read it as an estimate rather than a fixed date — credits, programming and detainers all move it, sometimes by months.
Three levels of custody, three separate record systems
Understanding which authority holds someone tells you where the record will appear and how fast it will get there.
Bureau of Prisons
The BOP holds people convicted of federal offences and some awaiting federal trial. Every person in federal custody is assigned an eight-digit register number that stays with them permanently, across every transfer and every subsequent sentence.
- Records are consistent and comparatively well maintained
- People held for federal agencies may sit in a contracted county jail rather than a federal institution
- Pre-trial detainees in US Marshals custody often do not appear at all until they are designated
Departments of Corrections
Each state's DOC holds people serving state sentences, typically anything longer than a year. Fifty separate agencies means fifty conventions: some publish photographs, sentence structure and parole eligibility; others release little more than a name and a facility.
- DOC numbers are state-specific and do not transfer between states
- Intake usually happens at a reception centre before assignment to a permanent institution
- Expect a delay of days to weeks between sentencing and appearance in the state system
Sheriffs and city jails
County jails hold people awaiting trial, people serving short sentences, and people being held for other agencies. This is where a new arrest surfaces first, and it is the level with by far the most variation in what gets published and how quickly.
- The fastest place to find a very recent arrest — often within hours
- Booking numbers are reissued and reused; they identify a stay, not a person
- Some counties publish nothing online and answer only by telephone
Browse the inmate index
Recently indexed records, newest first. If you are looking for a particular person, the name search at the top of the page is faster than paging through this.
| № | Name | Public records | Profile |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0161 | Neri Yolanda | Records & background | View profile |
| 0162 | Frank Davis | Records & background | View profile |
| 0163 | Pariani Davonte | Records & background | View profile |
| 0164 | Banuelosmendoza Bryan Anastacio | Records & background | View profile |
| 0165 | Elwood William Clark | Records & background | View profile |
| 0166 | Lane Rodney Alexander | Records & background | View profile |
| 0167 | Nelson F Aaron | Records & background | View profile |
| 0168 | Gama Richard | Records & background | View profile |
| 0169 | Salgado Monserrat | Records & background | View profile |
| 0170 | Robert Super | Records & background | View profile |
Finding someone who has just been arrested
What actually happens in the first few days, why searches come back empty, and what to do about it.
The first twenty-four hours
An arrest does not create a public record immediately. The person is transported to a booking facility, and only after intake is complete — identification confirmed, property inventoried, photographs and fingerprints taken, medical screening done — does a name get written to the roster. In a busy urban jail on a weekend night that process can take many hours on its own, and the record then has to reach whatever system publishes it, which for a great many agencies happens on a batch schedule rather than continuously.
The practical consequence is that an empty search result in the first few hours tells you very little. It does not mean the person is not in custody, and it does not mean you have the wrong county. It usually means the roster has not caught up. Search again after a few hours, and again the following morning.
Search the name the agency recorded, not the one you use
The single most common reason a search fails is the name. Agencies record the committed name taken from identification at booking, which is frequently not the name family and friends use. Robert is booked as Robert even if he has been Bobby for forty years. A hyphenated surname may be entered without the hyphen, or split into a middle and last name. A name with an accent will usually be stripped of it. Transposed first and last names are common where the arresting officer was working from a document with a different name order.
Start with the surname on its own if you are unsure. It is better to read through twenty results than to guess at a spelling and conclude, wrongly, that the person is not in the system. If a name has an obvious variant — Steven and Stephen, Jon and John, Mohammed and Muhammad — try each of them.
Look at neighbouring counties too
People are not always held where they were arrested. Small counties without capacity contract with larger neighbours. A person arrested near a county line may be booked on either side of it. Someone arrested on a warrant from another jurisdiction may be held locally for a short period and then transported somewhere else entirely, sometimes several hundred miles away. If a search of the obvious county comes back empty, widen it before concluding anything.
This is one of the reasons a combined index is useful: a name search here covers facilities across the country at once, so a transfer that would have sent you to a different sheriff's website simply appears as a different facility on the record.
Federal custody works differently
If the arrest was made by a federal agency — the FBI, DEA, ATF, HSI, or the US Marshals — the person may never appear on a county roster in a form you would recognise. Federal pre-trial detainees are held in the custody of the US Marshals Service, which does not publish a public locator, and they are frequently housed in a contracted county jail or a private facility rather than a federal institution. The Bureau of Prisons locator generally only shows a person once they have been sentenced and designated to a facility, though it does retain records of people released decades ago.
In that gap — arrest to designation — the most reliable route is the federal court docket for the district where the case was filed, or the office of the federal public defender if one has been appointed. The BOP register number, once assigned, is permanent and is the cleanest identifier in American corrections.
Immigration detention is a separate system again
People held on immigration matters are in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which maintains its own detainee locator, distinct from both the BOP and any state or county system. ICE detainees are held in a mix of dedicated centres, contracted county jails and private facilities, and a person can be moved between them at short notice and across state lines. Searching there requires either an alien registration number or a combination of full name, date of birth and country of birth.
Reading a custody record correctly
A booking record is a narrow document, and it is routinely over-read. It records that a person was taken into custody and what the arresting officer initially alleged. It is not a finding, it is not a conviction, and the charge description on it is frequently not the charge a prosecutor eventually files — charges are reduced, combined, dropped, or never formally brought at all in a substantial share of arrests. If you need to know what someone is actually charged with, the court record for that county is the authoritative source, not the roster.
Bail information on a roster carries the same caveat. In many jurisdictions bail is not set at booking but at a first appearance, which may be up to seventy-two hours later. A record showing no bail amount usually means it has not been set yet, not that release has been refused.
Release dates are projections
Where a projected release date is published, treat it as a moving estimate. Good-time credit and completed programming can pull it earlier. Disciplinary findings can push it later. A detainer lodged by another jurisdiction means the person will be transferred to that authority rather than released, which is the detail most likely to catch a family out. Confirm directly with the facility before arranging travel, time off work, or housing around a specific day.
Once you have found them
Finding the record is usually the easy half. Making contact runs into a set of rules that are strict, unposted, and different at every institution.
Calls travel outward only. No facility will connect an incoming call to a person in custody. They have to call you, through the telephone vendor contracted by that institution, and in most cases your number must be registered and a prepaid account funded before a call to it will connect at all. Calls to unregistered numbers are blocked automatically, which is why families often assume something is wrong when nothing is.
Money goes to an account, never to a person. Deposits go into a trust or commissary account held in the person's name, through whichever vendor that facility uses. You will need the committed name spelled exactly as the agency records it and the correct identification number. An incorrect number is the most frequent reason a deposit is rejected or returned, and recovering a misdirected deposit is slow.
Mail is rejected on formatting, not content. The identification number normally has to appear on the same line as the name. Many facilities now route all personal mail through a scanning contractor at a separate address, so a letter sent to the institution itself is returned unopened. Enclosures — stickers, polaroids, staples, cash, coloured ink, anything laminated or padded — are commonly prohibited. Check the facility page before you post anything.
Visits usually require approval in advance. Most institutions require visitors to be on an approved list, which means submitting an application and waiting for it to clear, sometimes for weeks. Turning up unannounced is rarely productive. Dress codes are enforced, identification is required, and a visit can be cancelled at short notice for reasons that have nothing to do with you.
When the search still comes back empty
There are only a handful of reasons a name genuinely does not appear. The record may not have published yet. The name may be recorded differently from the one you searched. The person may be in a system that does not publish — federal pre-trial, immigration detention, or a juvenile facility, since juvenile records are confidential in almost every state. They may have been released already; short holds resolve within hours and some agencies remove the entry immediately on release. Or they may simply be somewhere other than where you expected.
Work through those in order. Try name variants first, then widen the geography, then check the official state and federal locators directly, then telephone the arresting agency. If none of that resolves it and someone has been missing rather than arrested, that is a matter for a police report rather than a records search.
A word about privacy and fairness
These are public records because legislatures decided that the state should not be able to detain people in secret. That principle is a good one, and it is the reason this index can exist at all. It also means real people with unresolved cases — and people whose cases were dismissed years ago — are searchable by name, which can follow them long after the underlying matter ended.
We try to hold both of those things at once. We publish what agencies publish, we do not embellish it, and we respond to correction requests. If a record here is inaccurate, or if you believe a listing should be reviewed, write to us through the contact page with the specific URL. What we cannot do is change an agency's underlying record; that has to be taken up with the agency or the court that issued it.
The terms you will meet on a record
Custody paperwork uses a vocabulary that assumes you already know it. You almost certainly do not, and there is no reason you should.
The identifier a jail assigns to one stay in custody. It belongs to the stay, not the person — the same individual booked twice receives two numbers, and numbers are reused between people over time.
A state Department of Corrections identifier, assigned on entry to the state system and retained for life within that state. It does not carry across state lines.
The eight-digit federal identifier, permanent and unique to the individual. It stays with a person across every transfer and every later sentence, and it is the most reliable identifier in the system.
The legal name recorded at intake from identification documents. It is the name every system indexes on, and it is what you should search for — not a nickname or a preferred form.
A formal request from another jurisdiction to be notified before release, so the person can be transferred into its custody instead. A detainer means release will not mean going home.
Being held before any trial or plea. A person in pre-trial detention has been convicted of nothing; they are held because bail was refused, not set, or could not be met.
The first court appearance, where charges are formally read and a plea is entered. In many jurisdictions this is also when bail is set, which is why booking records often show no bail figure.
The intake institution a state uses for assessment and classification before assigning someone to a permanent facility. Expect the facility on a record to change once this stage completes.
Time deducted from a sentence for compliance or completed programming. It is the main reason a projected release date moves earlier, and the reason such dates should be treated as estimates.
The account held in a person's name at a facility, used for phone time, commissary purchases and incidentals. All deposits go here; money is never given to a person directly.
A facility's classification — minimum through maximum, plus administrative — which governs movement, programming and, in practice, how visits and calls are handled.
Court processes that restrict access to a record. They apply to the official record held by the court or agency; they must be pursued through that authority, not through a site that indexes published data.
Questions families ask us
How long after an arrest does someone appear in a search?
Usually between a few hours and a full day. Booking has to be completed before a name is written to the roster, and many agencies publish on a batch schedule rather than in real time. If someone was arrested in the last few hours, an empty result is expected and does not mean they are not in custody.
Is it free to search for an inmate here?
Yes. Searching the index by name and viewing a profile or facility page costs nothing and does not require an account. Some optional services linked from this site, such as background reports, are run by third-party providers and are paid.
Why does the same person appear more than once?
Separate agencies publish separate records. Someone booked into a county jail, transferred to state custody and later moved between facilities can generate several entries, each released by a different agency at a different time. Compare the dates and the facility on each record; the most recent one usually reflects the current location.
What if I only know a nickname or partial name?
Search the legal name if you can, because agencies record the committed name from identification documents rather than what family or friends use. If you only have part of a name, start with the surname alone and read through the matches, then narrow using age or facility.
Can I find out what someone was charged with?
Sometimes. Charge information is published by some agencies and withheld by others, and the wording on a booking record is the arresting officer's initial description rather than the charge a prosecutor ultimately files. Court records for the relevant county are the authoritative source for what a person is actually charged with.
Does an arrest record mean the person is guilty?
No. An arrest is an allegation. Everyone is entitled to the presumption of innocence, and a large share of arrests end in reduced charges, dismissal, or no formal filing at all. A booking record documents that a person was taken into custody, nothing more.
Is the projected release date accurate?
Treat it as an estimate. Good-time credit, completed programming, disciplinary findings and detainers lodged by other jurisdictions can all move the date in either direction. Confirm with the facility before making travel or housing arrangements that depend on a specific day.
I found the person but the facility looks wrong. What now?
Records reflect the agency's last published update, so a recent transfer may not be reflected yet. Call the facility listed on the profile and ask; if the person has been moved, staff can usually confirm the receiving institution.
How do I contact someone once I have found them?
Facilities do not connect incoming calls to individuals. The person inside must call you, usually through the vendor contracted by that institution, and your number generally has to be registered and funded first. Mail and money deposits go through the facility's own rules and require the exact committed name and identification number.
Can a record about me be corrected or removed?
Our listings come from records that agencies publish themselves. We cannot alter an agency's underlying record. If something on this site is inaccurate, contact us with the specific URL and we will review it; to correct the official record, approach the agency or court that issued it.
Where to look next
Search by name. It costs nothing.
If the first search comes back empty, try a name variant and check again in a few hours — rosters publish on a delay.
Compiled from public records released by government agencies under open-records laws. We do not create, verify or judge the underlying data — see our data sources.
An arrest is not a conviction. Need a record reviewed? Reach us through the contact page.