# Federal inmates in the news

The Bureau publishes where somebody is and when it currently expects to let them go. It doesn't publish what that actually means. For cases people were already following, we read the record every morning and write down what it says about the time somebody is doing.

A facility isn't a location, it's a set of conditions. A low and a medium are different years for the same sentence, a halfway house is the last stretch rather than the middle, and a projected release date moves more than people expect. Each page here says which of those applies and what changed.

Custody data is the [BOP inmate locator](https://www.bop.gov/inmateloc/), which is public and which anybody can search by name. We read it once a morning and write down what moved. We don't have anything the Bureau doesn't publish, and we don't call anybody to ask.

**Following somebody who isn't on this list?**

The tracker takes any federal register number, not just the names here. We check the locator every morning and email you the day anything moves.

[Track someone you know](https://federalprisondude.com/insider-tools/inmate-tracker/track)

## About the release dates

A projected release date is the Bureau's arithmetic, not a promise. It includes good conduct time, it moves when FSA credits (time off earned through programming) land or when a sheet gets redone, and it is not the same thing as the day somebody walks out. If you want to see how that math works, the [release date calculator](https://federalprisondude.com/resources/federal-prison-release-date-calculator) runs it.

What the locator doesn't publish is the credit ledger. There's no FSA figure and no good conduct figure in it, so when a date moves, these pages say how far it moved and stop there.