The part of this site that does something

The visiting room closes without warning.

The BOP publishes an operations level for every facility and changes it without telling anybody. People find out at the gate, after the drive, with the kids in the back.

I check every facility every five minutes. Pick the places you care about and you get one email when a visiting suspension starts and one when it lifts. No newsletter, no drip sequence, nothing else, ever.

The BOP also under-reports. Quiet means they have not said anything, not that nothing is happening.

An email address is the whole signup. An account is only useful if you want the alerts sitting next to your other tools.

Transfers are how families find out late.

The Bureau publishes where every federal inmate is and when they are due out. It does not tell you when that changes. Most people learn about a transfer from a phone call that stopped coming.

Give me a register number and I read the locator once a day. You get an email when the facility changes, when the projected release date moves, or when the release date lands. Nothing on a quiet day.

It is the same public data anybody can load at bop.gov, read on a schedule so you do not have to. It is not inside information, it is often days behind an actual move, and a projected release date is an estimate the Bureau revises.

The questions belong to the person inside.

The person doing the time has the questions. You are the one with the browser. That gap is the whole problem, and what gets lost in it is the specific stuff: the thing their case manager said, the number on their FSA credits sheet, what actually happened on the unit last week.

So they get an address of their own. You generate it here, you give it to them, and from then on they email me directly from TRULINCS without going through you.

• You generate an address. It is dedicated to one person. Give it to that person only, never reuse it, and never let it get passed around. A shared address is how it becomes a problem at the facility.
• They add it as a contact in TRULINCS. Same as any other contact they add.
• The Bureau approves it. On their schedule, not mine. This part takes as long as it takes.
• They ask. I answer. Same questions I answer by email from anybody else, and same price, which is nothing.
• You get a copy, if you asked for one when you generated the address.

Twenty people said they would write one.

Six of them actually will. Three of those six will say what a great guy you are and nothing a judge can use. Two arrive the week after the deadline. You spend the worst month of your life chasing your own aunt for a Word document.

Vouch is the tool for that month. You add the people, each one gets their own private link, and they write on the page with your instructions sitting next to them. You see who has started and who needs a nudge. Nobody makes an account. When it is done you download the approved letters as a single file and hand it to your attorney.

It works the same for a bond hearing or a halfway house decision. Same people, different ask.

This one is not on the free account. I turn it on case by case, because what comes out of it goes in front of a judge and I would rather look at your situation first than hand out a login and hope.