Where the facility guide data comes from

There are a lot of pages in the facility guide, one per place, and they look alike on purpose. That is a fair thing to be suspicious of, because the internet is full of prison directories that are one database table wearing a hundred different headings. So here is what is actually underneath these.

Short version: every answer on a facility page belongs to one of three tiers, and the page tells you which. Nothing is generated. Nothing is guessed. Where I do not know, it says I do not know, in those words.

Three tiers, and the page says which

This is the whole system. Once you can see it, you can read any facility page for exactly what it is worth.

The line under the docket at the top of each facility page names which sources that particular page had, and how many answers its handbook actually contained. A page built on the Bureau's record alone says that plainly instead of padding the gap with level-general prose dressed up as local knowledge.

The handbook corpus

The second tier comes from a collection of admission and orientation handbooks, one per facility where I have been able to get one. There are 185 of them on file right now, normalized into the same shape so the same question can be asked of any of them.

They are uneven, and that unevenness is visible rather than hidden. Some run sixty pages and answer everything. Some are eight pages of policy quotes and answer almost nothing. Some carry a print date and some do not, which is why a page will tell you when its handbook has no date on it: an undated handbook could be current or could be nine years old, and there is no way to tell from the document.

A satellite camp usually shares the main institution's handbook rather than having its own. When that happens the page says so, because a rule written for the institution behind the fence is not automatically the rule at the camp outside it.

Why the pages have the same shape

Every facility page runs the same eleven sections in the same order, whether or not there was anything to put in them. That is deliberate, and it is the opposite of what a page-count farm does.

The earlier version of these pages let the data decide the shape: a section with nothing behind it simply vanished. Three facilities produced three different documents, and worse, a page with six sections looked complete while a page with eleven looked thin, when the truth was the reverse. Now a section with no answers still appears, still says what the section is about in general, and states the gap.

So a short-looking facility page is not a page I put less work into. It is a page where the Bureau publishes less and I have not got the handbook yet.

Unknown means unknown

When a fact is missing, the page says "I don't know yet" in the first person, and that sentence is a link that lets you tell me the answer.

It used to say "Unknown," which reads like a null in a database and made the pages look half-built. The change was not cosmetic. A blank that admits it is a blank is worth more than a plausible-sounding sentence, and a family planning a four-hour drive needs to know which one they are reading.

What you will never see is an estimate presented as a fact, an average from other facilities printed as though it were this one's, or a number carried over from a place with a similar name. If it is on the page, something published it.

What changes and when

Different tiers move at very different speeds, and it is worth knowing which is which.

Corrections, and how to send one

These pages get better every time somebody who has actually been through the door sends something in. Not occasionally. Every time.

What helps most: a handbook I do not have, a store day or a stamp rate or a photo rule that is wrong, a visiting schedule that changed, or a flat contradiction between what a page says and what happened to you. Email it, or use the tip link sitting next to any unknown on a facility page.

What I will not add: rumors about individual staff, anything that identifies a specific person inside, or a rating out of five. This is a reference, not a review site, and the content policy covers the rest of how corrections work here.

Pass it on

If this helped, it'll help someone else's family too.