About

An independently built census of every facility in the lower 48 states and DC that holds people in custody against their will, overnight or longer: jails, prisons, detention centers, juvenile facilities, work camps, residential reentry under state custody, forensic psychiatric commitment, immigration detention, tribal jails, and military brigs.

No such public roster exists. Federal enumerations lag by years, and some states publish no list at all. This project asks whether a trustworthy census can be built from sources anyone can check, and how it stacks up against the official geospatial record.

5137 published-census records with mappable coordinates in this build, across 49 states.

Every record carries one of five evidence grades, reported separately on purpose, the way a historian separates a primary source from a corroborated secondary source from an inference: operator-confirmed (a government or operator roster names it), evidence-confirmed (a verbatim quote ties custody to this address), classifier-yes (two independent name-only passes agreed), roster-only (on a roster, never matched to a captured place), and name-inferred (a candidate list, never “confirmed”). Details on the method page.

The default map view is the published census. Everything else is opt-in and labelled as what it is: candidates under review, not facilities. Approximate positions render hollow. Records without coordinates are absent, never placed falsely. Empty fields mean not known. The census counts facilities, never people.

Every number on this site is computed fresh from the dataset build named in the footer. Nothing is hand-typed.