Inmate locator, across three custody systems
When someone is taken into custody, three separate systems could be holding them — a county jail, a statewide prison system, or federal custody — and each is searched in a different place. One call reaches the county and statewide layers together and reports which jurisdictions answered.
Custody is not one system, it is three
An inmate locator search fails far more often because it was pointed at the wrong system than because the person is not there. These are the three, in the order a case usually moves through them.
County jail
The first stop after an arrest, and where someone sits before trial or while serving a short sentence. Each county runs its own jail and publishes on its own terms, which is why there is no single place to look. A jail record leads with a booking date and the charges at booking.
State prison
Where someone goes after a state conviction carrying a longer sentence. This is a different system from the county jail that held them a month earlier, run by a different agency, with a different record — facility, custody status and admission date rather than a booking.
Federal custody
Federal charges are prosecuted and served outside the state systems entirely. Someone in federal custody can be invisible to a county search and a state search at the same time, which is the single most common reason a careful search comes back empty.
A blank result is usually the wrong question, not an answer
Someone searching a single county site, or a single state system, and finding nothing will normally conclude the person is not in custody. These are the five reasons that conclusion is often wrong.
They were arrested somewhere they do not live
Custody follows the place of arrest, not the place of residence. A stop on an interstate, a weekend two states away, a warrant served while travelling — the record sits in a county the family would never think to check.
They have already moved up a layer
Sentencing moves a person out of the county jail and into the state prison system, and the county record can stop describing them at that point. Checking the jail alone answers a question about last month.
The charge is federal
A federal matter never appears in a state prison system at all. No amount of searching the state layer surfaces it, and the search returns clean.
The county publishes nothing
Counties decide independently what to publish. Some post a full roster, some post current custody only, some post nothing. Of 1,375 county jurisdictions in the roster, 992 are answering today — and a search that does not say which ones answered is hiding the difference.
The name on the record is not the name you know
Custody records carry legal names, initials and transposed name orders, and a middle name that appears on one system is missing from the next. An exact-string search across one system is the easiest way to miss a person who is plainly there.
County depth, and whether the state layer exists
Depth is uneven because counties decide for themselves what to publish, and the statewide layers are separate decisions again. 51 of 52 states and territories carry a statewide prison system; 26 carry a warrant system. These are the largest county contributors.
| State | County jails | Answering | State prison | Warrants |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kentucky | 71 | 65 | Yes | — |
| Montana | 68 | 54 | Yes | — |
| Colorado | 66 | 42 | Yes | Yes |
| Pennsylvania | 65 | 60 | Yes | Yes |
| Texas | 65 | 38 | Yes | Yes |
| California | 59 | 26 | Yes | — |
| New York | 59 | 55 | Yes | — |
| Ohio | 51 | 31 | Yes | — |
| Indiana | 49 | 39 | Yes | — |
| Idaho | 46 | 31 | Yes | Yes |
| Georgia | 44 | 18 | Yes | — |
| New Mexico | 40 | 21 | Yes | Yes |
| Washington | 40 | 24 | Yes | Yes |
| Oregon | 38 | 30 | Yes | Yes |
50 states and territories publish a statewide prison layer. Every state, and what it publishes →
Reading a custody record honestly
Two records that look alike in a list of results carry completely different weight. Getting this wrong follows real people around for years, so it is worth being precise about.
A booking is an arrest
A county jail record proves one thing: a person was taken into custody on a date, on the charges written down at booking. That is the whole claim. Booking charges are frequently reduced, dismissed, or never filed at all.
A prison record is post-conviction
A statewide prison record describes someone serving a sentence, and it does carry the weight a booking does not. It still says nothing about what a person is like now, or about anything outside that one sentence.
Only a disposition says how it ended
The record that reports an outcome is the court disposition, in a separate system again — and statewide court sources exist in 22 of 52 jurisdictions, so in much of the country that answer is not reachable statewide at all. See court records.
Custody changes by the hour and jurisdictions publish on their own schedules. Treat a result as a pointer to the official record rather than a live custody status, and follow the citation on the record before acting on it.
Inmate locator questions
How do I find out which jail or prison someone is in?
Work out which of the three custody systems is holding them: a county jail, a statewide prison system, or federal custody. Most searches fail because they only cover one of the three. A single search here reaches the county and statewide layers together and tells you which jurisdictions answered, so a blank result is a fact about the search rather than a guess.
How many jurisdictions does one search reach?
The roster holds 1,491 county, state and federal jurisdictions, of which 1,108 are answering today, spread across 52 states and territories. An unscoped search reaches the answering ones in one call; scope it to a state or a named jurisdiction when you already know roughly where to look.
Does a custody record mean the person was convicted?
Not on its own. A county jail record is arrest-stage: it says someone was taken into custody on a date, on the charges written down at booking. Those charges are frequently reduced, dismissed or never filed. A state prison record is post-conviction and does carry that weight. The two look similar in a list of results and mean very different things.
Why did a search return nothing when I know they were arrested?
An empty result has several honest explanations: the person is held in a layer the search did not cover, the county publishes no roster at all, they have been released, or the name on the record differs from the name you searched. Because 992 of 1,375 county jurisdictions are answering, every response names what was searched and what did not respond rather than presenting a partial search as an empty one.
Can I look someone up by name across more than one state?
Yes. A name search runs unscoped by default rather than making you pick a state first, which is the point for anyone who does not know where the person was picked up. Narrow by state or jurisdiction once you have a lead, and follow the citation on any record before acting on what it says.
Once you know which system to search
County jail rosters
The county layer on its own — 1,375 jurisdictions, booking dates, charges and custody status, searched across counties instead of one county site at a time.
Jail and prison together
The two state-level layers side by side, for a reader who already knows which state to look in and needs both the arrest-stage and the post-conviction record.
Federal custody
The system no county or state search can see into, holding offences prosecuted outside the state courts entirely.
Criminal Records API
The same search as an endpoint, returning a citation and a per-jurisdiction status on every response, for teams building custody checks into their own product.