Inmate search across county jails and state prisons
An inmate is held in one of two very different systems, and almost every free lookup searches only one of them. This searches both — county jail booking rosters and statewide prison systems — in a single call, with coverage in every US state.
Why one lookup is never enough
“Is this person in custody?” has two separate answers held by two separate authorities. Searching one and stopping is how people conclude someone has no record when the record is simply in the other system.
County jail rosters
1,375 in the roster
Who is in a county jail now, or was recently booked. A jail record leads with a booking date and the charges recorded at booking. It is an arrest-stage record: it says someone was taken into custody, not that they were convicted of anything.
Statewide prison systems
53 DOC systems
A state Department of Corrections inmate system — people serving a state sentence, with facility, admission date and custody status. This is the post-conviction layer, and it is the one most "DOC inmate search" queries are actually looking for.
Where the jail rosters actually are
Depth is not uniform, and no honest page can pretend otherwise. These are the 12 states contributing the most county jail rosters, and whether each also has a live statewide prison system. Counts are a snapshot — the roster moved by 13 jurisdictions inside an hour on the day this table was generated, so treat the API as authoritative.
| State | County jail rosters | Answering today | Statewide prison system |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kentucky | 71 | 65 | Yes |
| Montana | 68 | 54 | Yes |
| Colorado | 66 | 42 | Yes |
| Pennsylvania | 65 | 60 | Yes |
| Texas | 65 | 38 | Yes |
| California | 59 | 26 | Yes |
| New York | 59 | 55 | Yes |
| Ohio | 51 | 31 | Yes |
| Indiana | 49 | 39 | Yes |
| Idaho | 46 | 31 | Yes |
| Georgia | 44 | 18 | Yes |
| New Mexico | 40 | 21 | Yes |
39 further states carry county jail rosters and are not listed here. Statewide prison systems are live for 51 states.
A custody record, and where it came from
- Booking date and the charges recorded at booking, for a jail record — the arrest-stage facts, labelled as such
- Facility, admission date and custody status, for a state prison record
- A citation on every record naming the jurisdiction that holds it, so an answer can be checked rather than trusted
- One consistent schema across both systems, so your code does not branch per state
- The same scored matching the registry search uses — a name is matched, not merely string-compared
Full field-by-field detail is in the record reference.
Inmate search questions
What is the difference between a jail search and a prison search?
They are different stages of the same system and they answer different questions. A county jail roster is pre-trial and short-term custody — it tells you someone was booked, on what date, on what charges. A state DOC system is post-conviction: someone serving a sentence, in a named facility. A person can appear in one and not the other, which is why searching only one of them produces a confident wrong answer. One call here reaches both.
Does a jail booking mean someone was convicted?
No, and treating it that way is the single most common misreading of this data. A booking record documents an arrest and the charges recorded at that moment. Charges are frequently reduced, dismissed or never filed. The layer that says how a case actually ended is the court record and its disposition, which is a separate record kind.
Which states are covered?
Statewide prison systems are live for 51 states, and county jail rosters exist across the roster for every state. Depth within a state varies a great deal — some states contribute dozens of county rosters, others a handful — so the per-state table on this page is the honest answer, and /v1/criminal/sources is the authoritative one at any given moment.
How current are the results?
Custody data changes by the hour, and we do not publish a freshness figure for the criminal corpus because the API does not yet report one per jurisdiction. Treat a custody result as a pointer to the official record rather than a real-time custody status, and follow the citation on the record before acting on it.
Can I use this to screen someone?
Offendersearch is not a consumer reporting agency and results are not a consumer report. FCRA-covered decisions — employment, tenancy, credit — require appropriate process on your side regardless of where the data came from. The same terms govern every endpoint we operate.
Custody is one record type of five
Court records
The disposition — how a case actually ended. The layer a booking record cannot tell you about.
Warrants
People sought rather than held. Outstanding by definition, and absent from custody and conviction searches alike.
Criminal records
All five record kinds behind one query, across county, state and federal jurisdictions.