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List of United States federal prisons

Wikimedia list article

Cross-disciplinary reference desk with index cards, atlas, dictionary and catalogue
General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJul 15, 2026
Entity authorityQ6600935 ↗
Source-derived summary

The Federal Bureau of Prisons of the United States Department of Justice classifies prisons into seven categories:

United States penitentiaries

Federal correctional institutions

Private correctional institutions

Federal prison camps

Administrative facilities

Federal correctional complexes

Former Federal facilities

This list does not include military prisons, halfway houses, or prisons, jails, and other facilities operated by state or local governments that contract with the Federal Bureau of Prisons. It also does not include facilities operated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

United States penitentiaries

Most United States penitentiaries (USPs) are high-security facilities, which have highly secured perimeters with walls or reinforced fences, multiple and single-occupant cell housing, the highest staff-to-inmate ratio, and close control of inmate movement. The most restrictive facility in the federal prison system is USP Florence ADMAX, the federal supermax prison, which holds inmates who are considered the most dangerous and in need of the tightest controls.

USP Leavenworth, USP Lewisburg, USP Lompoc, and USP Marion were originally operated as high-security facilities but have since been downgraded to medium-security facilities (former USP Lompoc has again been downgraded, to low-security). USP Atlanta, also a former high-security facility, is presently a low-security facility with the primary purpose of holding inmates until they are transferred to other institutions. In 2024, all former USP facilities were renamed to FCI facilities to more accurately reflect their security level. Many current USPs include minimum-security satellite camps on the same property and under the same administration as the higher-security units.

Federal correctional institutions

Federal correctional institutions (FCIs) are medium- and low-security facilities, which have strengthened perimeters (often double fences with electronic detection systems), mostly cell-type housing, a wide variety of work and treatment programs. FCI Terre Haute and FCI Marion contain highly restrictive communication management units, which hold inmates under stricter controls.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “List of United States federal prisons” is wikimedia list article. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through List, United and States, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2024—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, List, United and States is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

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The phrase “wikimedia list article” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6600935. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2024.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “List of United States federal prisons” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.