Florida

The Florida Department of Corrections (FDC) runs the third-largest state prison system in the country — roughly 50 major institutions, plus annexes, work camps, and work-release centers, holding around 88,000 people. Florida also uses seven privately operated prisons (run by the GEO Group, Management & Training Corporation, and CoreCivic); those contracts are overseen by the Florida Department of Management Services, not FDC directly. FDC’s materials use the word inmate; this site uses neutral terms.

Where a person is held turns first on the sentence. A person sentenced to state prison is held in an FDC institution (or a contracted private prison); people awaiting trial or serving a sentence of a year or less are held in a county jail run by one of Florida’s elected sheriffs, which sets its own rules and is not in the FDC search.

Newly committed people are processed at a reception center first. For men, the main intake centers are the Reception and Medical Center (RMC) at Lake Butler — which is also the system’s prison hospital — along with the Central Florida Reception Center (Orlando), the South Florida Reception Center (Doral), and the Northwest Florida Reception Center (Panhandle); for women, intake is at Lowell (Ocala). Florida has an active death penalty: men under a death sentence are held at Union Correctional Institution and Florida State Prison (both near Raiford), the execution chamber is at Florida State Prison, and women under a death sentence are held at Lowell Correctional Institution.

To find where someone is held, use the FDC Corrections Offender Network search by name or DC number; it covers people in FDC custody, including those in the contracted private prisons, not county-jail detainees. Incoming personal mail does not go to the prison — Florida routes routine personal mail to an off-site Smart Communications center that scans it and delivers it electronically (legal mail still goes to the institution); see the mail guide for the address. Use the guides below for the statewide rules at Florida prisons, or go straight to a specific institution.