Louisiana

Louisiana’s prison system has a feature no other state’s does to the same degree: more than half of the people serving a state (“DOC”) sentence are held not in a state prison but in a local jail run by a parish sheriff. At the most recent state count, about 14,800 DPS&C-custody people were in parish jails and about 13,800 in state prisons. The state pays sheriffs a daily rate to hold them, a person can spend an entire sentence in a parish jail or be moved between a jail and a prison, and — critically for families — the rules, visiting schedules, and phone, mail, and money vendors are different in a parish jail than in a state prison, and differ from one parish to the next.

So the first question for a Louisiana family is which kind of facility holds my person. The agency is the Louisiana Department of Public Safety & Corrections (DPS&C) — what families and sheriffs call “the DOC” — and it runs eight state prisons, including the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola (the largest maximum-security prison in the country), Elayn Hunt Correctional Center (where every man entering a state sentence is received), and the rebuilt Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women at St. Gabriel, which reopened in 2025. To find where a specific person is held — including when that’s a parish jail — use the state’s VINELink locator or call the DPS&C locator line at (225) 383-4580 with the person’s name and date of birth or DOC number. The guides below cover the rules at DPS&C state prisons; for someone in a parish jail, contact that sheriff’s office. Use the guides for statewide rules, or jump to a specific facility.