The BOP Ledger — Every Federal Prison, Weekly

The ban, twice — and the reversal that hasn't reversed

Federal private-prison policy has swung twice. Each entry below is a documented government action with its primary citation; the populations are BOP's own.

1. August 11, 2016 · Cycle 1

   DOJ Inspector General reports higher safety and security incidents at contract prisons

   The DOJ Office of the Inspector General published its review of the BOP's monitoring of contract prisons, finding contract facilities had more incidents of certain safety and security categories than comparable BOP institutions. [DOJ OIG Evaluation 16-06]

2. August 18, 2016 · Cycle 1

   Deputy Attorney General directs BOP to phase out contract prisons

   A memorandum from the Deputy Attorney General directed the BOP to decline to renew contract-prison contracts or to substantially reduce their scope as they expired, beginning the first federal wind-down. [DOJ memorandum (Aug 18, 2016)]

3. February 21, 2017 · Cycle 1

   Attorney General rescinds the phase-out directive

   A new memorandum rescinded the August 2016 directive, returning BOP to its prior contracting posture and ending the first cycle before it completed. [BOP: Memorandum on Use of Private Prisons Rescinded (Feb 2017)]

4. January 26, 2021 · Cycle 2

   Executive Order 14006 directs DOJ not to renew private criminal-detention contracts

   EO 14006, “Reforming Our Incarceration System to Eliminate the Use of Privately Operated Criminal Detention Facilities,” directed the Attorney General not to renew Department of Justice contracts with privately operated criminal detention facilities. Five days earlier, BOP's own archived feed recorded 11 private facilities holding roughly 14,000 people. [Executive Order 14006 (Federal Register)]

5. late 2022 · Cycle 2

   The federal private-prison population reaches zero

   As the last contracts reached their expiration dates across 2021 and 2022, the number of federal inmates held in privately managed prisons fell to zero and stayed there. [BOP population feed (PRIVATETOTAL)]

6. January 20, 2025 · Cycle 2

   Executive Order 14148 rescinds EO 14006

   Section 2(q) of EO 14148, “Initial Rescissions of Harmful Executive Orders and Actions,” rescinded EO 14006, removing the federal directive against renewing private criminal-detention contracts. [Executive Order 14148 (Federal Register)]

7. July 9, 2026 · Cycle 2

   Still zero, well over a year after the rescission

   BOP's live population feed continues to report zero inmates in privately managed federal prisons. Both publicly traded operators state in their FY2025 10-Ks that they hold no BOP prison contracts. The dataset's weekly build is the tripwire on any return. [BOP population feed (as of July 9, 2026)]

Where the institutions are

Each tile is shaded by the number of people BOP holds in that state; the number on the tile is its count of institutions. A labelled zero marks a state with no BOP institution.

The largest institutions (top 15 by population)

118 of 133 institutions carry a direct population; the other 15 are Federal Correctional Complex parent records whose people are counted at their member institutions. All ship in the keyless JSON with security level, type, region, and geography.

The system, in its own categories

The halfway-house layer

Beyond the walls, BOP contracts 10,062 residential-reentry beds across 155 contracts held by 55 operators — every one named in BOP's own feed. And the contracts have a cliff: 21 expire in 2026.

The state law wave

Alongside the federal swings, states have written their own private-prison statutes. This table records the law and its litigation posture only — it never flags a facility as operating against a ban, because on the leading examples the courts have held federal contractors likely preempted. Litigation status verified 2026-07-11, rechecked quarterly.

Forty-six years of federal custody

BOP's own historical file runs from 24,640 people in FY1980 to 155,270 in FY2025 — a 6.3× arc that peaked at 219,298 in FY2013. The system-wide series ships in full; per-institution history begins with this dataset's first weekly snapshot, since BOP publishes only a current one.

Method & caveats

• Source: the Federal Bureau of Prisons' own keyless JSON feeds (bop.gov statistics), a US government work in the public domain. Rebuilt weekly; each run self-archives BOP's current snapshot so the per-facility series accumulates.
• Population is joined from BOP's weekly popreport feed to its locations feed by facility code; camp and satellite populations are summed into their parent and also reported separately. Row sums are asserted against BOP's published total — a mismatch fails the build.
• Two BOP feeds report slightly different totals because they refresh on different days (153,482 vs 153,131, a 0.229% difference); every figure is stamped with its own as-of date.
• BOP publishes no rated or design capacity anywhere in these feeds. This dataset makes no overcrowding or over-capacity claim — the absence is itself recorded.
• Operators of reentry contracts are named exactly as BOP's feed names them; the operator rollup collapses BOP's spelling variants for display only. No private-prison operator is named, because the federal private-prison population is zero.
• Regenerate: python3 scripts/build_bop_ledger.py. Every gate fails closed — a banned endpoint, a total mismatch, or a private-facility reappearance stops the build for review.

Machine access

The full dataset — metadata, the reappearance watch, all 133 institutions, 155 reentry contracts, and the FY1980-present series — is one keyless fetch:

import requests
d = requests.get("https://ai-analytics.org/bop/index.json").json()
print(d["meta"]["privateReappearanceWatch"])   # the tripwire
print(len(d["institutions"]), "institutions;", d["meta"]["system"]["bopManaged"], "in custody")

Also listed in the Voidly datasets manifest and /data. License: public domain source; this compilation CC0.