Five days before the January 2021 order ending federal private-prison contracts, the Bureau of Prisons’ own feed recorded 14,095 people in 11 private facilities. Today it records zero — and it still records zero more than a year after the order was rescinded in January 2025. Both publicly traded operators state in their own SEC filings that they hold no BOP prison contracts. The two policy cycles behind the number, the removed Contract Prisons page, and the standing weekly tripwire on its return — all from BOP’s own numbers via the new BOP Ledger.
Writing · topic · 38 articles
Justice and immigration
Courts, prisons, policing, firearms, civil rights, and the immigration system.
ICE publishes a price list for custody (203 detention facilities, 66,161 held on an average day) and a signature ledger (2,123 agreements deputizing 1,804 local agencies). Joined at the state level they draw one map: Texas leads both boards, California holds the third-largest detained population with zero agreements under a 2017 state law, West Virginia signed 38 agreements with no detention facility at all — and 86 percent of the detained population sits in states that signed up. Geography, not causation — the join stays inside what two files can prove.
Guaranteed-minimum contracts commit the government to paying for 45,621 detention beds whether or not anyone is in them. In ICE’s own file, 8,813 of those beds sat paid-for and empty at the 20 facilities running more than ten percent under their guarantee — while 36 facilities ran more than ten percent over. Two columns of the public file and a minus sign: the take-or-pay floor covering 76 percent of the detained population.
Justice and immigration · Government operations · Transparency and open data
Of 203 facilities in ICE’s own detention file, 61 carry no inspection result on record — 9,186 people held on an average day at facilities whose rating column is blank, 38 of them under the US Marshals Service umbrella. The blanks, the 21 missing inspection dates, the 73.1% of the population with no recorded threat level, and the 5 facilities that were inspected, failed, and still hold people.
Justice and immigration · Government operations · Transparency and open data
ICE’s own file lists 203 detention facilities holding 66,161 people on an average day — and federal records name a private operator for only 7 of them. The intergovernmental-agreement structure that ends the federal record at the county line, what the file does say (61 facilities with no inspection result on record, 8,813 guaranteed beds paid for and empty), and why “no private operator identified in federal records” is itself a finding.
ICE publishes annual ERO reports covering arrests, detentions, removals, and returns by country of origin, criminal vs. non-criminal designation, and field office. Here is the data structure, TRAC-ICE access, and what the dataset reveals about enforcement priority shifts, nationality composition changes, and the interior vs. border enforcement split.
A guide to tracing the employment-based immigration pipeline through federal data — joining the Department of Labor’s foreign-labor certifications, the USCIS record of H-1B petitions, and the BLS wage statistics that set the prevailing-wage floor, so the path by which a US employer hires a foreign worker comes together in one view.
Justice and immigration · Labor and workplace · Engineering and infrastructure
The Department of Justice has its own independent watchdog — an inspector general who audits, inspects, and investigates the FBI, DEA, ATF, the Bureau of Prisons, and the rest of the department, then publishes the findings. This guide covers what the roughly 3,000 published OIG reports are, the Inspector General Act of 1978 that created the office, the audit-evaluation-investigation product lines, the landmark FBI and FISA reviews, how recommendations are tracked, where the data lives on oig.justice.gov and oversight.gov, a worked Python walkthrough, and the caveats.
Justice and immigration · Government operations · Federal data
The National Weather Service issues every official US watch, warning, and advisory in the Common Alerting Protocol — the same machine-readable feed that drives the Emergency Alert System, Wireless Emergency Alerts, and NOAA Weather Radio. Our weather_alerts table is a rolling snapshot of roughly 3,000 active and recently expired messages, keyed by alert identifier, mapped to NWS zones, and complementary to the deep NOAA storm-events archive.
Environment and energy · Justice and immigration · Federal data
The Antitrust Division’s case record runs from United States v. Microsoft to the modern big-tech monopolization suits—roughly 920 civil merger challenges, monopolization cases, and criminal cartel prosecutions keyed by matter and defendant. A field-level guide to the Sherman and Clayton Acts, the DOJ–FTC split, the criminal cartel program, Hart-Scott-Rodino premerger review, and a Python workflow that tallies cases by type and year.
The Department of Labor’s Office of Foreign Labor Certification runs the labor side of employment-based immigration — and publishes every case as quarterly disclosure data. A guide to ~298,000 visa-labor records spanning the H-1B LCA, PERM, and the seasonal H-2A and H-2B programs, the prevailing-wage attestation at their core, and how they join to USCIS and BLS.
Labor and workplace · Justice and immigration · Federal data
The Federal Trade Commission announces nearly everything it does — every settlement, every merger challenge, every new rule — through a press release, and those releases together form a searchable public log of US consumer-protection and antitrust enforcement. This guide reads the FTC’s ~10,700-record press and enforcement archive as a dataset: the Section 5 frame, the consumer-protection and competition missions, landmark privacy penalties, the shifting priorities of junk fees and noncompetes and big-tech antitrust, and a Python workflow that tallies releases by year and topic.
Consumer protection · Justice and immigration · Cybersecurity and privacy · Federal data
The H-1B visa is the central channel through which US employers hire skilled foreign workers, and the USCIS H-1B Employer Data Hub turns that program into a public record — roughly 764,000 employer-petition rows from 2009 to 2023 naming who sponsors, where the job sits, and whether the petition was approved or denied.
HUD's Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity office publishes a complaint database covering every fair housing complaint filed with HUD and participating state agencies — basis of discrimination (race, national origin, disability, familial status, sex, religion), property type, complaint disposition, and whether the complainant received relief. Here is the data structure and what 50,000+ complaints reveal about where housing discrimination concentrates.
Federal data · Economy and demographics · Justice and immigration
The Bureau of Justice Statistics publishes the National Prisoner Statistics program — state and federal prison populations back to 1925, with demographics (race, sex, age), offense categories, sentence lengths, and admissions/releases flows. Here is the data structure, how to access it, and what 100 years of incarceration data reveals about mandatory minimums, the drug war, and mass incarceration's racial dimensions.
The EEOC publishes annual charge statistics and, since 2017, charge-level data under FOIA. The aggregate data shows which industries generate the most race, sex, disability, and age discrimination charges — and which large employers appear repeatedly in the conciliation record.
Federal data · Justice and immigration · Labor and workplace
EOIR publishes quarterly data on every immigration judge's case outcomes, including asylum grant rates. The spread is enormous — some judges grant asylum in fewer than 5% of cases; others grant it in more than 90%. Here is how to access and analyze the data.
The Corporate Prosecution Registry at Duke and UVA covers 3,000+ federal organizational prosecutions and every DPA/NPA since 1990 — including agreements DOJ refused to disclose under FOIA.
Federal data · Justice and immigration · Transparency and open data
ATF publishes the complete list of ~75,000 active Federal Firearms Licensees monthly as a free CSV. Here's what the data contains, what the Tiahrt Amendment keeps hidden, and how to cross-reference it.
The Foreign Agents Registration Act database maintained by the DOJ National Security Division is the federal government authoritative record of foreign influence operations in the United States — covering every individual and firm registered as a foreign agent, the foreign governments and entities that retained them, and the lobbying activities, media campaigns, and political contacts conducted on their behalf.
The 94 United States Attorneys offices prosecute every federal crime — drug trafficking, financial fraud, public corruption, terrorism, and violent crime — generating a public record through press releases, PACER dockets, and USAO annual statistical reports that together document over 80,000 criminal defendants per year in federal court.
The Department of Justice Civil Rights Division enforces federal civil rights laws through pattern-or-practice investigations, consent decrees, voting rights litigation, and fair housing enforcement — producing a public record of every settlement, consent decree, and enforcement action against state and local governments.
The Department of Labor Office of Foreign Labor Certification publishes every H-1B Labor Condition Application, H-2A agricultural temporary worker certification, and H-2B non-agricultural temporary worker certification — the employer wage attestations behind the US guest-worker visa system.
Labor and workplace · Justice and immigration · Federal data
The Public Access to Court Electronic Records system holds dockets and documents for every federal district, bankruptcy, and appellate case filed since the 1980s — over 1 billion documents accessible via the CourtListener API and RECAP mirror.
The EEOC charge database tracks every workplace discrimination complaint filed with the federal government — race, sex, disability, age, religion — from first filing through litigation outcome.
BOP (Bureau of Prisons) under DOJ: 148,000+ federal inmates in 122 institutions (~36,000 staff). Federal offenses: drug trafficking ~44%, weapons ~20%, sex offenses ~8%, immigration ~6%, fraud/white collar ~5%. Federal mandatory minimums: 21 USC 841(b) (1kg+ heroin/5kg+ cocaine = 10-yr minimum). Crack/powder disparity: pre-FSA 2010 100:1 ratio, FSA 2010 reduced to 18:1. USSC Sentencing Guidelines advisory since Booker 2005; 13.4% longer sentences for Black defendants (USSC 2017). First Step Act 2018: FSA retroactivity (~2,600 released), safety valve expansion, earned-time credits (10-15 days/month), PATTERN risk tool. Demographics: 93% male, 37% Black, ~23% non-US citizens. Facility types: ADX (Florence supermax), USP, FCI, FPC, FMC. Private prisons: Biden EO 14006 non-renewal; Trump 2025 re-expansion. BOP Statistics at bop.gov/about/statistics/ (static tables). USSC datafiles at ussc.gov for sentencing data. Python BOP HTML table scraper + USSC drug sentence trends 2010-2023.
The FBI National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) replaced summary-level UCR in 2021 with incident-level records from 15,000+ law enforcement agencies — 52 offense categories, victim/offender/arrestee demographics, location, weapon, property, and arrest outcomes. 2022: ~15,724 agencies reporting, covering ~79% of US population; NYPD (8M people) only began NIBRS submission 2023. Offense segments: Group A (52 categories) vs Group B (11 citation-only). Victim segment: age, sex, race, ethnicity, victim-offender relationship (intimate partner, acquaintance, stranger, unknown). Hate crime codes: 88 bias motivation codes. Crime Data Explorer API at cde.ucr.cjis.gov: /api/nibrs/{offense}/offense/agencies, /api/nibrs/{offense}/victim/count — free API key, 1,000 req/day. Annual bulk downloads: incident, offense, victim, offender, arrestee, property files. Supplemental Homicide Reports (SHR) since 1976: victim-offender-weapon-circumstance at case level. NIBRS vs NCVS: only ~43% of violent crimes reported to police. TRAC-NIBRS for coverage gap analysis. Here is the UCR-to-NIBRS transition, reporting gaps, API structure, hate crime methodology, SHR limitations, NCVS complement, and a Python CDE API violent crime rate analysis by state.
ATF eTrace processes ~350,000-400,000 crime gun trace requests annually from law enforcement. Trace chain: law enforcement submits recovered gun → ATF contacts manufacturer/importer → FFL of first sale → subsequent FFLs until first retail purchaser identified. Time-to-crime (TTC): average 7-8 years nationally; TTC under 3 years flags potential trafficking; 21% of handguns traced within 3 years. Tiahrt Amendments (2003): prohibit ATF from releasing trace data to the public, using in civil litigation against gun dealers/manufacturers. Iron Pipeline: southeastern states (GA, SC, VA, FL) supply northeastern cities (NY, NJ, MD) via regulatory arbitrage. NIBIN: 300+ sites, 7,300 ballistic leads/week, links cartridge cases across crime scenes. ~130,000 active FFLs; 5-7% annually inspected; 920M+ records at Out-of-Business Records Center. ATF publishes state-level aggregate trace data at atf.gov. Here is eTrace chain mechanics, Tiahrt Amendments history, Iron Pipeline geographic patterns, NIBIN infrastructure, and a Python TTC distribution analysis by state and firearm type.
DOJ Antitrust Division enforces Sherman Act (criminal: price-fixing, bid-rigging, market allocation) and Clayton Act (civil merger review). HSR Act pre-merger notification: 2024 threshold $119.5M, ~1,500-2,000 annual filings, ~3% receive Second Requests, $51,744/day penalty for failure to file. Merger review: Phase 1 (30-day) → Phase 2 → consent decree or litigation. 2023 Merger Guidelines: HHI thresholds (2,500+ highly concentrated). Leniency Program: first cartel self-reporter gets automatic amnesty. Auto parts cartel $2.9B fines. AT&T-Time Warner (DOJ lost), UnitedHealth-Change Healthcare (blocked), JetBlue-Spirit (blocked). DOJ press releases RSS, PACER for complaints. Here is FTC coordination, criminal enforcement mechanics, and a Python press release classification analysis.
The Bureau of Prisons manages 121 federal prisons holding ~148,000 inmates — down from a 219,000 peak in 2013. Here is the weekly population data, offense category breakdown (drug offenses 43%+, the legacy of mandatory minimums), the racial disparity in crack vs. powder cocaine sentencing before the Fair Sentencing Act 2010, FIRST STEP Act reforms, the BJS National Prisoner Statistics Program covering all US incarceration, US Sentencing Commission case-level sentencing data and disparity research, PACER federal court records, supervised release mechanics, private prison contracting ($700M+/year), ICE immigration detention as a separate civil system, and recidivism data (68% rearrest within 3 years).
USCIS adjudicates ~8 million petitions annually and publishes detailed statistics on every immigration benefit category. Here is the naturalization data (~800–900K/year by country of birth), the employment-based green card per-country 7% cap that creates 40+ year backlogs for Indian nationals (EB-2 India priority date ~2012), the H-1B lottery (470K registrations for 85K slots in FY2025), the 1.7M+ affirmative asylum backlog, DACA quarterly recipient counts by state, the EOIR immigration court 3.3M+ case backlog with judge-level grant rate variation, DHS Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, and a Python USCIS naturalization Excel workbook analysis.
Federal data · Justice and immigration · Economy and demographics
The FBI Uniform Crime Reporting program collects crime data from ~18,000 law enforcement agencies — transitioning from the legacy Summary Reporting System to the incident-level NIBRS, a shift that created massive coverage gaps in the 2021 national crime count when major cities failed to report. Here is the 8 Part I Index Crimes, the NIBRS incident/offense/victim/property/arrestee segment structure, the 2020–2021 murder surge (+30% single-year, the largest since national tracking began), hate crime data, LEOKA officer safety statistics, the dark figure of crime and NCVS complement, clearance rates, and the Crime Data Explorer API with a Python state-level murder rate trend analysis.
The Brady Act NICS system has processed 400M+ background checks since 1998 — publishing monthly state-level counts of handgun, long gun, and permit check types. Here is the full check type taxonomy, why NICS counts don't equal gun sales, the default proceed loophole that enabled the Charleston shooting, the COVID-2020 and Biden-2021 demand spikes, and how to use the BuzzFeed News parsed CSV.
The Corporate Prosecution Registry (Duke Law) tracks every federal corporate criminal resolution since 1990 — deferred prosecution agreements, non-prosecution agreements, and guilty pleas — covering 400+ resolutions and $30B+ in fines. Here is the DPA/NPA/guilty plea taxonomy, the Yates Memo and Monaco Doctrine evolution, the HSBC and Boeing landmark cases, the compliance monitor system, and FCPA as the dominant enforcement category.
The ATF National Tracing Center processes 500,000+ firearm traces per year — reconstructing the chain of commerce from manufacturer to crime scene. Here is what the Tiahrt Amendment restricts, what aggregated state-level trace data still reveals about the iron pipeline, how time-to-crime exposes straw purchasing, the FFL directory, AFMER manufacturing data, and the ghost gun tracing gap.
The H-2A program (cap-free agricultural) and H-2B program (66,000-cap non-agricultural) bring hundreds of thousands of temporary workers to the US annually. DOL OFLC publishes quarterly disclosure files with employer, job title, wages, worksites, and worker counts. Here is the data structure, how H-2A grew from 60,000 to 370,000+ certifications between 2012 and 2023, and how to compare offered wages against adverse effect wage rates.
Federal data · Labor and workplace · Justice and immigration
The DOL Labor Condition Application dataset and USCIS H-1B Employer Data Hub together reveal the true shape of the skilled-worker visa program: IT staffing companies dominate approvals, India-born workers hold 70%+ of visas, and prevailing wage Level I filings expose systematic wage suppression. Here is the data structure and how to compute employer-level wage ratios.
Federal data · Justice and immigration · Labor and workplace
The False Claims Act is the government's primary anti-fraud tool, with qui tam whistleblowers driving 80%+ of the $2B+ in annual recoveries. Healthcare fraud dominates — Medicare and Medicaid upcoding, kickbacks, and unnecessary procedures. Here is how to access the DOJ settlement database, scrape press releases, and identify repeat violators.
Federal data · Justice and immigration · Health and medicine
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