Neither, exactly, and that is what makes this different from anything else you will find online.
The answers on Ask The Inmate come from someone who has been on the inside. The founder of InmateAid spent 66 months in federal prison before building this platform in April 2012. That firsthand experience is the foundation of every answer written here. Not a corrections officer's perspective, not a lawyer's carefully hedged language, not a social worker who has read about incarceration. Someone who lived it, who knows what the hole actually feels like, what mail call means to a person who has been waiting, what it costs per minute to hear a familiar voice, and what it does to a relationship when an inmate has nothing but time and anxiety.
Nobody from any prison or jail facility is involved in answering these questions. No correctional staff, no administration, no official body of any kind. This is an independent platform built specifically to give families and inmates the kind of straight answers that the system itself will never volunteer.
That independence is the point. The goal has always been to be the resource that someone can find at midnight when they are scared and confused and do not know where to start.