Ask The Inmate. Real answers from people who've been there.

The prison food is generally bland. Menus are usually designed by a nutrition for a balanced diet of calories, proteins, carbohydrates and fats.  The taste is not great as they don't have much extra to season the food so you get some mediocre meals. But be certain that the inmates are getting at least 2500 calories per day. You can always put money on their commissary to buy the little extras like bags of tuna, chicken, and mackerel; to go...

Standard meal times in most correctional facilities follow a fairly predictable schedule built around institutional operations rather than anything resembling a normal dining experience on the outside. Breakfast typically comes early, usually around 5:30 to 6:30 in the morning. Facilities run on early schedules and the kitchen staff, often made up of inmate workers, starts well before most people would consider a reasonable hour. Lunch generally falls around 11:00 to 11:30 in the morning and dinner is served in the mid...

Visitation denials can be appealed and the decision on whether to grant an exception rests with the warden's office at the facility. The honest assessment of the odds is roughly 50/50, which means the appeal is genuinely worth pursuing but there are no guarantees regardless of how strong your case appears on paper. The strongest appeals are the ones that tell a complete and documented story rather than just arguing that the denial was unfair. In a situation where a felony...

Rape in prison is real. New inmates are the most vulnerable. The security level of the prison has some bearing on whether rape is more likely. Rape can be forcible or done through manipulation.  If they show kindness or are trying to be helpful, it is only because they want something. And if there offering you protection you can guarantee that there going to seek sexual favors. When an inmate comes in for the first time and doesn't know anyone,...

Fort Dix is one of the largest federal correctional institutions in the country and the math on jobs versus population is a real issue. With close to 5,000 inmates and a limited number of formal UNICOR and facility work assignments available, not everyone is going to have a paying job at any given time. That is just the reality of a facility that size. What happens in practice is that job assignments get prioritized based on several factors, including sentence length,...

This disconnect happens because there is no centralized public database that tracks real-time lockdown status for correctional facilities across the country. The websites you are checking are not pulling live facility data and most of them have no mechanism for doing so. Lockdown information is managed internally by each facility and is rarely communicated through any public-facing channel in real time. A facility can be on full lockdown with every inmate confined to their cell and no outside communication allowed, while...

It depends entirely on what triggered the lockdown and how quickly the situation gets resolved. There is no standard duration and lockdowns can last anywhere from a few hours to several weeks or even longer in extreme cases. Short lockdowns lasting a few hours are the most common. These get called for routine reasons like a facility-wide count that comes up short, a minor incident in one housing unit, a medical emergency, or a security sweep. Once the situation is resolved...

Being on probation does not automatically disqualify you from visiting someone held at an immigration detention facility but it does add a layer of complexity that requires careful handling before you show up at the door. ICE detention facilities operated by private contractors like CoreCivic, formerly CCA, run their own visitor approval processes that are separate from the standard state or federal prison visitor screening. Central Arizona Detention Center follows ICE's civil detention standards for visitation rather than the criminal corrections...

Being in single man lockup, which is typically administrative segregation or protective custody rather than general population, does affect visitation but it does not necessarily eliminate it entirely. Visitation for inmates in segregated housing is more restricted than for general population inmates. Some facilities suspend visitation during the initial placement period while the situation is being assessed. Others allow non-contact visits through a partition on a limited schedule. The specific policy depends entirely on the facility and the reason for the...

TV exaggerates the things that happen in prison. Think of prison as a small village with a group of people that have to live there for a while. Somehow, some way, the people figure out how to co-exist. Inmates have a "hustle", a way to get little extras. Some cut hair, some do laundry or clean other's cells. Some cook and sell their food. But there is gambling and contraband peddling. If your inamte gets caught up in that and...