Finding an inmate is often a challenging process, especially when you consider the variety of facilities that the person you’re looking for may have ended up in. From state to federal prisons, there is no end to the different types of jails that you’ll come across, even sometimes within the same state!
Today, we’re going to take a look at how you can conduct an Alabama Department of Corrections Inmate Search. We’ll discuss how you can navigate the Alabama DOC official site and we’ll even cover some alternative methods that you can use if you can’t find the inmate you’re looking for.
If the person you’re looking for is being held in a state prison in Alabama, then you’re in luck because the state keeps centralized records of all of its inmates, facilitating an ADOC inmate lookup. Through the Alabama DOC (Department of Corrections), the state tries to maintain a virtual presence that will make it easier to find who you’re looking for.
Unfortunately, there are also some correctional facilities in Alabama that don’t keep their records in this central database, though this is becoming rarer by the year. If the inmate you’re looking for is held in one of these facilities, then you may have to put a little more legwork into finding them.
For the majority of people held in Alabama state prisons, you’ll be able to find them by heading over to the database that is hosted by the Alabama Department of Corrections. You’ll find it on this page, and it will allow you to access all public information about an inmate held in a state prison.
If you don’t end up finding the person that you’re looking for in the official database, then the first possibility is that they’re held in a federal correctional facility. On the other hand, they may be in an Alabama state prison that still hasn’t updated its records, making it impossible to conduct a virtual inmate search.
To make the search process go as smoothly as possible, there are a few things that you should know about the inmate that you’re searching for. First off, you’ll want to know both the first and last name of the person that you’re searching for. Relevant middle names may be included as part of the first name.
You should also know the date of birth of the inmate that you’re looking for. If possible, having the inmate’s ID number will make your search that much more seamless, but it isn’t always necessary. Since this database is an amalgamation of several smaller databases, the search requirements may sometimes be a little inconsistent.
When conducting an ADOC inmate search on the most advanced databases, then you may end up being able to find an inmate with as little as a partial name or even one of their aliases. On the other hand, some of the more antiquated databases may force you to resort to the inmate ID number.
Knowing what part of the state the prisoner you’re looking for is jailed in will also make it easier to narrow down the search. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself searching through the databases of various prisons from all around Alabama, increasing the number of prisoners that you have to search through.
Depending on how common the name of the inmate you’re searching for is, you may have a bit of trouble finding the one you’re looking for. Due to how data is entered on some databases, you may also wish to only search using an initial for the first name so as not to confuse the algorithm.
The Alabama Department of Corrections is tasked with managing the prisons in the state of Alabama. Compared to the rest of the country, Alabama tends to have harsher sentencing, resulting in people serving longer prison sentences that necessitate a more extensive DOC.
In fact, due to the rigid sentencing imposed in the state, Alabama has the most crowded prison system in the country. There are more than 24,000 people incarcerated in the state, and the Department of Corrections essentially only has the tools to handle just over 13,000 of them.
One of the more shocking things about the Alabama Department of Corrections is that it spends the least of any state per prisoner, leading to a political push to overhaul the ADOC. In 2017, Governor Robert Bentley announced an initiative to retrofit existing facilities and to create newer, specialized prisons.
By opening new facilities, the state will be able to shut down older prisons that can’t hold enough prisoners and that require an extensive maintenance budget. Unfortunately, as of 2019, the state legislature has not agreed to fund the initiative by Governor Bentley to open these new prisons.
Alabama still has the death penalty, and the state puts the most people to death per capita out of any state in the country. In fact, Alabama hands out more death penalties than Texas, despite having five times fewer people living in it. However, this doesn’t work out in practice since the rate of sentences commuted in Alabama means that Texas still has functionally the most executions.
To find people who are on death row in Alabama, you’ll have to check the Alabama Department of Corrections’s roster of people on death row. It will allow you to access the AIS number, name, birth year, and gender of the person on death row.
If none of the above methods allow you to find the inmate that you’re looking for, then you have a few options available. Other sites like VINE may allow you to search for prisoners across state borders, and you can also go the extra mile and schedule an in-person appointment to inquire about an inmate.
Finally, if nothing else works, you always have the option of hiring a private investigator who can figure out where the inmate you’re looking for is located. However, this is more of a last-ditch effort.