Federal Prison Camps: The Complete List

What a Federal Prison Camp Actually Is

The Bureau of Prisons defines it in one sentence on its own facilities page: "Minimum security institutions, also known as Federal Prison Camps (FPCs), have dormitory housing, a relatively low staff-to-inmate ratio, and limited or no perimeter fencing. These institutions are work- and program-oriented."

The phrase that does the work there is "limited or no perimeter fencing." At most camps there is nothing physically stopping a person from walking to the road. What holds a camp together is the consequence rather than the perimeter. Leaving is an escape, it is prosecuted, and it converts a short sentence at the easiest place in the federal system into a long one somewhere much harder. That is why camps can be run with fewer staff, and it is also why BOP is careful about who it puts there.

There are two kinds, and the difference matters to a family more than most pages acknowledge. Six camps are standalone Federal Prison Camps with no adjacent institution: Alderson, Bryan, Duluth, Montgomery, Morgantown and Yankton. The other 61 are satellite camps that sit on the grounds of a larger prison. BOP describes their function plainly: satellite camps "provide inmate labor to the main institution and to off-site work programs."

Seven of those satellite camps are attached to high-security penitentiaries: USP Atwater, USP Big Sandy, USP Canaan, USP Hazelton, USP Lee, USP McCreary and USP Tucson. A person designated to one of them is still a minimum-security inmate in a minimum-security camp. He is also living on the grounds of a penitentiary, and the drive, the visiting room and the phone call home all feel different from Yankton or Morgantown. Families reading a camp list rarely know this until someone tells them.

Who Gets Designated to a Camp: the Actual Scoring

Designation runs on a point score, and the points are not a secret. They are itemized on Form BP-337, the Inmate Load and Security Designation Form, reproduced inside Program Statement 5100.08, Inmate Security Designation and Custody Classification, Change Notice CN-3, approved May 6, 2026 by Director William K. Marshall III. Almost every page on this subject says "there is a point system" and stops. Here are the items and their values, as the form prints them.

Source: Form BP-337 as printed in Program Statement 5100.08 CN-3 (bop.gov), retrieved and read August 5, 2026. Worth knowing what that change notice actually changed: its own cover page states it updates Section 1, Purpose and Scope. Every page of the scoring machinery above is footered September 12, 2006, which is why a 2026 change notice and a twenty-year-old point scale sit inside the same document.

The total is then matched against a threshold. The thresholds are different for men and women, and there is no medium-security designation for women at all.

Source: Program Statement 5100.08 CN-3, Chapter 1, and Tables 5-2 and 5-3.

Where Most Camp Hopes Actually Die: the Public Safety Factor

A clean point score does not survive a Public Safety Factor. A PSF overrides the total and forces placement at a higher level, and it is the part of the process families almost never see coming, because it has nothing to do with how well someone scored.

For a man at 0 to 11 points, any of the following moves him out of a camp and into a low: Deportable Alien, Juvenile Violence, Greatest Severity Offense, Sex Offender, Serious Telephone Abuse, or Threat to Government Officials. Sentence Length is scaled: more than ten years remaining forces Low, more than twenty forces Medium, more than thirty forces High. Serious Escape forces Medium. Disruptive Group and Prison Disturbance force High.

The list for women is not the same list, which is a distinction almost nothing published on this topic makes. At 0 to 15 points, Deportable Alien, Juvenile Violence, Serious Telephone Abuse, Sex Offender, Threat to Government Officials and Violent Behavior move a woman to Low, and Prison Disturbance or Serious Escape move her straight to High. Three of the male factors do not exist for women at all: the form marks Disruptive Group, Greatest Severity Offense and Sentence Length as males only, and marks Violent Behavior as females only. A woman with a fifteen-year sentence is not pushed out of a camp by sentence length the way a man is.

Two provisions in the Program Statement are worth knowing and are rarely quoted. A maximum of three Public Safety Factors may be applied, and if more than three apply, the ones producing the greatest security are the ones used. And a PSF can be waived: the Program Statement states that only the DSCC Administrator is authorized to waive a Public Safety Factor, on a request submitted to the Designation and Sentence Computation Center. It is not common, and it is not something anyone should be promised, but it exists.

None of this is a formula anyone gets to appeal after the fact. The inputs come from the presentence investigation report, which is why the fight over a camp is mostly a fight over what the PSI says, months before BOP designates anybody. What the report records about offense severity, criminal history, violence and substance use is what gets keyed into SENTRY. That is covered in more detail in the presentence investigation guide.

Camp vs. Low-Security FCI

This is the comparison people search for four different ways and almost never find answered side by side. Both descriptions below are BOP's own words from its facilities page; the point thresholds are from Program Statement 5100.08.

Sources: bop.gov security-level definitions and Program Statement 5100.08 CN-3, Tables 5-2 and 5-3. Camp count and population computed from BOP's population report dated July 30, 2026.

Read the point rows again, because that is the whole argument. For a man, the distance between a camp and a low is often three or four points, and three of them can come from a single line on the form: voluntary surrender. Whether the judgment permits a self-surrender, and whether the person is actually released rather than taken into custody at sentencing, is decided in the courtroom, not by BOP. How the self-surrender process runs is worth understanding before that hearing rather than after it.

What Changed in May 2026

On May 28, 2026, BOP published Strategic Expansion of Minimum-Security Camp Utilization, and it changes who is realistically in play for a camp right now. In BOP's own words: "Effective immediately, institutions will begin transitioning eligible individuals to minimum-security facilities (Camps) once they have received a Residential Reentry Center (RRC) or Home Confinement (HC) placement date." Those transfers are to be completed in accordance with Program Statement 5100.08 CN-3, and BOP states that "initial implementation will prioritize those currently housed in low security facilities who are appropriate for camp placement."

The release lists the exclusions directly. Individuals not eligible for camp placement include sex offenders, deportable aliens, Disruptive Group members, domestic or international terrorists, inmates requiring heightened monitoring, inmates with recent serious misconduct, and cases where placement would pose any identifiable risk to public safety. The release frames the rationale as reentry and cost: camps are described as "historically underutilized," and intermediate camp placement as better preparation for release than a direct transition from a higher-security institution.

None of that machinery is new. What changed is that BOP started enforcing it. Program Statement 5100.08 has long stated that inmates approved for a community corrections referral and otherwise appropriate for camp "are to be transferred to a camp for intermediate placement if at all practicable," that the camp "should be closer to the inmate's release residence," and that the process should allow a minimum of 60 days at the camp before the reporting date. That paragraph was widely ignored. The May release puts weight behind it.

The practical read: if someone you love is sitting in a low security FCI and has a halfway house or home confinement date, the camp question is live for them today in a way it was not a year ago, and the mechanism is a transfer request rather than a redesignation fight. How that interacts with earned time credits and release planning is covered in the First Step Act guide and the Second Chance Act guide, and whether a particular case is in range is what an early release eligibility review is for.

The Complete List of Federal Prison Camps

Six standalone Federal Prison Camps operate with no adjacent institution: FPC Alderson in West Virginia (women, 451), FPC Bryan in Texas (women, 618), FPC Duluth in Minnesota (men, 234), FPC Montgomery in Alabama (men, 782), FPC Morgantown in West Virginia (men, 183) and FPC Yankton in South Dakota (men, 501). The other 61 camps in the table are satellite camps sitting alongside a larger institution. Camp names link to their facility record; where a facility page carries more detail than we have room for here, the link goes to BOP's own page for that institution.

Assembled August 5, 2026 from BOP's live facility directory (165 records) and BOP's population report dated July 30, 2026, which contains 67 camp records totalling 14,538 people against a BOP population of 138,415. BOP does not publish the camp roster as a list, so this table is derived rather than copied, and populations move every week. Gender is stated only where a BOP source establishes it for the camp itself. Three camps are marked "See facility" because BOP publishes a gender flag for the institution but not for its camp, and we would rather leave a cell honest than fill it.

A national table only gets a family so far, because what actually matters is which of these is inside driving range of home. We keep the same facility data broken out by district, with road distances and drive times, for Atlanta, Philadelphia, New York, Miami, Chicago, Dallas and Los Angeles. Atlanta is the one worth reading even if you are not there, because it is the clearest example of a major district with no camp of its own: Georgia has exactly one federal camp, at Jesup, roughly 240 miles from the city.

One correction, because it appears on nearly every camp list published online, including on pages that rank at the top of Google. FPC Pensacola and FPC Eglin are not operating facilities. Neither appears in BOP's live facility directory, neither has a record in the July 30, 2026 population report, and the old Pensacola facility URL now redirects to BOP's locations index. The error is upstream of the pages that repeat it: BOP's own security-levels page still illustrates minimum security with a photograph captioned FPC Pensacola, linked to that dead facility page. If a list you are reading includes Pensacola, that list was not checked against BOP's current data.

Camps That Hold Women

Eight camps are established as holding women by a BOP source we could pull and read. Four sit at institutions BOP flags female outright: FPC Alderson, FPC Bryan, the camp at FCI Aliceville and the camp at FMC Carswell. Four more are established at the camp level by BOP's own admission and orientation handbooks. The Danbury handbook states the complex comprises "FCI (Low Security-Male), FSL (Federal Satellite Low-Female), and SCP (Satellite Prison Camp-Female)." The FPC Greenville handbook and the FCI Marianna handbook each describe the Resolve Program, "a non-residential program for female inmates," as running at the camp. The Phoenix camp handbook designates a housing unit for the Female Integrated Treatment program.

Do not read eight as the complete set. Three further camps sit at institutions BOP flags as mixed and publishes no camp-level gender for: FCI Pekin, FMC Lexington and FCI Victorville Medium I. In BOP's July 30, 2026 population report the Pekin camp record is printed as "PEKIN-CAMP F," and the FPC Pekin handbook carries a female health care section, which points one way, but no BOP page states it plainly and this page will not state it for them. If one of those three is near your home, ask.

That thinness is the whole problem for a woman and her family. BOP states that women are "approximately 7 percent of the federal inmate population" and are "housed among 29 facilities." Fewer than a dozen camps across the country means the 500-driving-mile provision is far harder to satisfy for a woman than for a man, and it means a woman scored at minimum security can end up considerably further from home than a man with the same score. It also means program availability varies sharply between them, since not every camp runs every program.

If the person you are supporting is a woman, Women's Federal Prison keeps a facility-by-facility directory and a longer treatment of how designation works for women and how to advocate for a facility near home. Both go further into the women's side than this page does.

What a Camp Is Like Day to Day

Dormitory or cubicle housing, no cell doors, a bunk and a locker. A work assignment, which at a satellite camp usually means labor for the main institution or an off-site work program, because that is literally what BOP says satellite camps are for. Movement across a compound rather than controlled movement through gates. Programming, education and, at facilities that run it, RDAP. Not every camp offers every program, and that is a real designation variable rather than a footnote.

The thing that surprises people most is how much of camp life is ordinary and administrative. The first day is intake paperwork and a bunk assignment, not a confrontation. The first month is learning a routine, a commissary schedule and a phone system. The practical version of all of that is in what actually happens on the first day, what to bring when surrendering and how the commissary works.

The second surprise is that "camp" describes a security level, not an atmosphere. A camp on the grounds of a penitentiary and a standalone camp in South Dakota are the same designation and two different experiences. Anyone comparing options should be comparing the specific facility, not the category.

Where a Consultant Helps, and Where He Does Not

The Bureau of Prisons designates. That is worth stating flatly, because the market around this topic is not always honest about it. Program Statement 5100.08 quotes the governing statute, 18 U.S.C. 3621(b), which directs BOP to place a prisoner "in a facility as close as practicable to the prisoner's primary residence, and to the extent practicable, in a facility within 500 driving miles of that residence," subject to bed availability, the prisoner's security designation, programmatic needs, mental and medical health needs, faith-based requests, the recommendations of the sentencing court, and other security concerns.

Read that list again and notice which item is the only one a defendant can still influence at sentencing: the recommendation of the sentencing court. A judicial recommendation for a named facility is not binding on BOP, and BOP designates against it regularly. It is still the single most useful thing on the record, and it has to be built before sentencing, not requested afterward. So does the medical documentation, the program justification and the accurate account of criminal history that keeps the point score from being scored higher than the facts support.

Sam Mangel advocates for a designation. He does not place anyone. Nobody outside BOP can. Anyone who tells a family they can get a person into a specific camp is describing something the Bureau does not permit them to do, and a family under this much pressure deserves to hear that before they pay for it. What can be done is documented, specific and mostly unglamorous: getting the presentence report right, building the record that supports the security level the facts actually justify, making the case for proximity and for programming, and knowing which facilities realistically have beds. That is the work in facility designation, and it runs alongside prison preparation and RDAP placement.

Frequently Asked Questions