If you want to help us identify all the prisons and jails in the United States or other countries, here's how:

1. Contact Ed Sawicki and you'll be assigned a state and a jail type (county or city).
2. You may also volunteer to submit prison information for other countries.
3. You'll collect the information and place it in a text file that's described below.
4. Send it to Ed Sawicki via email.

File format

Information about prisons and jails is communicated via an XML-formatted, plain text file. Here's an example of what that looks like:

<marker>
        <name>Clallam County Jail</name>
        <adr>223 East 4th Street, Port Angeles</adr>
        <state>WA</state>
        <geo>48.11581859, -123.4325759</geo>
        <tag>County</tag>
        <gender>Male and Female</gender>
	<id>ejs</id>
</marker>
<marker>
        <name>Algona Prison</name>
        <adr>Main Street, Kent</adr>
        <state>WA</state>
        <geo>47.27820057, -122.2477160</geo>
        <tag>County</tag>
        <cap>17</cap>
	<employs>6</employs>
        <gender>Male</gender>
        <open>1997</open>
	<id>ejs</id>
</marker>
<marker>
        <name>Score Regional Jail</name>
        <aka>South Correctional Entity</aka>
        <adr>20817 17th Ave S, Des Moines</adr>
        <state>WA</state>
        <geo>47.41489428, -122.3125661</geo>
        <tag>City</tag>
        <cap>802</cap>
        <gender>Male and Female</gender>
        <note>Owners are Auburn, Burien, Des Moines, Renton, SeaTac, and Tukwila</note>
        <url>https://blanfordlaw.com/score-jail/</url>
	<id>ejs</id>
</marker>

This format allows you to put in as much or as little information as you can find. Here's what these lines mean:

• There must be <name>, <adr>, <state>, and <tag> lines for each prison or jail.
• All of these identifiers, such as name, adr, and state must be in lower case.
• If the prison or jail is known by another name, place it in <aka>.
• If you know the maximum number of inmates a prison or jail can hold, place it in <cap>. This is the number of beds in the prison. We don't count the number of people in holding cells who generally spend less than a day in the cell.
• <gender> specifies the gender of those who are incarcerated. Generally, jails have both male and female. Prisons are usually segregated. Please capitalize Male and Female.
• Add notes if you discover interesting information. You can add as many <note> lines as you need.
• If you know the number of employees of the jail or prison, place it in <employs>.
• If you know how to convert an address into geographic coordinates, place the coordinates in <geo>. (Latitude comes first.) If you don't know how, we'll do it later.
• If you know the official website URL for the prison or jail, put it in <url>.
• If you run into an interesting news story, such as abuse at the prison or jail, add the URL in another <url> line.
• Place your initials in <id>.

Assemble a file of a few prisons and send it to Ed so we know the format is correct.

Plain text files are preferred. This means using a plain text editor. If you must use a word processor, save it in a plain text format if you can.