How We Verify Our Facility Guides
Every facility page on Pigeonly is researched directly from official government sources — not forums, not other aggregators. Here's exactly how we do it, and why it matters for your family.
Why most facility info online can't be trusted
When a loved one is incarcerated, wrong information has real consequences — a rejected letter, a turned-away visitor, a missed call. Most sources fail families in three ways.
Copied & unverified
Many sites copy from other aggregators with no original sourcing. Errors compound over time with no way to trace them back.
Months out of date
Facilities change policies constantly. Static pages with no update cadence leave families working from rules that no longer apply.
Forum posts as fact
One person's experience at one facility gets treated as authoritative data published across thousands of pages.
Our Sourcing Standard
Every data point in a Pigeonly facility guide is traced to an official primary source. We do not use community submissions, forum posts, or third-party aggregators as source material.
Federal Bureau of Prisons
All federal facility data is verified directly from the BOP's official facility locator and policy documents.
State Departments of Corrections
Each state DOC publishes official rules for their facilities. We pull directly from these for every state.
County sheriff and jail websites
County-level facilities are verified from the official sheriff or county detention authority website. We confirm the domain is a government source before citing.
Direct facility contact
When web sources are ambiguous or outdated, our team calls the facility directly to confirm before publishing.
Haystac™
Pigeonly's facility intelligence system continuously monitors official government sources across jails, prisons, and detention centers in all 50 states. When an official page changes, Haystac flags it — so our team can re-verify and update before families encounter stale information.
Our 4-Step Process
Every facility guide follows the same process — whether it's a 300-bed county jail or a 5,000-person federal penitentiary. Those four steps involve roughly 40 individual research and verification actions per page: cross-checking addresses, visiting hours, phone systems, mail rules, and money codes against official documents before a word gets published.
Research
We locate the official government source for that facility type — BOP, state DOC, or county authority — before writing a single word.
Verify
We cross-reference every data point against the primary source. Anything ambiguous gets a direct call to the facility.
Write
We write guides in plain language families can actually use — no jargon, no filler. Visiting hours means visiting hours, not a wall of disclaimers.
Update
Haystac™ monitors the source for changes. Policy shifts trigger a re-verify and page update within 24 hours.
Content Standards
We always do this
We never do this
About Pigeonly
Built from the inside out
Pigeonly's founder, Frederick Hutson, spent 51 months in federal prison. During those four years, he was transferred to eight different facilities. Every transfer meant new rules: different mail formats, a new phone account to set up, updated visiting schedules. When he got a letter or a call, it was a lifeline. When families had the wrong information, the connection didn't happen.
Before he was released, Frederick started designing what would become Pigeonly. Not as an outside observer, but as someone who lived it. That's why accuracy isn't just an editorial standard here. It's personal.
We send the letters and photos, which means we deal with facility rules firsthand, every day. When a facility changes its photo acceptance policy, we know about it because it affects real orders. That operational experience is built into every guide we publish.
We also process mail directly for state DOCs and county jails under official contract, including Delaware, Iowa, and New Jersey. Those agencies route incoming mail through Pigeonly to screen it before it reaches an inmate. When we write about a facility's mail rules, we're often describing a process we run ourselves, not one we pieced together from the outside.
Spotted an error?
Our team reviews every report and corrects verified errors within 24 hours. If you've visited recently or have a document that contradicts what we've published, we want to know.
We respond to every report · Corrections posted within 24 hours