FCI Sandstone: Low-Security Federal Prison, Minnesota

By Elizabeth Franklin-Best, Esq., and Christopher Zoukis, JD, MBA

FCI Sandstone at a glance

FCI Sandstone is a low-security federal prison for men in Sandstone, Minnesota, holding 1,207 people as of September 2026. It has no camp. It is a Care Level 1 institution, so a man whose medical classification rises to Level 2 is reviewed for transfer somewhere else. Visiting is on Saturdays, Sundays and federal holidays, on an odd/even weekend rotation.

Official name	Federal Correctional Institution, Sandstone
BOP code	SST
Security level	Low; men
Population	1,207 (as of September 2026)
Visiting	Saturday, Sunday and federal holidays, 8:30 a.m.–3:30 p.m. · odd/even weekend rotation
Inmate mail	Inmate Name & Register Number · FCI Sandstone · Federal Correctional Institution · P.O. Box 1000 · Sandstone, MN 55072
Send money	Lockbox · Western Union (code city FBOP, DC) · MoneyGram (receive code 7932)
Phone	320-245-2262 · Fax 320-245-0385
Street address	2300 County Road 29, Sandstone, MN 55072 · Pine County
Judicial district	District of Minnesota
BOP region	North Central
Designated capacity	957
Housing	13 housing units
Special Housing Unit	Yes · 45 segregation cells
Medical care level	Level 1
RDAP	Yes
UNICOR	Yes
Camp	None

It is a single fenced institution on County Road 29 in Pine County, three miles southeast of the town, in the Bureau’s North Central Region, and one of the federal prisons in Minnesota. It opened in 1939 with a group of men transferred from the U.S. Penitentiary at Leavenworth, and its age and its medical rating together set it apart from almost every other low in the system.

Minnesota has four federal prisons. This is the low-security one for men.

FCI Sandstone is the only low-security federal prison for men in Minnesota. The state’s federal roster is small and easy to confuse, and three of its four facilities take men. Before you send or book anything, confirm which one the locator names.

Facility	Code	Type and security	Who is held there
FCI Sandstone (this page)	SST	Federal correctional institution, low	Men
FMC Rochester	RCH	Federal medical center, administrative	Men, at every security level, designated for medical or psychiatric need
FPC Duluth	DTH	Federal prison camp, minimum	Men
FCI Waseca	WAS	Federal correctional institution, low	Women

FCI Waseca is the one that catches people out: same type, same security level, same state, and it holds women. If the person you are looking for is a woman sentenced in federal court in Minnesota, Sandstone is the wrong page.

FPC Duluth is the other live confusion, because for seven months it looked as though the camp’s staff were coming here. On December 5, 2024 the Bureau announced it would deactivate Duluth, saying "[e]mployees working at FPC Duluth will be moved primarily to nearby FCI Sandstone." On July 16, 2025 it reversed itself: after a site visit, Director William Marshall III determined the camp would not be deactivated. Then on July 1, 2026 the Bureau announced that Duluth and Morgantown "will transition from minimum-security camps to FSL facilities" — a change the roster has not yet recorded; it still types Duluth a minimum-security camp. None of it changed anything at Sandstone.

Minnesota also runs its own state prison system, and none of those prisons is in Sandstone. A person sentenced in a Minnesota state court will not appear in the federal locator.

Does FCI Sandstone have a prison camp?

No. FCI Sandstone has no camp, no satellite low and no second institution on the site. The Bureau’s facility record shows no camp, no satellite low and no complex, and it lists four addresses for the prison — inmate mail, staff mail, the physical address and a warehouse shipping address. There is no camp mailing address because there is no camp.

Low security with a camp is the usual pattern. Listings that describe a Sandstone camp or a "Sandstone Federal Correctional Complex" draw on empty template blocks ("For inmates at the Camp," "For inmates at the FSL") that sit hidden in the code of every Bureau facility page. There is no Sandstone federal correctional complex.

Everyone at this address is therefore in the same fenced institution, under the same visiting supplement, commissary schedule and movement rules. If a relative says he is "at the camp at Sandstone," he means a different prison, and the locator will say which.

What is the security level at FCI Sandstone?

Low security. The 2024 PREA audit records the custody levels held here as "Low & In/Out"; the 2021 audit recorded "Low/In, Out, & Community." A low-security federal institution has double-fenced perimeters, dormitory or cubicle housing rather than cells, and a higher ratio of work and program assignments to custody posts than a medium does.

Two rules in this institution’s own handbook exist only because it is a low, and both matter to families. Outgoing mail from a sentenced man "in a minimum or low security institution may be sealed by the inmate and is sent out unopened and uninspected" — a letter written here leaves in a sealed envelope. And "[a]t minimum and low security institutions, an inmate may receive softcover publications (other than newspapers) from any source," so a paperback can come from you rather than only from a publisher or a bookstore. Neither is true at a medium.

Whether a person lands here is decided by a security point score under the Bureau’s security designation rules and by whether any Public Safety Factor applies; a Public Safety Factor overrides the point total, and it is the usual reason a man who scores low enough for a camp is sent to a low instead. Our guides to the intake process and preparing for prison cover the rest. Classification runs on the standard cycle — initial classification within 28 days, then program reviews every 90 to 180 days — and the handbook is blunt that a man "may not waive appearance with the Unit Team."

Housing runs in units lettered A, B, C, F, H, I, J and K, with a group the handbook calls the west compound and a tunnel serving the K units. F Unit is reserved for men approved for a gate-pass assignment — work outside the secure perimeter — so a move into F Unit is a signal about custody status, not just a bed change. A, F, J and K have duress telephones that ring straight to staff. The 2024 audit counted 13 housing units and 45 segregation cells in 22 buildings; three years earlier it was 12 units and 34 cells in the same 22 buildings.

Who are the notable inmates at FCI Sandstone?

No one on the published notable-inmate lists is held at FCI Sandstone now: every name below has left, or was never here. Each carries the register number the Bureau’s records use.

Name	What the Bureau’s records show (September 2026)	Case
Willie Junior Maxwell II ("Fetty Wap")	Register number 71943-509. Gone. The locator carries him under the Philadelphia Residential Reentry Management office, with a projected release date of November 3, 2026. People and CNN reported in January 2026 that he had served at FCI Sandstone before an early release	Pleaded guilty in the Eastern District of New York to conspiracy to distribute controlled substances; six-year sentence
Marc Dreier	Register number 70595-054. Released December 20, 2024. Listings that show him serving 20 years here are out of date	Former attorney; convicted of securities fraud, wire fraud and money laundering in the Southern District of New York
David Brankle	Register number 07411-028. Released June 18, 2023. Listings that describe him as "serving a 21-year sentence" here are out of date	Serial bank robbery
Sean Combs	Register number 37452-054. Never here. The locator places him at FCI Fort Dix, New Jersey, with a projected release date of February 5, 2028	Convicted in the Southern District of New York on transportation-to-engage-in-prostitution counts

Sean Combs is often said to be at Sandstone; the Bureau’s records place him at FCI Fort Dix. Two other men have been publicly named as Sandstone prisoners in Justice Department press releases, both for contraband mailed to them here, and their cases are set out below, because what they show about the mail room matters more than the names.

How do I find someone at FCI Sandstone?

To find someone at FCI Sandstone, search the Bureau’s free public Inmate Locator by name, or by the eight-digit register number if you have it. The number is the reliable key: the locator matches the committed name on the judgment, not a nickname, and it covers everyone in federal custody since 1982. For someone still held it returns the facility and projected release date; for someone released it shows "Not in BOP Custody as of" and a date, with no facility.

It shows the facility by name and type; in Minnesota the type matters. "Sandstone FCI" is this institution, "Rochester FMC" the medical center, "Duluth FPC" the camp, and "Waseca FCI" holds women. "Minneapolis RRM" is not a prison at all — it is a reentry office: a man shown there is in a halfway house or on home confinement, not behind a fence. Check the name against the Bureau’s locations list before you address an envelope.

If the locator finds nothing, the usual explanations are state rather than federal custody, pretrial detention under the U.S. Marshals Service before designation, or a judgment that spells the name differently from daily use. Our guide to how federal register numbers work explains how the number is built — which matters here more than at most prisons, because its fifth digit decides which weekends a man gets visits.

How do I write to someone at FCI Sandstone?

Letters go to P.O. Box 1000, Sandstone, MN 55072 — a post office box in the town, not County Road 29 — and the committed name and register number go on the first line exactly as the Bureau spells them.

Letters and personal mail to a prisoner	Mail to a staff member
Inmate Name & Register Number FCI Sandstone Federal Correctional Institution P.O. Box 1000 Sandstone, MN 55072	Staff Name FCI Sandstone Federal Correctional Institution P.O. Box 999 Sandstone, MN 55072

The handbook asks writers to add the housing unit under the register number, because first-class mail is handed out unit by unit by the evening-watch officer, Monday to Friday except holidays; there is ordinarily no delivery on weekends. Legal and special mail is distributed separately, by mail room or unit staff, and opened in front of the man it is addressed to.

That protection is conditional, and the condition is on the envelope. Mail from an attorney is special mail only if the envelope carries the attorney’s name and an indication that he or she is an attorney, and the front is marked "Special Mail – Open only in the presence of the inmate" or words to that effect. Without it, the handbook says, "the mail may be opened, read, and inspected" — and the Bureau puts the burden of telling the lawyer on the prisoner. The national mail rules sit in the Bureau’s correspondence regulations. Our pages on attorney-client communication in the Bureau of Prisons and on writing to someone in federal prison take that further.

Sandstone’s mail room has a documented problem. Twice in five years the Justice Department has announced a prosecution here for drugs delivered on paper. Curtis Brent Carico was sentenced in February 2021 to three additional months for arranging to have a magazine mailed to him with a page soaked in liquid synthetic cannabinoid; Nickolas William Mihelic was sentenced in February 2023 to 24 additional months for arranging to have sheets of paper saturated with liquid methamphetamine mailed to him, which staff seized on arrival. The practical effect on an ordinary family is that greeting cards, glossy inserts, colored paper, stickers and anything stained or scented draw attention — and a photocopy of a child’s drawing arrives where the original may not.

Publications are easier here than at most institutions: because Sandstone is a low, softcover books and magazines may come from any source, while hardcovers and newspapers still have to come from a publisher, book club or bookstore. Packages need prior authorization, and after a release or transfer ordinary mail is forwarded for 30 days and then returned. Never put money in a letter.

How do I send money to someone at FCI Sandstone?

Money for someone at FCI Sandstone goes to the Bureau’s national lockbox in Des Moines or through Western Union or MoneyGram, never to the prison. Each of the three wants the committed name and the eight-digit register number, and each rejects anything missing either.

Route	Where it goes	How fast it posts
Postal money order	Federal Bureau of Prisons Committed Name Eight-Digit Register Number Post Office Box 474701 Des Moines, Iowa 50947-0001	U.S. postal money orders post without a hold. Every non-postal money order and non-government check has carried an automatic 15-day hold since December 1, 2007
Western Union Quick Collect	Code city FBOP, DC. Enter the eight-digit register number with no spaces or dashes, immediately followed by the last name; the full committed name goes on the attention line	Two to four hours if sent between 7:00 a.m. and 9:00 p.m. Eastern, seven days a week including holidays; otherwise by 7:00 a.m. Eastern the next morning
MoneyGram	Receive code 7932, company name Federal Bureau of Prisons, Washington, DC	On the same posting schedule

Cash and personal checks are not accepted. The sender’s name and return address must be in the upper left corner, because that is the only way a rejected deposit finds its way home; without one it goes to the Treasury. Nothing else may be in the envelope — the handbook says the Bureau "shall dispose of all items included with the funds." If a money order has not appeared, the sender, not the prisoner, opens the tracer. Our guide to sending money to a federal prisoner compares each route.

Two Sandstone-specific things before sending a large amount. Money leaves the account more slowly than it arrives: withdrawal requests on form BP-199 are processed weekly, a Unit Manager signs most of them, and only an Associate Warden can approve one over $500. And if the man is in refuse status under the Inmate Financial Responsibility Program, the handbook drops his commissary limit to $25 a month and bars him from UNICOR and from performance pay above maintenance level. More money does not fix that; renegotiating the payment plan with the Unit Team does.

What are the visiting hours at FCI Sandstone?

FCI Sandstone’s visiting hours are Saturdays, Sundays and federal holidays, 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Visitors may arrive from 8:00 a.m. to begin processing and are not permitted onto institution grounds before 7:50 a.m. No visitor is admitted after 2:30 p.m. The hours are set by institution supplement SST-5267.09D, Visiting Regulations, dated May 19, 2025, under the Bureau’s national visiting regulations.

Monday visiting no longer exists. The Bureau’s December 2021 handbook for this facility says visits run "Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and federal holidays" and carries a schedule page reading "WEEKDAY VISITING IS MONDAY 8:30 AM TO 3:30 PM." The May 2025 supplement lists Saturday, Sunday and federal holidays only. Listings that give Monday hours are out of date.

There is a second closure inside the day. On Saturdays, Sundays and holidays a 10:00 a.m. count runs, and no one enters or leaves the institution from 9:30 a.m. until it clears, ordinarily about 10:30. Arrive at 9:40 and you lose an hour — and not in the parking lot, because the handbook forbids waiting in the lot or on the grounds during a count or while someone else visits.

Who can visit, and the odd-even weekend rule

You cannot come every weekend, and which weekends you get is decided by a digit. Weekend visiting runs on an odd/even rotation and, in the supplement’s words, "[o]dd and even is determined by the fifth digit of the register number. (The number ‘0’ is considered an even number)." An odd fifth digit visits on the weekends designated odd that month; an even one visits on the even weekends. The calendar of which is which is posted in the housing units — ask for it, because it is published nowhere outside the prison. Federal holidays carry no odd/even restriction, and only the Unit Manager can approve an exception, in advance.

• Six visits a month, not counting federal holidays — which makes a holiday visit worth planning around.
• Any entry to and exit from the visiting room counts as one visit. Step out and the day is over.
• Six visitors at a time, children included; the room holds 100 people.
• The visiting list holds up to 20 adults, meaning anyone 16 or over, and may be changed once a month.
• A visitor may not appear on two prisoners’ lists, unless two relatives are held at Sandstone and the presentence report verifies it.
• Friends and associates must have known the prisoner before he was incarcerated; only the Warden can waive that.
• Before a list is approved, new arrivals and men in holdover status see immediate family only, on proof of relationship; approval normally takes five working days.
• When the room is full, visits are cut to two hours in a fixed order: men visiting on their off weekend first, then frequent local visitors, then whoever has been there longest.
• Special visits need the Unit Manager’s and the Captain’s approval in advance and "will not be approved more frequently than once every six months."
• A minister of record may visit twice a week for two hours; other clergy count against the ordinary total.

Attorneys should read the supplement rather than assume. Legal visits here "will ordinarily occur on non-visiting days during regular visiting hours" and are scheduled at least a week ahead through the Unit Team, which sends a memorandum to the Warden through the Captain first. An attorney who instead turns up on a Saturday is supervised by the visiting room officer, may bring in no supplies or paperwork, and is to be told there is "no guaranteed expectation of privacy, due to other social visits occurring at the same time"; a briefcase is searched and admitted only by the Operations Lieutenant or the Institution Duty Officer. Men in the Special Housing Unit get no contact visits at all during normal hours: they are strip-searched, put in a jumpsuit and kept in full restraints throughout, only two may be in the room at once, and a third family’s arrival ends the longest-running of those visits after two hours.

What visitors can wear and bring

The dress code is written against the uniform and against a northern Minnesota winter, and it turns away more visitors than anything else here. Prohibited: tight, transparent or spandex clothing, including leggings; tank tops, halter tops and sleeveless shirts; hooded clothing; clothing with holes; plunging necklines; wrap-around skirts; shorts more than one inch above the knee; skirts that do not touch the bottom of the knee when you are sitting; open-toed shoes; Crocs of any type; hats and any other head covering; bags of any kind; and watches. Khaki is out because that is the uniform, and so are camouflage, orange and gray. Shirts must not hang more than three inches below the belt line; children under 13 may wear shorts.

The coat rule catches visitors out in a state where it can be twenty below in the parking lot: "Jackets and coats are not permitted while entering and exiting the Visiting Room… and must be hung on the wall prior to the start of any visit." Dress for a heated room, not for the drive.

You may bring one clear plastic change purse, roughly five inches by eight. The May 2025 supplement allows up to $40.00 in it, in bills of $20 or smaller, for the vending machines; the December 2021 handbook allows $20.00. The supplement is the newer document and governs, but both figures are in circulation and staff apply the one in front of them — take exact change in small bills and expect the lower number.

Nothing else comes in — no wallets or bags, no phones or cameras, no toys, reading matter, gum, food or tobacco — and nothing may be handed to a prisoner, so anything he needs to sign or read has to be mailed in. Personal wheelchairs are not allowed — the institution provides one — and photography anywhere on the grounds is forbidden. Infants are the exception: diapers, wipes, bottles or food and a small blanket, carried in hand or in a one-gallon clear zip-lock bag, with no diaper bag and no stroller. Feminine hygiene products are expressly permitted and may not be a reason to refuse entry. Medication is held by the visiting room officer, except cardiac medication, which the visitor or the prisoner may keep.

Inside the room, an embrace and a kiss are allowed on arrival and departure and nothing else: the supplement lists holding hands, arms around each other and crossing legs with each other among the behaviors that end a visit and may produce an incident report. Seating is assigned. Photographs are taken by an approved inmate photographer on Saturdays, Sundays and holidays between noon and 2:00 p.m.; the ticket costs a dollar, is bought from the commissary, and must be requested before noon.

Identification and screening

Every visitor 16 and over needs a valid state or government-issued photo identification, and it stays with the Front Lobby Officer until you leave; visitors under 16 with a parent or guardian are exempt. Everyone signs the Notification to Visitors form, BP-A0224, before entering, and the supplement warns that 18 U.S.C. § 1001 carries up to five years and a $250,000 fine for falsifying information used to establish identity.

Screening is a walk-through metal detector plus an ion scanner, and every visitor is hand-stamped in invisible ink before entering. The stamp changes daily and is checked under black light by the control room officer on the way in and again before you leave. Failing the ion scanner is one of the listed grounds for denial, along with no identification or the wrong kind, an underage visitor with no adult, improper dress, failing the metal detector, and appearing intoxicated. A denial is documented on the supplement’s own Visitation Denial form and approved by the Warden. See searches, shakedowns and contraband for how these rules work system-wide, and our general guide to federal prison visitation for the national rules.

The prisoner is searched harder than the visitor. He wears clean pressed khakis and institution or commissary boots, and the visiting room officer attaches zip tags to those boots before he enters: if the tags come off during the visit, the visit ends, and if they are missing when he leaves, the boots are confiscated and not returned. He may carry one handkerchief, one wedding ring, one comb and one pair of prescription glasses, nothing more. He is pat-searched going in and strip-searched coming out, and no one carries money into or out of the room.

Getting there

The institution is at 2300 County Road 29, three miles southeast of the town of Sandstone, off State Highway 123. The Bureau’s own directions tell visitors to stop at the red light on the entrance road and follow the posted instructions before going any further; visitor parking is at the east end of the main lot, parking along the Bureau Road is prohibited, and visitors may not park next to the fence or speak to men on the recreation yard.

Distances depend on which Bureau document you read: the 2021 handbook puts the prison 90 miles north of Minneapolis, the 2021 PREA audit about 80, and both agree on 70 miles south of Duluth. The nearest airports are Duluth, 70 miles away, and Minneapolis–St. Paul, 90. Then the sentence that decides the trip: "There is no public transportation to and from the institution." Plan on a car, in a part of Minnesota where winter closes interstates.

How do phone calls and email work at FCI Sandstone?

At FCI Sandstone, calls are placed by the prisoner and email runs on TRULINCS; you cannot call in. The number must be on his approved list, he needs a nine-digit Phone Access Code and a voice-verification registration, and every call except a properly arranged legal call is recorded. Across the Bureau the allowance is 510 minutes a calendar month under the Bureau’s telephone regulations, Program Statement 5264.09, issued September 3, 2026: 300 are free to anyone eligible for First Step Act telephone incentives, and anyone who uses up those 300, eligible or not, may buy the remaining 210. A single call should generally not exceed 15 minutes, at least 30 minutes must pass between completed calls, and the monthly cap does not apply to unmonitored legal calls. The extra 100 minutes in November and December belonged to the 2008 policy and did not survive its rescission.

At Sandstone the telephones run from 6:00 a.m. to no later than 9:00 p.m., but access inside that window is limited to three blocks — on weekdays 6:00 to 7:30 a.m., 10:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. and 4:30 to 9:00 p.m.; on weekends and holidays 7:00 to 9:30 a.m., 10:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. and 4:30 to 9:00 p.m. Men are expected to be at work, not on the telephone, during work hours. If a weekly call stops arriving, a change of work detail is at least as likely an explanation as anything alarming. Our guide to federal inmate phone calls covers the rates and the rules.

An unmonitored call to an attorney is not something a man can simply ask for. The handbook requires him to demonstrate the need to the Unit Team — "such as an imminent court deadline" — he pays for the call himself, and a collect call is preferred. A lawyer who needs a confidential conversation should write to the Unit Team in advance with the deadline on the face of the letter, rather than wait for the client to negotiate it.

Email runs on TRULINCS, which families reach through CorrLinks, and the terminals in the west compound and K units are available from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. daily. It is text only — no attachments, no internet, 13,000 characters a message, and a per-minute charge. The same terminals run the law library, prescription refills, withdrawal requests and a Justice Department mailbox for reporting sexual abuse straight to the Inspector General. Messages to a lawyer carry no privilege here or anywhere in the Bureau; confidential writing has to travel as marked special mail. See CorrLinks and TRULINCS for what the system charges.

What can people buy at the FCI Sandstone commissary?

The FCI Sandstone commissary sells food, including kosher and halal items, cold-weather clothing, work boots, tablets and watches, and a man may spend up to the national limit of $460 a month there. That limit is set by the Bureau’s trust fund rules, Program Statement 4500.13, issued May 7, 2026, which records in its own summary of changes that it "[i]ncreases spending limit from $360 to $460 per month." It rises by $50 during the November–December holiday period, for no more than one validation period. Items that do not count against it include postage stamps, copy cards and paper, over-the-counter medications and vitamins, footwear, mattresses and nicotine replacement lozenges.

Sandstone’s own December 2021 handbook says "The National Spending Limit is $360.00." That figure is obsolete, and so is the $180 biweekly figure derived from it that still circulates. What survives is the second half of the sentence: "Each inmate account spending limitation is revalidated on a bi-weekly basis at FCI Sandstone." Program Statement 4500.13 permits that, revalidating monthly "except where weekly or bi-weekly validation is used." So the ceiling here is released in two installments, and the Bureau has not published what each is under the new figure. Ask the unit team before assuming a man can spend $460 at once.

Shopping is by unit, one slot each, Monday to Thursday only — roughly 6:00 to 7:40 a.m. and 10:30 a.m. to noon, closed Fridays. The Special Housing Unit shops on Wednesdays, with every order reviewed by medical staff and the Captain first. Two local rules decide whether a man actually shops. His list goes into a mail slot in the exit doorway and he then waits at the entrance for his name; if he does not come to the window after three calls, the list is pulled and he forfeits that week. And the order in which units are called is set by the last sanitation inspection — the cleanest unit shops first. A man can lose his week to a cellmate’s untidy locker.

The order form (2025) prices a tablet at $141.70, a Casio watch at $85.95 and work boots at $84.50 to $91.00, and stocks about forty kosher-marked items and a halal beef log. What it stocks that a warmer prison does not is the tell: a winter hat at $11.95, a scarf at $10.40, thermal tops and bottoms from $8.60, gray sweatshirts at $18.85, and insect repellent at $8.50 for the other half of the Minnesota year. Typewriter ribbons at $6.55 are still on the list, which tells you how legal work gets typed here. For the national rules behind all of this, see the federal prison commissary.

One detail connects two sections of this page: commissary clothing for men may be sold only in gray and white, and gray is on the visitor dress-code ban list. The color a man is issued is the color his mother cannot wear to see him.

What programs are available at FCI Sandstone?

FCI Sandstone offers the Residential Drug Abuse Program, GED and English-as-a-second-language classes, food service and welding training, UNICOR work, Department of Labor apprenticeships and a run of First Step Act programs aimed at aging and chronic illness, listed in the Bureau’s First Step Act Approved Programs Guide (August 2026).

RDAP and drug treatment

FCI Sandstone runs the Residential Drug Abuse Program, and the institution’s handbook is unambiguous — "The RDAP is available at FCI Sandstone" — and the Bureau’s current list of RDAP locations, updated in June 2026 and printed inside the August 2026 First Step Act approved-programs guide, names FCI Sandstone under the North Central Region among 57 programs at 50 locations. Participants are housed together in a treatment unit set apart from the general population, the unit-based portion runs a minimum of nine months as a half-day program, and for a man convicted of a non-violent offense successful completion can mean up to a year off the sentence under 18 U.S.C. § 3621(e)(2)(B).

Timing is the thing families get wrong. Admission is driven by nearness to release, and the handbook records that men are "ordinarily interviewed 24-42 months from release." Apply with eight years to serve and you are told to wait; wait until eighteen months are left and the unit-based and community components may not fit. The Drug Abuse Education course is separate and mandatory where the presentence report documents prolonged drug use, drug-related offense conduct, a judicial recommendation or a supervision violation — refusing it costs performance pay above maintenance level and UNICOR eligibility. The non-residential program is also offered.

Education and vocational training

GED and English-as-a-second-language classes, Adult Continuing Education in the evenings and on weekends, a leisure library and an electronic law library, correspondence study at the man’s own expense, and apprenticeships registered with the Department of Labor. Literacy carries 240 mandatory instructional hours, and the GED is taken on a computer, so the handbook urges men to take a keyboarding course first. Men who already hold a diploma are encouraged to sit the Tests of Adult Basic Education, because the Program Review sheet scores academic readiness "unknown" until a man scores 9.0 or higher.

The vocational programs here are food service and welding, and the enrollment criteria hold a trap. Enrollment requires a GED or high school diploma, release within three years, at least a year of clear conduct, no security concerns, and at least a year left before halfway-house eligibility — and then this: men enrolling in the food service and welding programs "must be RDAP ineligible." A man who qualifies for RDAP cannot take either trade. That is a real fork in a sentence plan; raise it with the unit team early rather than discover it at a program review.

UNICOR operates here: the First Step Act guide’s entry for Federal Prison Industries names this institution, and the commissary schedule gives UNICOR and vocational training their own Wednesday morning slot. The Bureau does not publish what the Sandstone factory makes. Men in refuse status under the Inmate Financial Responsibility Program cannot work there. Our guides to prison education and vocational training cover the system-wide rules.

First Step Act programming, and where the guide disagrees with itself

The Bureau’s August 2026 approved-programs guide is the document that decides which activities earn First Step Act time credits, and its programs-by-institution table marks Sandstone for the usual spine — the cognitive-skills, literacy, parenting, drug-treatment and occupational-education programs almost every institution runs — and then, unusually, a long run of aging and chronic-illness activities: Brain Health As You Age, Getting to Know Your Aging Body, Healthy Steps for Older Adults, Living a Healthy Life with Chronic Conditions, Managing Your Diabetes, Talking With Your Doctor, Walk With Ease and the National Diabetes Prevention Program. For a prison whose oldest resident was 70 at the last audit, that cluster is the tell.

One entry in that table is contradicted by the same document. The table marks Sandstone for the Life Connections Program, the Bureau’s residential faith-based reentry program; the narrative page for Life Connections, in the same guide, names five institutions, and Sandstone is not one of them. The next move is the same either way: ask the chaplain, in writing, whether it runs here. Threshold, the non-residential faith-based program, is described as available at all Bureau institutions and is marked for Sandstone, so that one is not in doubt.

Approval is not delivery. The guide lists what an institution is approved to offer; whether a class is running and how long the list is changes constantly and is a question for the unit team. Psychology Services runs its own groups here — basic cognitive skills, criminal thinking, emotional regulation — advertised on TRULINCS when they open. Sandstone is not a Sex Offender Management Program institution; the handbook treats those programs as somewhere a man is transferred to.

What medical care does FCI Sandstone provide?

FCI Sandstone provides basic outpatient care, and the handbook is unusually direct about the limit: "As FCI Sandstone is a Care Level 1 institution, any inmate who is CL2 or higher will be reviewed for possible transfer to another institution. Many factors are considered when reviewing such a matter." The same passage adds that a Care Level 2 classification does not make a transfer automatic.

Care Level 1 is the Bureau’s designation for institutions holding generally healthy people. If a man’s health deteriorates here, the institutional answer is not more care at Sandstone — it is a review for transfer, perhaps to FMC Rochester, and perhaps a long way from a family that moved to Pine County for him. Understand that before a diagnosis, not after.

Day to day, sick call requests are taken at the medication room window between 6:15 and 6:45 a.m., Monday to Friday, with an identification card; a man who misses that window tells his work supervisor or unit officer instead, and men in segregation ask a clinician on daily rounds. There is a co-payment unless he is found indigent. Pill line runs on weekday mornings and again at 4:45 p.m., with scheduled medication pickup between 10:30 and 11:00 a.m. Routine dental cleaning is a cop-out to the Dental Service and a waiting list, not something a dental sick call provides. See medical care in federal prison for what to do when care does not happen.

There is a corollary in the oversight record. Twice in 2016 the Inspector General chose Sandstone as one of five institutions for a Bureau-wide medical review — once on medical staffing, where it was picked for having "a high number or high percentage of PHS staff in FY 2014," meaning commissioned Public Health Service officers rather than civil-service clinicians, and once on what the Bureau pays for outside care. A Care Level 1 prison staffed by PHS officers and buying its serious care outside is a particular model, and it is the one the Inspector General came looking for.

What is daily life like at FCI Sandstone?

Daily life at FCI Sandstone is shaped by counts, the khaki uniform and strict rules for the cube each man lives in. The table below comes from the institution’s 2021 handbook; treat it as the shape of a day rather than a timetable.

	Weekdays	Weekends and holidays
Wake-up	6:00 a.m.
Beds made by	7:30 a.m.	9:30 a.m.
Standing counts	4:15 p.m. and 9:30 p.m.	10:00 a.m., plus the weekday counts
Other counts	Midnight, 3:00 a.m. and 5:00 a.m.
Khaki uniform required	7:30 a.m. – 4:00 p.m., and during any visit	—
Controlled movement	Ten minutes, beginning about ten minutes before the hour; one direction at a time
Telephones	6:00–7:30 a.m., 10:30 a.m.–1:00 p.m., 4:30–9:00 p.m.	7:00–9:30 a.m., 10:30 a.m.–3:30 p.m., 4:30–9:00 p.m.
TRULINCS	6:00 a.m. – 9:00 p.m.
Sick call sign-up	6:15 – 6:45 a.m. at the medication room window	—
Showers close	10:00 p.m.

Callouts — the next day’s medical, dental, education and team appointments — go up on the unit bulletin boards after 4:00 p.m. the day before, and missing one is a disciplinary matter rather than an inconvenience. Clothing exchange runs Monday, Tuesday and Thursday mornings, and clothing services is closed on Fridays.

What the handbook spends most of its pages on is the cube. Nothing may be taped to a wall, locker, bed frame or light, or stored on top of a locker, on a windowsill or under a mattress. Cardboard is not permitted in a living area and may not be hung on a bed "for any reason, i.e. attempt to create privacy." Meals are taken in uniform at weekday lunch. One chair per bunk, marked with the bunk number; a chair from another cube is contraband. Televisions change only through a staff-installed channel box. A sanitation failure is written up as a "gig," and because commissary order is set by the last sanitation score, a gig costs the whole unit its place in the queue.

The weather is in the paperwork. The Bureau issues a winter coat, winter gloves and a stocking cap here, and thermal underwear to cold-weather work details; the property list allows three sets of thermals. Recreation includes two weightlifting areas, indoors and out, with safety shoes required in both, under the Zimmer Amendment restrictions: no R, X or NC-17 films, no martial arts or weightlifting instruction, no electric instruments. Hobby craft in the units is beadwork, knitting and small work in colored pencil or pastel, with a current card and material for one project only.

One section matters to lawyers. Sandstone ranks three ways to verify a document: an unsworn declaration under 28 U.S.C. § 1746 is "the preferred method," and the handbook prints the wording to put at the foot of a filing; failing that, an oath before a Case Manager under 18 U.S.C. § 4004; and a notary only where neither will do. A client told he needs a notary for a § 2255 declaration has usually been told wrong. Federal Tort Claims Act claims start on Standard Form 95, from a request to staff or the Correctional Counselor.

What do inspectors say about conditions at FCI Sandstone?

Inspectors have published very little about conditions at FCI Sandstone. The DOJ Office of the Inspector General has not conducted an on-site inspection of this facility. The District of Columbia’s Corrections Information Council, which has produced the only independent conditions reports some federal prisons have ever had, has never inspected Sandstone either. What exists is two Prison Rape Elimination Act audits three years apart, and two Inspector General medical evaluations that reached this institution down a video link.

Sandstone is named in seven Inspector General products; five carry it only in appendix tables or survey data, without discussion. The two that chose it deliberately are both from 2016 and both concern medical care — the reviews of the Bureau’s medical staffing challenges and of its reimbursement rates for outside medical care. Each picked five institutions "representing all four" care levels. Then, under a heading reading "Site Visits," each report records what its team actually did: "The team conducted video teleconferences" with those five. Neither report makes any finding about conditions here.

The only published on-site oversight reports on this compound are two PREA audits, and they came for one purpose.

The most recent audit ran on site November 19–21, 2024, by Lynni O’Haver of Corrections Consulting Services, with a final report dated December 14, 2024. The facility passed: 44 standards met, one exceeded — standard 115.54, third-party reporting — and none unmet, with no corrective action required. It earned that on translation: the auditor found zero-tolerance bulletins posted in multiple languages at housing unit entrances and in the education and vocational buildings, and all 26 randomly interviewed men recalled both their intake and their orientation briefings. For the twelve months the audit reviewed, the facility recorded one sexual abuse allegation, staff-on-inmate, closed as unsubstantiated, and four of sexual harassment. There were no inmate-on-inmate sexual abuse allegations at all.

The earlier audit, by Valerie Wolfe Mahfood, subcontracted by PREA Auditors of America, ran on site November 16–18, 2021, with a report dated December 29, 2021; the 2024 audit supersedes it.

The audits are also the only public account of the physical plant and the population, and read side by side they show what happened to this prison in three years.

	2021 audit (visit November 16–18, 2021)	2024 audit (visit November 19–21, 2024)
Designated capacity	996	957
Average daily population	878	1,148
Over capacity in the past 12 months?	No — "[a]t no time within the audited time frame has the FCI Sandstone exceeded its maximum capacity range"	Yes
Buildings / housing units / segregation cells	22 / 12 / 34	22 / 13 / 45
Staff who may have inmate contact	221	250
Volunteers with inmate contact	90	148
Age range	20 to 68	19 to 70
Average length of stay	897.7 days	629.6 days
Standards exceeded / met / not met	8 / 37 / 0	1 / 44 / 0

Designated capacity fell by 39 beds while the average population rose by 270. Against the 2024 figure of 957, the 1,207 men held as of September 2026 are about 126 percent of capacity. Turnover has risen sharply too: the average stay has fallen by more than 260 days, which is what a low looks like when it becomes a release-preparation institution.

Two numbers from the 2024 audit belong together. Of the 1,145 men held on its first day, 167 — about one in seven — were recorded as limited English proficient, and 61 had a cognitive or functional disability. The Bureau’s answer is a contract with Language Line Services and a rule against using other prisoners as interpreters. A family whose relative does not read English should ask specifically how his program review was interpreted, because a sentence-planning meeting a man cannot follow is a lost year.

On staffing, Sandstone is the rare federal prison with good news. The 2024 audit records that the facility "reported no deviations from the staffing plan during the auditing period," and the Warden confirmed it in interview. That matches what the union said out loud when the Bureau proposed moving Duluth’s employees here: its district vice president told a member of Congress that Sandstone "is very well-staffed" and could absorb only about 15 of the roughly 90 people involved. At an agency where augmentation and mandatory overtime are the norm, a fully staffed institution is a material advantage for the people held in it.

Every piece of systematic, independent scrutiny of conditions at a prison holding 1,207 men as of September 2026 consists of two audits about sexual safety and two video calls about medical care.

The Eighth Circuit case about First Step Act credits at FCI Sandstone

In Osorio-Calderon v. Warden FCI Sandstone, a published decision of June 30, 2026, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit held that earned First Step Act credits do not entitle a prisoner to leave prison on a particular date. The decision now governs every federal prisoner in Minnesota, the Dakotas, Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri and Arkansas.

The facts are narrower than the rule they produced. Jose Osorio-Calderon, held at Sandstone, is serving 151 months for coercion and enticement of a minor. He did the programming and earned the credits; by April 2, 2025 he had accumulated 1,095 days of them, 365 of which moved his projected release date forward a full year, from July 3, 2027 to July 3, 2026, and the remaining 730 went toward prerelease custody. He became eligible for that transfer on July 3, 2024, and was still at Sandstone when the case was decided.

He was still there because no placement was approved. He first asked for prerelease custody in New York, where his sister lives; the United States Probation Office refused in March 2024, finding her home "not suitable for supervision." The Bureau then looked at Puerto Rico, and in November 2024 its Residential Reentry Manager there found a reentry center infeasible because local ordinances restricting where sex offenders may be placed — near the two private schools and the daycare center beside the facility — applied to his offense. The Bureau revisited it in April 2025 and refused again. That is an individualized decision under the five factors in § 3621(b), and it is what the Eighth Circuit was asked to review.

He exhausted the administrative remedy process and petitioned the District of Minnesota under 28 U.S.C. § 2241. A magistrate judge recommended in June 2025 that he win; on September 19, 2025 the district court rejected that recommendation and dismissed the petition without prejudice, holding that it had no power to review the Bureau’s placement decision under § 3621(b). He appealed, and in December 2025 the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Minnesota and the Clemency Project Clinic of the University of Minnesota Law School filed an amicus brief supporting him.

The Eighth Circuit affirmed, and its reasoning matters more than its result. The statute says the Bureau "shall transfer" eligible prisoners into prerelease custody. The court held that sentence "is best read as a directive that identifies what group of prisoners the BOP must transfer into prerelease custody, not as establishing an immutable date by which the BOP must effectuate individual transfers," and that "[n]either § 3632(d)(4)(C) nor § 3624(g) says that the BOP must transfer a prisoner immediately upon achieving eligibility." It then pointed at a sentence the First Step Act itself added to the placement statute in 2018: "Notwithstanding any other provision of law, a designation of a place of imprisonment under [that] subsection is not reviewable by any court." Because prerelease custody is a place of imprisonment, a court cannot order the Bureau to put a particular person in a particular halfway house on a particular day.

The court reserved only one question. The district court had also held, as an alternative ground, that circuit precedent requires dismissal of any habeas petition seeking transfer to prerelease custody because such a petition challenges a place of confinement. In a footnote the Eighth Circuit said: "We need not determine whether the district court’s alternative conclusion is correct." Whether habeas is the right vehicle at all is therefore still open in this circuit. Nothing else is.

A second Sandstone case decided six weeks earlier draws the other boundary. In Cullar v. Warden, FCI Sandstone (D. Minn., May 19, 2026) a man serving 135 months asked the Bureau to count credits he expected to earn in future. The court refused: only "earned" credits may be applied, "[u]ntil such credits are ‘earned,’ federal law bars the BOP from applying them," and without them he had no injury and no standing — the claim was "speculative and hypothetical." The same opinion restates the arithmetic: up to 365 days of credits trim the custodial term itself, and everything beyond that goes toward an earlier move into prerelease custody.

The practical lesson from both is the same: fight over the calculation of credits, over a wrong PATTERN risk score, over programming that should have been credited, and do it through the administrative remedy process early. A petition asking a judge to order a transfer on a date is, in this circuit, asking for the one thing the statute says no court may give.

FCI Sandstone in the news

Recent news about FCI Sandstone centers on First Step Act litigation, Fetty Wap’s release, a new warden and a staffing plan the Bureau reversed; older items concern mail-contraband prosecutions, a COVID-19 outbreak and the prison’s history.

• June 2026 — the Eighth Circuit decided Osorio-Calderon v. Warden FCI Sandstone, holding that the First Step Act sets no fixed date for transfer into prerelease custody and that the Bureau’s placement decisions are not reviewable by any court.
• May 2026 — the District of Minnesota denied the petition in Cullar v. Warden, FCI Sandstone, holding that credits a man has not yet earned cannot be applied and give him no standing.
• January 2026 — Fetty Wap was released early from his six-year sentence. Press accounts place his imprisonment here; the Bureau’s locator now carries him under the Philadelphia reentry management office.
• July 2025 — the Bureau reversed the deactivation of FPC Duluth after a site visit by its new director, ending a plan that would have moved the camp’s staff here.
• January 2025 — Tim Vaught arrived as warden, having joined the Bureau in 2000 and served at ten federal facilities. He succeeded Mark W. King, who held the post at the November 2024 PREA audit.
• December 2024 — the Bureau announced it would deactivate FPC Duluth and move its employees "primarily to nearby FCI Sandstone." A congressman’s letter twelve days later reported the union’s position that Sandstone was already well staffed and could take about fifteen of them.
• February 2023 — Nickolas William Mihelic, an inmate here, was sentenced to 24 additional months for arranging to have paper saturated with liquid methamphetamine mailed to him. Staff seized it on arrival.
• February 2021 — Curtis Brent Carico was sentenced to three additional months for arranging to have a magazine with a page soaked in liquid synthetic cannabinoid mailed to him here in January 2020.
• January 2021 — the Bureau posted one news release reporting the death of a person held at FCI Sandstone; the Bureau’s releases are listed on its press release page.
• December 2020 — Bureau data, as reported by WCCO, showed 198 men and 17 staff then positive for COVID-19 and 525 men recovered, against a population of 858: roughly 84 percent of the men held here had contracted the virus.
• Late 2003 — a $20 million project began for a new powerhouse, boiler and water treatment plant, deliberately sited outside the fence so that, as the Bureau’s project representative put it, "in the event of a loss of control of the prison itself, the water and power facilities would not be in the hands of the inmates."
• 1949 to 1959 — the prison was closed and the site used as a mental health hospital before reopening as a federal institution. It had opened in 1939 with a group of men transferred from the U.S. Penitentiary at Leavenworth.

Frequently asked questions about FCI Sandstone

Problems at FCI Sandstone: where we can help

The problems that recur at Sandstone are not the ones that recur at a violent penitentiary. This is a well-staffed, over-capacity, short-stay low with good PREA results and almost no independent oversight, and its own record points at a particular set of fights:

• First Step Act time credits. This institution generated the published Eighth Circuit decision on what those credits require, and a District of Minnesota decision on which credits count at all. After Osorio-Calderon, a petition asking a judge to order a transfer on a date fails in this circuit. What can still be litigated is whether credits were correctly earned and calculated, whether a PATTERN score is right, and whether programming that should have counted was credited.
• Designation and transfer. A man at a Care Level 1 institution whose health declines is reviewed for transfer, often far from the family that moved north for him. Security points, Public Safety Factors and a Management Variable are all arguable. See federal prison transfers.
• RDAP eligibility and the § 3621(e) year, including the local collision between RDAP eligibility and the food service and welding trades — a man cannot have both here.
• Prerelease placement in a halfway house or on home confinement, which for Minnesota runs through RRM Minneapolis. With the average stay here now around 21 months, that early-release planning starts almost on arrival.
• Medical care that is not happening at a prison rated to provide only the routine kind, and, where negligence has caused injury, Federal Tort Claims Act claims.
• Mail and contraband allegations. Two prosecutions here in five years turned on drugs delivered on soaked paper, which means incoming mail is scrutinized and an innocent letter can start an investigation — and with it a disciplinary case with good conduct time at stake and a stay in the Special Housing Unit that runs well past any reason for it.
• Language access. One man in seven here was recorded as limited English proficient at the 2024 audit.
• Compassionate release under the Bureau’s reduction-in-sentence rules, and sentence computation errors.
• Challenges to the conviction or sentence itself, through a direct appeal or a § 2255 motion.

Elizabeth Franklin-Best, P.C. handles federal criminal defense, appeals and post-conviction matters nationwide, and advises families on Bureau of Prisons issues at institutions across the system. Call (843) 620-1100 or contact us to talk through a specific situation.

Christopher Zoukis, JD, MBA, the firm’s Managing Director, writes and maintains the federal prison policy material on this site. He is not counsel of record; legal representation is provided by Elizabeth Franklin-Best.

Sources and currency

Bureau of Prisons documents

• FCI Sandstone, Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2026. The Bureau’s facility page, with address, contact details and population.
• FCI Sandstone Commissary Order Form, Federal Bureau of Prisons, FCI Sandstone, 2025. Prices and category limits.
• Institution Supplement SST-5267.09D, Visiting Regulations, Federal Bureau of Prisons, FCI Sandstone, 2025. Visiting days and hours, the odd/even rotation, visitor limits, dress code, screening, and attorney and SHU visits.
• FCI Sandstone Admissions and Orientation Handbook, Federal Bureau of Prisons, FCI Sandstone, 2021. Daily schedule, counts, housing, commissary, deposits, telephone and TRULINCS hours, education, drug programs, health services, mail and legal activities.
• Trust Fund/Deposit Fund Manual, Program Statement 4500.13, Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2026. Spending limit, holiday increase, exclusions and revalidation.
• Inmate Telephone Regulations, Program Statement 5264.09, Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2026. Replaced Program Statement 5264.08 (2008).
• First Step Act Approved Programs Guide, Federal Bureau of Prisons, Reentry Services Division, 2026. Programs by institution, including the RDAP location list.
• Federal Bureau of Prisons Set to Deactivate Several Facilities, Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2024. Press release.
• Press Releases, Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2021. Includes the January 2021 release reporting a death at FCI Sandstone.

Audits and inspections

• PREA Audit Report: FCI Sandstone, Corrections Consulting Services, 2024. On-site audit of November 19–21, 2024, by Lynni O’Haver; capacity, population, physical plant, staffing and allegation data.
• PREA Audit Report: FCI Sandstone, PREA Auditors of America, 2021. On-site audit of November 16–18, 2021, by Valerie Wolfe Mahfood; superseded by the 2024 audit.
• The Federal Bureau of Prisons’ Reimbursement Rates for Outside Medical Care, U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, 2016. Report 16-04.
• Review of the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ Medical Staffing Challenges, U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, 2016. Report 16-02.

Court records

• Osorio-Calderon v. Warden FCI Sandstone, No. 25-3090 (8th Cir.), U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, 2026. Opinion.
• Cullar v. Warden, FCI Sandstone, No. 0:25-cv-02916 (D. Minn.), U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota, 2026. Docket and order on unearned First Step Act credits and standing.
• Osorio-Calderon v. Warden FCI Sandstone, No. 0:25-cv-00398 (D. Minn.), U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota, 2025. Docket, including the report and recommendation and the order dismissing the petition.
• Federal Prison Inmate Sentenced to 24 Months After Pleading Guilty to Attempting to Obtain Contraband, U.S. Attorney’s Office, District of Minnesota, 2023. Nickolas William Mihelic’s sentence.
• Federal Prison Inmate Sentenced To Additional Prison Time For Attempting To Obtain Contraband, U.S. Attorney’s Office, District of Minnesota, 2021. Curtis Brent Carico’s sentence.

News and other sources

• Fetty Wap Released Early from Federal Prison, CNN, 2026.
• Fetty Wap Released from Prison Early After Serving 3 Years for Drug Trafficking, People, 2026.
• Osorio-Calderon v. Warden, FCI Sandstone, American Civil Liberties Union, 2025. Case page with the procedural history and the amicus brief.
• Duluth prison camp to remain open, reversing earlier decision to ‘deactivate’ the facility, MPR News, 2025.
• Sandstone Prison Welcomes New Warden, Pine County News, 2025.
• Letter from Rep. Pete Stauber to Director Colette S. Peters, Office of Representative Pete Stauber, 2024.
• More Than 80% Of Sandstone Prison Inmates Have Contracted COVID-19, WCCO / CBS Minnesota, 2020.
• New Water Plant among Upgrades at Sandstone Correctional Institution, Minnesota Department of Health, 2006. Waterline, Winter 2005–06; the 1939 opening, the 1949–1959 hospital period and the 2003 water-plant project.
• 18 U.S.C. § 3621(b), (e)(2)(B), Imprisonment of a convicted person, U.S. Code (Legal Information Institute).
• 18 U.S.C. § 3632(d)(4)(C), Development of risk and needs assessment system, U.S. Code (Legal Information Institute).

Sources reviewed September 2026.

Reviewed for legal accuracy by Elizabeth Franklin-Best, Esq., Principal Attorney·September 2026