FCI Pekin Federal Correctional Institution, Illinois

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

FCI Pekin at a glance

FCI Pekin is a medium-security federal prison for men in Pekin, Illinois, with a minimum-security satellite camp next to it that holds women. As of September 2026 the Bureau counted 1,288 people there — 1,058 at the institution and 230 at the camp, which the population report labels “PEKIN-CAMP F.”

Official name	Federal Correctional Institution, Pekin
BOP code	PEK
Security level	Medium; men at the institution, women at the adjacent minimum-security satellite camp
Population	1,288 (as of September 2026) · 1,058 at the FCI, 230 at the camp
Visiting	Saturdays, Sundays and federal holidays · institution 8:15 a.m.–3:00 p.m., camp 8:30 a.m.–3:00 p.m. · see visiting hours
Inmate mail	Institution: Inmate Name & Register Number · FCI Pekin · Federal Correctional Institution · P.O. Box 5000 · Pekin, IL 61555 Camp: Inmate Name & Register Number · FCI Pekin · Federal Correctional Institution · Satellite Camp · P.O. Box 5000 · Pekin, IL 61555
Send money	Lockbox · Western Union (Quick Collect) · MoneyGram
Phone	309-346-8588 · Fax 309-477-4670
Street address	2600 S. Second St., Pekin, IL 61554 · Tazewell County
Judicial district	Central District of Illinois
BOP region	North Central
Housing	Nine multiple-occupancy cell units and two open-bay dormitory units; no single-cell units
Special Housing Unit	Yes · 65 segregation cells, inside the medium-security institution
RDAP	No · not at the institution and not at the camp
UNICOR	Yes · Federal Prison Industries operates at the institution
Camp	Adjacent minimum-security satellite camp for women

It sits in Tazewell County about five miles south of Peoria, in the Bureau’s North Central Region and the Central District of Illinois, and it opened in 1994, on the Pekin Daily Times‘ account — the Bureau publishes no opening date of its own. Pekin’s is the only camp row in the Bureau’s population report that carries that “F.”

FCI Pekin and FPC Pekin: one campus, two prisons

Settle this before anything else, because almost everything that follows turns on it. The Federal Correctional Institution is medium security and holds men; the Federal Prison Camp beside it is minimum security and holds women. They share one post office box, one laundry and one warden, and they differ on visiting hours, commissary stock, screening and what a person may own.

The Bureau says so on its own facility page, which lists the inmate sex as “Male and Female Offenders” and breaks the population into “1,058 Inmates at the FCI” and “230 Inmates at the CAMP F.” That suffix is not decoration: of the sixty Bureau institutions whose population report shows a camp row, Pekin’s is the only one carrying an F.

The camp’s own paperwork says the same from the inside. Its commissary order form for April to June 2025 stocks clasp and compression bras, panty liners, pads, tampons, feminine wash, foundation, mascara, eyeliner, hair dye and relaxer; the institution’s form for January to March 2025 stocks none of them. The January 2023 handbook’s property list uses a color key in which “F = FEMALES ONLY,” and the laundry-bag allowance is “seven underwear, seven bras, seven socks.”

The camp has changed hands twice

This is why the internet is confused about Pekin, and why so many directory pages say the camp holds men. It did, for a while.

The camp opened with the institution in 1994 and held women from the start, under the Bureau’s female offender manual. In March 2011 the Pekin Daily Times, quoting the institution’s executive assistant, reported that “the female inmates will soon leave the prison for other minimum security facilities as the Federal Bureau of Prisons shifts its male population because of an increased need for an in-house drug abuse program for male inmates,” and that the camp “has housed approximately 300 women up until now. The transition will occur in May.” The Bureau’s February 2014 camp handbook shows the result: not one female-specific line in it, and “Kansas Unit” described as “a Residential Drug Abuse Program housing unit.”

Then it changed back. The Inspector General’s September 2018 review of the Bureau’s management of its female inmate population lists Pekin among the Bureau’s facilities holding women, at minimum security, and by the January 2023 revision of the handbook the female property markings and a Preventive Health Program for Women fact sheet are in place while the residential drug program section has gone. No Bureau news release dates the women’s return; the Inspector General’s 2018 review places it in late 2017.

One more thing to discount. BOP’s facility page carries a heading reading “Other facilities at the Pekin Federal Correctional Complex” with nothing underneath it; that is page furniture, not a statement about Pekin, because the Bureau’s roster records no complex code here and the institution and its camp are the only federal facilities on the site. Illinois does have four other federal prisons — MCC Chicago, FCI Greenville, FCI Marion and FCI Thomson — and confusing Pekin with any of them sends mail and money to the wrong place.

What is the security level at FCI Pekin?

The institution is medium security; the camp is minimum security. The 2024 PREA audit records both custody levels — “Minimum, Medium” — for the facility as a whole.

What that means physically is set out in the same audit, the most detailed public description of this plant that exists: twenty-two buildings, no single-cell housing units anywhere, nine multiple-occupancy cell units and two open-bay dormitories — the dormitories being the camp’s Kansas and Nebraska units — and sixty-five segregation cells.

Whether a person lands at the institution or the camp is decided before they arrive, under the Bureau’s security designation rules, by their security point score and by whether any Public Safety Factor applies. A Public Safety Factor overrides the point total: it is what keeps someone out of a camp no matter how low they score. Our guides to the intake process and to preparing for prison cover the first days either way.

The audit also dates the crowding. On the day the auditor arrived, July 23, 2024, the facility held 1,307 people against a designated capacity of 1,208, and the auditor recorded “Yes” to whether it had been over capacity at any point in the previous year.

Who are the notable inmates at FCI Pekin?

Most lists of Pekin’s well-known prisoners are wrong, and two names on almost every one of them left the federal system years ago. Each register number below is recorded so the status can be checked in the locator.

Name	Status on September 15, 2026	Case
Joseph Jerome Miedzianowski	Held at FCI Pekin. Register number 11502-424; projected release recorded as LIFE	A former Chicago police officer convicted of running a drug conspiracy from inside the department’s gang crimes unit
Betty Jo Cooley	Held at FCI Pekin. Register number 46755-511; projected release June 24, 2027	A former Walker County, Alabama corrections officer who pleaded guilty to falsifying records that concealed the assault of a jail inmate
Rita A. Crundwell	Former. Released December 20, 2024; the last facility on her record is the Bureau’s Chicago residential reentry office. Register number 44540-424	The comptroller of Dixon, Illinois, sentenced in 2013 for embezzling roughly $54 million from the city over two decades
John P. Tomkins	Former. Bureau records place him at FCI Thomson, Illinois — not Pekin. Register number 19421-424; projected release November 30, 2038	The machinist convicted as the “Bishop” mail bomber for sending threatening letters and two pipe bombs to investment firms
Shon Hopwood	Former. Released April 9, 2009	Convicted of bank robbery; became a Supreme Court practitioner and law professor after release

Three corrections, because they appear on nearly every other page about this prison. John Tomkins is at FCI Thomson, a different Illinois federal prison with a different address and visiting schedule — the locator shows him at “Thomson FCI,” not “Pekin FCI.” Rita Crundwell is out, and has been since December 2024; the city she stole from is Dixon, not “Petunia City,” which is only Dixon’s nickname. Shon Hopwood has been out since 2009.

How do I find someone at FCI Pekin?

Use the Bureau’s free public Inmate Locator, explained in our guide to the inmate locator. Search by the eight-digit register number if you have it, because it is the reliable key — the locator matches the committed name on the judgment, not the name a family uses. It covers everyone in federal custody since 1982: for someone still held it gives the facility and a projected release date, and for someone released it shows “Not in BOP Custody as of” and a date, with no facility.

The locator shows the prison by its short name and type, and Illinois has several federal prisons. “Pekin FCI” is this one; “Thomson FCI,” “Marion FCI” and “Chicago MCC” are other Illinois institutions, each with its own address. Check any name you do not recognize before addressing an envelope. The locator also does not separate the institution from the camp: a man held at the FCI and a woman held at the camp both show as “Pekin FCI.”

If the locator finds nothing, the usual reasons are state rather than federal custody, pretrial detention under the U.S. Marshals Service, or a committed name that differs from the one you searched. Our guide to how register numbers work explains how the number is built.

How do I write to someone at FCI Pekin?

The institution and the camp use the same post office box, and the only difference is one line. Put the committed name and register number on the first line of every envelope.

For someone at the FCI	For someone at the satellite camp
Inmate Name & Register Number FCI Pekin Federal Correctional Institution P.O. Box 5000 Pekin, IL 61555	Inmate Name & Register Number FCI Pekin Federal Correctional Institution Satellite Camp P.O. Box 5000 Pekin, IL 61555

Note the ZIP. Letters go to 61555, the post office box ZIP; the street address is 61554 and is used for freight, not mail. Sending a letter to the street address is the most common addressing error here.

General correspondence is opened and read under the Bureau’s correspondence rules. At Pekin it is handed out after the 4:00 p.m. count, Monday through Friday, and the handbook is blunt about the condition: “You must be present to receive your mail.” Legal and special mail comes separately, from a Correctional Systems staff member, and is opened only in front of the person it is addressed to — but only if the sender is clearly identified and the front is marked “Special Mail — Open only in the presence of the inmate.” An attorney’s letter without that marking is read like any other. See writing to someone in federal prison and attorney-client communication in the Bureau of Prisons.

On books there is a trap specific to this campus. Hardcover publications and newspapers must come from a publisher, bookstore or book club; softcover books and magazines may come from any source, five per mailing, marked “Books” or “Authorized Reading Material.” But the handbook records what happens when a camp resident is sent to the Special Housing Unit, which is inside the medium-security institution: “all incoming publications will be required to be sent from an authorized source,” because the looser rule does not apply at medium security. A person loses the softcover exception by being moved across the campus. Most often rejected outright: stamps, musical greeting cards, Polaroid photographs, homemade cards that cannot be searched without destroying them, and stickers.

How do I send money to someone at FCI Pekin?

Never to the prison. Pekin’s handbook is explicit: “No monies or checks will be posted to any inmate’s account at this institution… All funds received at the institution will be returned to the sender.” Every route needs the committed name and the eight-digit register number.

Route	Where it goes	How fast it posts
Postal money order, cashier’s check, government or business check	Federal Bureau of Prisons Committed Name Eight-Digit Register Number Post Office Box 474701 Des Moines, Iowa 50947-0001	Processed on arrival. U.S. postal money orders post without a hold; most other instruments carry an automatic 15-day hold. No personal checks and no cash
Western Union Quick Collect	Code city FBOP, DC. Transfers may also be sent from a participating Elektra–Western Union location in Mexico	The Bureau’s Send Money page says two to four hours for a transfer made from 7:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. Eastern (its Trust Fund manual says two hours), with anything later posted by 7:00 a.m. the following day. Pekin’s January 2023 handbook says funds are “placed on an inmate’s account within a few hours of the transaction”
MoneyGram	Receive code 7932, company name Federal Bureau of Prisons, Washington, DC	Comparable to Western Union

Before sending a large sum, know that there is a ceiling on what it can buy: commissary spending is capped at $460 a month under the Bureau’s trust fund rules, Program Statement 4500.13, and money above that sits in the account. Our guide to sending money to a federal prisoner compares every route and its cost.

What are the visiting hours at FCI Pekin?

Saturdays, Sundays and federal holidays. At the institution the room runs 8:15 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.; at the camp it runs 8:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. This is from institution supplement PEK 5267.09P, dated March 20, 2023, which rescinded the July 2012 version; the Bureau’s visiting regulations set the national rules. The body of that supplement states that “the Visiting Room will be closed on Monday through Friday.”

The visitor handout bound into the back of that same supplement, as Attachment 2, contradicts its own body three times. It gives the institution’s schedule as “Saturday, Sunday, Monday and all Federal Holidays,” adding that “visiting on Monday will occur from 1:00 p.m. until 8:00 p.m.” It gives the camp an 8:00 a.m. start rather than 8:30. And where the body says “the FPC and FCI visiting will be regulated by a point system,” the handout says “the FPC does not work on the visiting point system.” All of it is in one document, signed by one warden on one date, and which half controls is not stated. If you are planning a trip around a Monday visit, call 309-346-8588 first.

Whichever schedule is in force, the clock on arrival is strict. No one is allowed onto the grounds before 8:00 a.m.; processing starts at 8:15 and stops at 2:30 p.m., after which only a pre-approved attorney gets in. Arrive after 9:30 a.m. and you wait until the institution count clears, so the supplement tells visitors to be in the lobby by 8:45. Once you leave the visiting room you cannot re-enter that day.

Special Housing Unit visits are not in person at all: TRULINCS video in a designated area of the front lobby, on the regular visiting days, one 30-minute block a day and four visitors.

Who can visit, and how many

• Pekin runs a points system unusually generous by Bureau standards: forty points a month, vested at the start of each month, with one point buying an hour of weekday visiting and two points an hour at a weekend or on a federal holiday. That is twenty weekend hours a month. Unused points do not roll over, and more points require written approval from the Associate Warden for Programs.
• Attorney visits are free of the points system entirely — the supplement puts “free” in quotation marks and says legal visits “will not be charged against the ‘points per month’ limit.”
• Five visitors at one time, counting infants; the Unit Manager can approve more for a long journey or a large family.
• The list should ordinarily hold no more than ten friends and associates, who must have known the person before confinement; immediate family go on from the presentence report for 30 days pending paperwork.
• Children under 16 need not be on the list but must come with an approved adult, and 16- and 17-year-olds may visit alone with written parental approval. Attachment 2 says under 18 rather than under 16 — another of its internal conflicts.
• When the room is crowded visits may be cut to a minimum of one hour, with infrequent visitors and long-distance travelers the last to be terminated.
• Holdovers passing through get four visiting days a month, two of which may fall at a weekend.

One more local rule surprises people every time. Before a kiss at the beginning or end of a visit, “both the visitor and inmate will approach the Officer’s Station in order for the officer to visually inspect the visitor and inmate’s mouth with a flashlight.”

What visitors can wear and bring

Skirts, dresses and shorts must reach the middle of the knee, slits included. Out: halter and strapless tops, tank tops on anyone, sleeveless, transparent or tight clothing, spandex, cut-offs, midriffs, sweats, jeans with holes, jeggings, hats and headbands, open-toed shoes, and any shirt carrying profane or gang material. Out also: military clothing, camouflage and green fatigues — and “no khaki or light brown clothing of any type will be allowed in the visiting room,” because those are the colors that read as institutional.

What you may carry in travels in clear plastic bags, none larger than eighteen inches square: a clear change purse holding no more than $30 or one card, a comb, feminine hygiene items, a coat, one set of car keys, and for an infant bottles, diapers, a small blanket, one set of clothes and vacuum-sealed baby food in its original container. Jewelry may be worn but not carried. Reading matter, photographs, personal papers and all food stay in the car; the vending machines are for visitors only, and anything bought and not eaten is binned before you leave.

Life-maintenance medication is limited, by name, to an epinephrine auto-injector, a prescribed asthma inhaler and nitroglycerin tablets in the prescription bottle, and at the institution the Visiting Room Officer holds them. “Diabetic medication, needles and syringes are not considered life maintenance medications and must be stored securely in the visitor’s vehicle.” A diabetic visitor planning a six-hour visit has to plan around that sentence.

Photographs are available — the person inside buys a ticket at the commissary and an inmate photographer takes the picture on a visiting day — but never of two prisoners together.

Identification and screening

Everyone 16 and over needs a valid photo ID, and screening is where the two prisons diverge most sharply. At the institution, visitors and their property pass metal detection and x-ray screening and face random trace drug detection and same-sex pat searches, hand-stamped and checked under black light three times between the sallyport and the exit. At the camp, visitors “may be randomly screened using the hand-held metal detector.” Refusing any search means leaving, and coming back needs the Associate Warden’s approval.

See the Bureau’s search rules and our guides to searches, shakedowns and contraband and federal prison visitation.

The person you are visiting is screened harder than you are. At the institution they change in the shakedown room into a uniform issued for the purpose — the supplement specifies yellow jumpsuit, T-shirt, socks, boxers and slide shoes — and may carry in only a comb, a handkerchief, a wedding band, a religious medallion, religious headgear and one pair of glasses. They are visually searched before and after and randomly sent for a SecurePass body scan. Camp residents wear their own issued clothing and are pat searched instead.

For lawyers: an attorney visit is arranged with the Unit Team at least 24 hours ahead, in writing, and needs a current license, the front-lobby logbook and Attachment 1 to the supplement, a “Certification for Licensed Attorney.” Legal papers carried into the room need Attachment 5, signed by the Unit Manager, and are searched twice.

Getting to FCI Pekin

The supplement’s own directions put the institution “on Route 29 south, approximately 5 miles south of Peoria, IL; 2½ hours southwest of Chicago, IL and 3 hours northeast of St. Louis, MO,” 70 miles north of Springfield and five miles from Interstate 74. The physical address is 2600 South Second Street.

Without a car: commercial air through Peoria, Trailways buses to Peoria, and Amtrak at Chillicothe, 15 miles away, or Bloomington, 60 miles away. The supplement also lists a local taxi company and the Pekin city bus line.

How do phone calls and email work at FCI Pekin?

Calls go out, never in, to an approved list of up to thirty numbers changed through TRULINCS once a month. The Bureau-wide allowance is 510 minutes a calendar month under the telephone regulations, Program Statement 5264.09, issued September 3, 2026 — 300 free to anyone eligible for First Step Act telephone incentives, and anyone, eligible or not, may buy the other 210 after using up the first 300. A single call should generally not exceed 15 minutes. The holiday minutes older sources describe went with the 2008 policy 5264.09 rescinded, and properly arranged unmonitored legal calls do not count against the 510.

Pekin’s handbook still prints the old national figure — “300 minutes per month” — and gives two different closing times in two sections. The unit rules put the phones at 6:00 to 7:30 a.m., 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. and 4:30 to 9:15 p.m. on weekdays and 6:00 a.m. to 9:15 p.m. on weekends, with one telephone available throughout; the trust fund section of the same handbook says 6:00 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. daily. On the minutes the program statement controls; on the hours, only the institution can say.

Calls stop fifteen minutes before every official count, and there are six of those a day. Prepaid accounts run through Value Added Communications on (800) 913-6097, opened from outside, and credit is refunded only on release, on transfer, or when privileges are restricted for more than 60 days. See our guide to federal inmate phone calls.

An unmonitored call with a lawyer is not routine here. The handbook sets the test: such calls “should be allowed only when an inmate demonstrates that communication with their attorney by other means is not adequate: for example, when the inmate or attorney can demonstrate an imminent court deadline,” and staff will first ask whether marked legal mail, TRULINCS or a legal visit has been tried. The request goes to the assigned Counselor and the person inside pays for the call, so put the deadline in the request, in writing.

Electronic messaging runs on TRULINCS, reached from outside through CorrLinks: text only, charged by the message, and nothing passes until the person inside adds your address. Email with a lawyer is not privileged, so privileged writing goes by marked special mail. At Pekin the same system carries the daily call-outs, posted before the 4:00 p.m. count, and missing one is an incident report under the Bureau’s discipline program. Our page on CorrLinks and TRULINCS explains the costs.

What can people buy at the FCI Pekin commissary?

Different things, depending on which side of the campus they are on. Pekin publishes two separate order forms, and reading them side by side is the clearest picture there is of how the institution and the camp differ.

Start with the money. The national ceiling is $460 a month, set by Program Statement 4500.13, the Trust Fund/Deposit Fund Manual, dated May 7, 2026, which records in its own change log that it raised the limit from $360. It rises by $50 during the November and December holiday period, for no more than one validation period. Postage stamps, copy cards, over-the-counter medications and vitamins, footwear, mattresses and secured media devices are excluded from the limit.

Pekin’s own handbook, revised in January 2023, sets it out differently: “The spending limit is $180.00 per bi-weekly and will be re-validated on the 1st and 15th day of the month.” That is a permitted local arrangement — the national manual says revalidation happens monthly “except where weekly or bi-weekly validation is used” — but $180 a fortnight was written against the old $360 ceiling. Neither Pekin order form prints a dollar figure at all, so the current per-period number is a question for the unit team, and any source saying the limit here is $360 a month is quoting a figure the Bureau replaced in May 2026.

Here is what the two forms stock. The institution’s list is dated January to March 2025 and signed by Warden D. Alatary; the camp’s is dated April to June 2025, updated March 10, 2025, and signed by the same name as Acting Warden.

	FCI list (Jan–Mar 2025)	Camp list (Apr–Jun 2025)
Personal care	Barbasol, Magic Shave, Bump Stopper, afro pick, doo-rag, club brush	Foundation, loose powder, blush, mascara, liquid and pencil eyeliner, eye shadow, make-up brushes, lip gloss, tweezers, emery boards, cosmetic bag
Hygiene	No feminine products listed	Panty liners, ultra-thin pads, tampons, feminine wash, Midol
Underwear	Boxer briefs, one per package, limit 1	Briefs in two size ranges; clasp bra $16.95 and compression bra $16.05, limit 2 of each
Hair	VO5, Dove, Shea, Sulfur 8, Murray’s beeswax, Magic Gro	All of the above plus hair dye in black, light brown, dark brown and blonde, auburn dye, Optimum Relaxer, Pink Moisturizer, Cantu taming gel, edge control, bonnet, jaw clips, foam curlers, heat tamer
Legal work	Typewriter ribbon $15.60, correction tape $3.05, typing paper 100-sheet $1.70	None of these
Tablet	Score 7 tablet $137.30	Score 7 tablet $137.80
Radio, watches, shoes	Sangean SR-35CL $32.50; Timex $21.95; G-Shock $99.95; athletic and shower shoes on the main sheet	Diamond radio $29.95; Timex Marathon $24.70; G-Shock $99.45; shoes “Available by Copout Only” — white athletic $59.80, black athletic $70.20, brown boots $99.45
Soda and hobby	Four 12-pack sodas at $6.05, water $0.65; workout gloves, racquetballs	Diet Pepsi 12-pack only; water $0.70; crochet hooks $6.10
Category caps	Soups 24 total; chips 6; coffee and cocoa 6; ice cream 1; fragrance 1; deodorant 1	Candy bars 10 total; snacks 12; cereal 3; chips 6; coffee and cocoa 4; ice cream 2; fragrance 2; deodorant 2; vitamins 2 each
Meat and fish caps	Mostly 3 or 6 per item	Mostly 6 or 7 per item — summer sausage, chicken, spam, mackerel and carnitas all 7

Typewriter ribbons and correction tape are stocked at the institution and not at the camp, and the education department keeps electric typewriters for which the ribbon has to be bought at commissary — which tells you how legal work still gets done on that side of the campus. And the camp’s form carries a line at the top the institution’s does not: “Work Detail (6:15 Shop Only),” an early shopping slot for women whose details start before the ordinary window.

The camp’s list is about to change. The same May 7, 2026 manual that raised the ceiling to $460 added, in its own words, “verbiage for a standardized female specific commissary list,” and requires every institution housing women to implement one. It lifted the maximum price for athletic shoes, work shoes and watches from $100 to $150 — Pekin’s camp brown boots and G-Shock both sit at $99.45, right under the old cap — and tightened hair dye, limiting sales to female institutions at low security or above with a cosmetology program and requiring an Education-signed form naming the buyer’s natural color, with the product stored by Education until used.

The shopping rules are unforgiving and identical on both forms. One day a week, set by housing unit or work assignment, no exceptions; miss your place in the line and “you void the opportunity for general purchase”; no additions or substitutions once the form is in; “ALL SALES ARE FINAL!” The camp commissary opens Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, with Thursday open to everyone for shoes, radios, Special Purchase Orders, over-the-counter medicines and hobbycraft only, and both stores close for inventory in March and September. Our page on the federal prison commissary covers the national rules.

What programs are available at FCI Pekin?

Drug treatment, and the RDAP that is not here

There is no Residential Drug Abuse Program at FCI Pekin or at its camp. That matters, because completing RDAP under the Bureau’s RDAP rules can take up to a year off a sentence under 18 U.S.C. § 3621(e) for people convicted of non-violent offenses, and a designation to a prison without one is a designation away from that.

The Bureau’s August 2026 First Step Act Approved Programs Guide carries its RDAP location list at page 29, dated June 4, 2026 and headed “57 RDAPS at 50 Locations.” Pekin is not on it, and is not marked for RDAP in the guide’s by-institution matrix either. Fifty-eight facility codes appear in one half of the guide or the other; Illinois’ FCI Greenville and FCI Marion are among them and Pekin is not. The handbook agrees by omission: the February 2014 edition carries a full Residential Drug Abuse Program section describing Kansas Unit as the treatment unit, and the 2023 revision has deleted it.

That absence has a history: the camp’s male population arrived in 2011 precisely so the Bureau could open a men’s residential drug program here, the women came back later, and the program did not stay. If RDAP is the point of a designation, it is a transfer question, not a Pekin question, and it needs raising early.

What is here is the non-residential track. Drug Education runs 12 to 15 hours and is mandatory where the record shows drug involvement in the offense, a supervised-release violation, a judicial recommendation or a history of use; refusing it costs performance pay, bonus pay and eligibility for a Federal Prison Industries job. The Non-Residential Drug Abuse Treatment Program runs up to 24 sessions and pays up to $30 on completion. Both are entered by written request to Psychology Services.

Education and vocational training

Pekin is an official GED testing center, and the literacy requirement bites: no one is approved to withdraw voluntarily before completing 240 instructional hours, and withdrawing after that — or being found guilty of an education-related disciplinary offense — produces an unsatisfactory-progress assignment that costs the maximum good conduct time. The gate to the exam is the GED Ready test at 145 in each subject, and the GED itself requires 145 in each of math, science, social studies and language arts.

Vocational training requires a diploma or GED, a year of clear conduct and enough time left to finish. The two courses named in the January 2023 handbook are Computer Applications and Material Handling Industry. The older camp handbook named two that no longer appear: a Certified Associate Addictions Professional program leading to an Illinois state credential, and horticulture run through a local community college for credit. See our guides to prison education and vocational training.

The law library sits in the education department, open daily 7:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. and 5:00 to 8:30 p.m. Federal case law is on TRULINCS terminals there, the copy machine takes a commissary copy card, and the electric typewriters need a ribbon bought at the commissary. Pekin publishes no institution supplement on legal activities, which is the Bureau’s norm rather than a Pekin failing: of the 118 institution pages, 104 offer only the national Program Statement 1315.08 under that heading and 14 a supplement of their own. Local practice here therefore comes from the handbook and from Education staff.

UNICOR at FCI Pekin

Federal Prison Industries operates at Pekin under the Bureau’s work and pay rules, and both halves of the August 2026 program guide agree on that, which is not true of every facility. The Inspector General’s audit of FPI’s fiscal year 2019 financial statements records that it “opened and/or expanded 6 operations located at FCI Pekin, FCI Tallahassee, FCC Yazoo City, FCI Terminal Island, FCC Allenwood, and USP Atlanta” that year.

The January 2023 handbook prints the factory day: work call at 6:50 a.m., clean-up and shakedown at 10:45, lunch at 11:00, back on the floor at 11:40, the shift ending at 2:15 p.m. and release to the units at 2:30. “The workday is 35.00 hours per week.” Pay runs from Grade 5 at $0.23 an hour to Premium grade at $1.35, which the handbook works out as $198.45 a month, with longevity adding ten cents an hour after 18 months and rising to thirty after 84. Hiring is from two waiting lists, and someone who has worked for FPI before goes to the bottom of the Prior list.

In February 2014 the same factory ran 37.5 hours a week and Premium grade paid $212.63 a month. The shorter week costs the top grade about $14 a month.

Women’s programming, faith and reentry

The August 2026 program guide’s narrative half — the part that controls, because it is each program’s own statement of where it runs — names FCI Pekin for three things: Federal Prison Industries, Post-Secondary Education, and the RESOLVE Program, a trauma treatment program that the guide lists at men’s and women’s institutions alike. On the post-secondary entry the guide is more specific than it looks: it permits college coursework at any institution, but names only sixteen sites — Pekin among them — as offering post-secondary programs funded by Pell grants. The guide’s by-institution grid marks Pekin for a much longer list of women-specific programming: Assert Yourself for Female Offenders, Square One, Women’s Lifeskills, Women’s Career Skills and Career Exploration, Women’s Basic Financial Literacy, Women in the 21st Century Workplace, Women’s Relationships I and II, Women’s Reflections Group, Women’s Sexual Safety, Women’s Aging, the Survivor Therapy Empowerment Program, Trauma Education, and Seeking Safety and Seeking Strength — along with Threshold, Foundation, anger management, criminal thinking, dialectical behavior therapy, the national parenting program and apprenticeship training.

One entry in the guide disagrees with itself about Pekin. The Life Connections Program, the Bureau’s residential faith-based program, has a narrative cell naming five institutions — FMC Carswell, FCI Fort Dix, FCI Greenville, FCI Milan and USP Terre Haute — and Pekin is not among them; the by-institution grid in the same document marks Pekin for it. Where the two halves conflict the named list controls, so the better reading is that Life Connections does not run here. Both readings sit in one Bureau document, and the answer either way comes from the unit team in writing.

Religious Services holds organized services for most major faiths, with contract clergy and approved volunteers assisting the chaplains. The handbook’s authorized religious property list is unusually broad — phylacteries, prayer beads and feathers, prayer oils, a prayer rug and shawl, rosaries, rune cards, tarot cards, scapulars, a Torah, a chapel turban, a wood wand and yarmulkes — which matters at a prison the 2024 audit records as having no volunteers on site at all.

A note on First Step Act programming generally. The guide lists what is approved to be offered. Approval is not delivery, and whether a class is running this month is a question for the unit team — at Pekin with a documented reason to ask, because staff told the Inspector General in 2025 that vacancies had stopped a different scheduled program here altogether.

What is daily life like at FCI Pekin?

The day below comes from the Admission and Orientation handbook revised in January 2023. Read it as the shape of the day rather than a guarantee; schedules change, and this one describes the camp most closely.

	Weekdays	Weekends and holidays
Official counts	Midnight, 3:00 a.m. and 5:00 a.m. in your room; 4:00 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. standing, plus 10:00 a.m. standing on weekends and on holidays. Daily census counts on top of those
Breakfast and lunch	6:20 a.m. and 11:00 a.m.	Brunch after the 10:00 a.m. count clears
Dinner	After the 4:00 p.m. count clears
Uniform required	6:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m., spruce-green shirt and pants outside the unit, shirt tucked in	—
Sick call sign-up	7:00 a.m., Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays only	None
Pill and insulin line	6:00 – 6:15 a.m. and 2:45 – 3:00 p.m.
Telephones	6:00 – 7:30 a.m., 10:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m., 4:30 – 9:15 p.m.	6:00 a.m. – 9:15 p.m.
Library	7:30 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. and 5:00 – 8:30 p.m.
Recreation yard and gym	6:30 a.m. – 3:30 p.m., 4:30 p.m. – dusk or 8:30 p.m.	6:30 – 9:30 a.m., 10:30 a.m. – 3:30 p.m., 4:30 p.m. – dusk or 8:30 p.m.
Mail and call-outs	Mail after the 4:00 p.m. count, and you must be present; call-outs posted on TRULINCS before it	—

Source: FCI Pekin Admission & Orientation Handbook, revised January 2023.

Housing at the camp is two units, Kansas and Nebraska, with rooms furnished to a fixed list: a wall locker, chair, mattress and bulletin board each, one desk, one trash can. Gray boxes are issued for current-case legal material and kept by the Counselor; everything else lives in the locker, and everyone in a room is mutually responsible for anything found in it.

Laundry at the camp is exacting about method: uniform on one loop, institution T-shirts on a second, commissary clothing on a third, and only personal items in the bag — one pillowcase, two towels, two face cloths, seven underwear, seven bras, seven socks. Anything laundered any other way “is subject to confiscation.” Kansas washes Mondays and Thursdays, Nebraska Tuesdays and Fridays, linen Wednesdays.

Sick call is sign-up in person at 7:00 a.m. on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays — none on Wednesdays, on weekends or on holidays — and arriving after the move closes means not being seen. Dental sick call is Fridays at 7:30 a.m. Routine eye examinations come every two years, glasses are made by Federal Prison Industries at FCI Butner, and the handbook warns that “Health Services will not replace lost, broken, stolen, or mistreated eyeglasses until the next routine eye exam.” The Bureau’s patient care rules set what is owed, and our guide to medical care in federal prison covers how to escalate when a request goes unanswered.

Recreation covers yards with basketball, handball and volleyball courts, softball fields and a soccer and flag-football field, with billiard tables and table tennis indoors. The February 2014 handbook described “weight training equipment”; the 2023 revision drops the word weight.

What do inspectors say about conditions at FCI Pekin?

The DOJ Office of the Inspector General has not conducted an on-site inspection of this facility. Its staff have nonetheless been here, and two Bureau-wide products drew on this prison directly — once in a way that should worry anyone with a family member here who needs a doctor. The District of Columbia’s Corrections Information Council has never inspected Pekin. That leaves the Prison Rape Elimination Act audit as the only recurring independent look at this place, and it examines one subject.

The 2025 colorectal cancer screening finding

In May 2025 the Inspector General published an evaluation of the Bureau’s colorectal cancer screening practices and used FCI Pekin as its worked example of a facility where the system had stopped functioning:

Health Services employees at Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) Pekin in Illinois told the OIG that prior to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic the facility ran monthly preventive health clinics, which allowed Health Services employees to offer CRC screening alongside other annual screenings, such as for tuberculosis. However, employee vacancies have rendered FCI Pekin unable to offer preventive health clinics. Instead, the Clinical Director (CD) assumed responsibility for CRC screening, by monitoring the CRC Screening Dashboard and ordering screening for inmates as needed, until departing FCI Pekin to take another role. At the time of our fieldwork, interviewees reported that FCI Pekin no longer had a consistent CRC screening process.

U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, Evaluation of the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ Colorectal Cancer Screening Practices for Inmates and Its Clinical Follow-up on Screenings (Report 25-057, May 20, 2025)

The numbers behind that paragraph are in the report’s Table 12, from April 2024 data. Of 417 people at Pekin in the average-risk age band, 60 percent had a current screening offer on record, 68 percent of those offered refused, and 19 percent had a current screening. The report sets that against FCI La Tuna in Texas, where screening is a shared responsibility across several staff who monitor the dashboard, call patients in, counsel them and chase unreturned samples: 97 percent offered, 3 percent refusing, 94 percent screened. Bureau-wide, about 27 percent of those offered screening between April 2023 and April 2024 refused.

Read the three figures together and they describe two failures: a screening that is not consistently offered, and a screening most of the people offered it turn down. The second is not solved by hiring. It is solved by somebody having the conversation the La Tuna model builds in, and the Inspector General’s own explanation for why Pekin could not do that is vacancies.

The other visit was quieter. For its July 2021 audit of the Bureau’s chaplaincy services program the Inspector General selected twelve institutions and visited all of them before February 2020, Pekin among them. The findings are Bureau-wide — a chaplaincy too small and too narrow in its faith representation — and the report makes no finding about Pekin in particular.

The 2024 PREA audit

FCI Pekin was audited under the Prison Rape Elimination Act on site from July 23–25, 2024 by Lynni O’Haver, an independent auditor subcontracted by PREA Auditors of America. The final report is dated August 23, 2024 and runs to 178 pages. The facility passed — 45 standards met, none exceeded, none unmet, no corrective action — and the auditor recorded that she had access to all areas of the facility.

The Bureau posted that report on September 20, 2024, and the posting date is where the confusion starts, because the file is called pek_prea_092024.pdf and the date inside it is August. Cite the dates on page one, not the filename. Be careful for a second reason too: the older audit is still live at the conventional address pek_prea.pdf and returns a working file. That is a different audit by a different auditor — Karen Murray, on site September 21–23, 2021 — describing a different prison, with separate capacities of 716 at the institution and 256 at the camp. It has been superseded.

The 2024 audit is also the fullest public description of who is held here. On the first day of the audit the facility held 1,307 people.

Buildings	22
Housing	No single-cell units anywhere; nine multiple-occupancy cell units and two open-bay dormitories
Segregation cells	65
Designated capacity	1,208, against 1,338 held at the time of the audit
Average daily population, prior 12 months	1,293, with the facility over capacity at some point in that year
Age range and length of stay	20 to 90; an average stay of 535 days, on 1,371 admissions in the prior year
Staff who may have inmate contact	243, of whom 36 were hired in the prior 12 months
Contractors / volunteers on site	14 / 0
Accreditation	American Correctional Association only — not NCCHC, not CALEA

Zero volunteers with inmate contact, at a prison whose chaplaincy depends on volunteers, is a real constraint on what can be offered. And the accreditation line is narrower than it looks: the American Correctional Association accredits operations, and the absence of National Commission on Correctional Health Care accreditation means health services here carry no independent clinical accreditation at all.

Of the 1,307 people recorded on day one, 88 had disclosed prior sexual victimization at risk screening, 45 identified as transgender or intersex, 32 were limited English proficient and 59 had a cognitive or functional disability. No one was held in segregated housing either for risk of sexual victimization or for having reported abuse — which, given the alternative, is the right answer.

One figure in the audit is not a Pekin figure. The form records 253 investigators responsible for administrative investigations into sexual abuse; that number appears in other institutions’ audits too. The local figure that matters sits beside it: zero investigators employed for criminal investigations, which are referred out to a Justice Department component.

Sexual abuse allegations, 2020 to 2024

In the twelve months before the July 2024 audit the facility received 20 allegations of sexual abuse — 13 naming another prisoner, 7 naming staff — and two of sexual harassment. One criminal investigation was opened and 20 administrative investigations completed. Of the inmate-on-inmate allegations, two closed as unfounded, ten as unsubstantiated and one as substantiated. All seven staff-on-inmate allegations closed as unfounded.

A longer series comes from the Government Accountability Office, which published per-institution counts in May 2026. At Pekin, allegations naming another incarcerated person ran 1 in 2020, 7 in 2021, 7 in 2022, 9 in 2023 and 16 in 2024 — 40 in all, counted by the year the incident occurred. Allegations naming a Bureau employee ran 1, 1, 6, 11 and 14 across the same years, 33 in all, counted by the year the allegation was reported.

Four cautions travel with those numbers and none is optional. They are reported allegations, not findings. Nationally, most from 2014 through 2022 closed as unsubstantiated, which means the evidence did not settle the question either way, not that the report was false. The two sets come from different Bureau systems with different cut-off dates, so they cannot be added together. And the Government Accountability Office does not adjust for population anywhere in its report, so these counts cannot rank one prison against another: a large prison out-counts a small one at identical risk, and a low count can equally mean no one is reporting.

Staffing and retention pay

In February 2025 the Bureau told roughly 23,000 employees that their retention incentives would be cut or ended from March 23. Corrections1, reporting Forbes and Government Executive, published the mechanism: bonuses were halved everywhere except at institutions that had reached 95 percent staffing for correctional officers or overall in the first pay period of the year, and those seven lost their retention bonuses entirely. Pekin was one of the seven, with MDC Los Angeles, FCI Mendota, USP Atwater, FDC Miami, FCI Otisville and FCI Sheridan.

Hold that next to the Inspector General’s finding three months later, that “employee vacancies have rendered FCI Pekin unable to offer preventive health clinics.” Both are true, because they measure different staff: the 95 percent that cost Pekin its retention pay is a correctional-officer and overall headcount, while the vacancies that stopped the clinics are in Health Services. A prison can be fully posted on the compound and short of a clinician at the same time, and for a family the consequence is the same either way — staffing is why a call-out is canceled, a program has a waiting list, or a visit is cut to the one-hour minimum.

FCI Pekin in the news

Recent news about FCI Pekin centers on contraband prosecutions, a manslaughter indictment over a death in custody, and the loss of staff retention pay; older items concern a disturbance that closed visiting and the camp’s change of mission. Items are newest first.

• July 2026 — Joseph Nichols, 42, was sentenced to an additional 48 months, consecutive, for two counts of possessing contraband in prison after a razor blade and child sexual abuse material were found inside a prison-issued hearing-aid case bearing his name, in a case worked by the institution’s Special Investigative Services with the FBI (U.S. Attorney, Central District of Illinois).
• May 2025 — a federal grand jury in Peoria indicted Nestor Lugo, 32, a former Pekin prisoner, on one count of voluntary manslaughter over the death of a fellow prisoner on November 6, 2023, alleging he “upon a sudden quarrel and heat of passion, knowingly did kill” the victim “by beating him to death.” Bureau records now place Lugo at the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri.
• February 2025 — FCI Pekin was named one of seven Bureau institutions to lose retention bonuses entirely, having reached 95 percent staffing in the first pay period of the year.
• 2024 and 2025 — three further prosecutions: Travis Jay Nyhoff sentenced to 33 months for aggravated battery after breaking another prisoner’s jaw, Darell Reed to 15 months for possession of a prohibited object, and a former officer, Daniel Scott, convicted on two counts of possessing child pornography. (U.S. Attorney’s Office, C.D. Ill.; DOJ Office of the Inspector General.)
• November 2023 — David Tran, 67, died at the institution. Officials attributed the death at the time to a “perceived altercation” with another prisoner. (WMBD.)
• October 2018 — the institution stopped admitting visitors after a group of prisoners became disruptive. No staff were hurt and some prisoners had minor injuries; visiting continued as normal at the camp throughout. (WMBD.)
• December 2015 — a former Pekin correctional officer pleaded guilty to bribery, admitting she had supplied contraband tobacco and a cellular telephone to a prisoner between August and December 2013. (U.S. Attorney’s Office, Central District of Illinois.)
• March 2011 — the Pekin Daily Times reported that the camp’s roughly 300 women would transfer out that May so the Bureau could open an in-house drug abuse program for men, ending seventeen years of the camp holding women. The same article described what the camp’s residents did outside the fence: training abandoned dogs for the Tazewell Animal Protective Society, raising seedlings for two park districts and county 4-H, and staffing the Salvation Army’s Christmas toy shop.

Frequently asked questions about FCI Pekin

Problems at FCI Pekin: where we can help

The problems that recur here are visible in this prison’s own record. These are the ones families at Pekin call about:

• Preventive and routine medical care that is not happening. Staff told the Inspector General for its May 2025 evaluation that vacancies had ended the monthly preventive health clinics here and that the facility “no longer had a consistent CRC screening process.” The route is a written request to Health Services, then the administrative remedy process — the BP-9 and the appeals above it — and where an untreated condition has caused injury a Federal Tort Claims Act claim.
• Designation to the wrong side of the campus. Whether someone is at the institution or the camp turns on security points, Public Safety Factors and a Management Variable, all three of which are arguable. See our guide to designation and to federal prison transfers.
• Transfer where RDAP is the point. Pekin runs no residential drug program, so a sentencing recommendation for treatment cannot be honored here. The question is a redesignation question and the timing is everything. See our RDAP advocacy.
• First Step Act time credits and program access — whether credits are being earned, calculated and applied, and whether a program the guide lists as approved is actually running. Pekin’s own record shows the gap: the guide’s two halves disagree about whether Life Connections runs here at all. See our First Step Act credit reviews, our guide to challenging a sentence computation and the Bureau’s sentence computation rules.
• Sexual abuse and harassment reporting. Twenty allegations in the year to July 2024, seven naming staff and all seven closed as unfounded, at a prison where 88 people had disclosed prior victimization at screening. Reports go to any staff member, to the Bureau’s hotline or through a third party.
• Disciplinary proceedings that threaten good conduct time, and SHU placements that outlast their justification, including protective custody. Pekin’s Special Housing Unit sits inside the medium-security institution, so a camp resident sent there loses camp visiting, camp screening and the softcover publication rule at once.
• Visiting decisions: only the Warden can restore a visitor removed after an incident, on a written memorandum through the Associate Warden.
• Release that is not moving: halfway house and home confinement placement under the Bureau’s halfway house placement procedures, arranged by the reentry office for the district of release (RRM Chicago for the Central and Northern Districts of Illinois, RRM St. Louis for the Southern), and compassionate release under its reduction-in-sentence procedures.
• 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 Pekin, Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2026. Address, contact details, population, mailing block and posted documents.
• FPC Pekin Commissary List, Federal Bureau of Prisons, FCI Pekin, 2025. The camp list, April to June 2025.
• FCI Pekin Commissary Order Form, Federal Bureau of Prisons, FCI Pekin, 2025. The institution list, January to March 2025.
• Visiting Regulations, Institution Supplement PEK 5267.09P, Federal Bureau of Prisons, FCI Pekin, 2023. Schedule, the visiting points system, dress code, screening, attorney visits and directions; rescinded IS PEK 5267.08N (2012).
• FCI Pekin Admission and Orientation Handbook, Federal Bureau of Prisons, FCI Pekin, 2023. Counts, housing, laundry, mail, telephone, commissary, education, UNICOR and health services.
• FPC Pekin Admission and Orientation Handbook, Federal Bureau of Prisons, FCI Pekin, 2014. The earlier edition, written while the camp held men.
• Inmate Legal Activities, Program Statement 1315.08, Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2026. Linked from Pekin’s facility page in place of a local supplement.
• Trust Fund/Deposit Fund Manual, Program Statement 4500.13, Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2026. The $460 spending limitation and its exclusions, bi-weekly validation, the standardized female-specific commissary list, maximum selling prices and hair dye.
• Inmate Telephone Regulations, Program Statement 5264.09, Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2026. Replaced Program Statement 5264.08 (2008).
• Community Corrections Center (CCC) Utilization and Transfer Procedure, Program Statement 7310.04, Federal Bureau of Prisons, 1998. Referral through the community corrections manager, and the district of release.
• First Step Act Approved Programs Guide, Federal Bureau of Prisons, Reentry Services Division, 2026. August 2026 edition; the RDAP locations list, Life Connections, RESOLVE, post-secondary education and the by-institution matrix.
• Send Money, Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2026. Lockbox, Western Union and MoneyGram routes, holds and posting times.
• Find an Inmate, Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2026.
• RRM Chicago, Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2026. The judicial districts this reentry office serves.
• RRM St. Louis, Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2026. The judicial districts this reentry office serves.

Audits and inspections

• Federal Prisons: Improvements Needed to Prevent, Detect, and Address Sexual Abuse (GAO-26-107343), U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2026. Per-institution allegation counts for 2020 through 2024.
• Evaluation of the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ Colorectal Cancer Screening Practices for Inmates and Its Clinical Follow-up on Screenings (Report 25-057), U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, 2025. FCI Pekin as the worked example, and the comparison with FCI La Tuna.
• PREA Audit Report: FCI Pekin, Lynni O’Haver, PREA Auditors of America, 2024. Final report of August 23, 2024; site visit July 23–25, 2024. Capacity, population, physical plant, staffing and allegation data.
• PREA Audit Report: Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) Pekin, Karen Murray, PREA Auditors of America, 2021. Superseded, and still served at the conventional filename.
• Audit of the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ Management and Oversight of its Chaplaincy Services Program (Report 21-091), U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, 2021. Pekin among the twelve institutions visited.
• Audit of the Federal Prison Industries, Inc. Annual Financial Statements, Fiscal Year 2019 (Report 20-018), U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, 2019. The operations opened or expanded at FCI Pekin that year.
• Review of the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ Management of Its Female Inmate Population (Report 18-05), U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, 2018. Pekin among the facilities holding women, and the late-2017 conversion.

Court records

• Convicted Sex Offender Receives an Additional 48 Month Sentence for Possession of Contraband in Prison, U.S. Attorney’s Office, Central District of Illinois, 2026. Joseph Nichols’s sentence.
• Federal Prisoner Sentenced to Additional Prison Term for Possession of Contraband, U.S. Attorney’s Office, Central District of Illinois, 2025. Darell Reed’s sentence.
• Federal Inmate Sentenced to 33 Months in Prison for Breaking Fellow Inmate’s Jaw, U.S. Attorney’s Office, Central District of Illinois, 2025. Travis Jay Nyhoff’s sentence.
• Former Federal Correctional Officer Pleads Guilty to Bribery, U.S. Attorney’s Office, Central District of Illinois, 2015.

News and other sources

• Former Inmate Faces Manslaughter Charge in FCI Pekin Death, WMBD, 2025. Nestor Lugo’s indictment.
• BOP Slashes Retention Bonuses, Impacting Thousands of Correctional Officers, Corrections1, 2025. The seven institutions that lost retention pay outright.
• FCI Pekin Closes to Visitors After Disruption, WMBD, 2018.
• Prison Community Service to Expand, Sharon Woods Harris, Pekin Daily Times, 2011. The camp’s 2011 change of mission and the work its residents did outside the fence; the link is the Internet Archive’s copy.
• 18 U.S.C. § 3621(e), Imprisonment of a convicted person, U.S. Code (Legal Information Institute).

Sources reviewed September 2026.

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