USP Allenwood: Visiting, Programs and Inmate Info

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

USP Allenwood at a glance

USP Allenwood is a high-security federal penitentiary for men on U.S. Route 15 in Union County, Pennsylvania, holding 351 people as of September 2026. It is one of three prisons at the Allenwood Federal Correctional Complex, with FCI Allenwood Low and FCI Allenwood Medium, and each of its four housing units is a program unit.

Official name	United States Penitentiary, Allenwood
BOP code	ALP · complex ALX
Security level	High; men
Population	351 (as of September 2026)
Visiting	Saturday, Sunday, and federal holidays, 8:00 a.m.–3:00 p.m.
Inmate mail	Committed Name and Register Number · United States Penitentiary Allenwood · P.O. Box 3000 · White Deer, Pennsylvania 17887
Send money	Lockbox · Western Union (code city FBOP, DC) · MoneyGram (receive code 7932)
Phone	570-547-0963 · Fax 570-547-9201
Street address	Route 15, two miles north of Allenwood, Allenwood, PA 17810 · Union County
Judicial district	Middle District of Pennsylvania
BOP region	Northeast
Designated capacity	252
Housing	Four program units; no general population unit
Special Housing Unit	Yes
Medical care level	2 or 3 · see the four units
Mental health care level	3
RDAP	No
UNICOR	Closed · see education, vocational training, and UNICOR
Camp	None

The penitentiary is one of the federal prisons in Pennsylvania and belongs to the Bureau’s Northeast Region, and it is not like the other fourteen federal penitentiaries. When the District of Columbia’s prison inspectors toured it in January 2024, they recorded four housing units — a Transitional Care Unit, a Secure Mental Health Step-Down unit, and two Reintegration Units — and wrote that the place “is unique in that each housing unit is programmatic; there are no general population housing units.” The population had been cut deliberately to make room for a mental-health mission, and a penitentiary built for more than a thousand men now runs at a quarter of that.

Three Allenwood prisons, three codes, and no camp

USP Allenwood is the high-security prison of the three that share the complex, and the Bureau’s records tell them apart by three-letter codes; mixing them up sends mail to the wrong post office box and a family to the wrong gate.

Code	Prison	Security	Town on the roster	Population	Inmate mail box
ALP	USP Allenwood (this page)	High	Allenwood	351	P.O. Box 3000
ALM	FCI Allenwood Medium	Medium	White Deer	1,070	P.O. Box 2000
ALF	FCI Allenwood Low	Low	Allenwood	1,037	P.O. Box 1000
ALX	FCC Allenwood — the complex, not a prison	—	Montgomery	2,458 combined	Not a mailing address

Populations are as of September 2026. Every mailing box is in White Deer, PA 17887, whichever town the roster gives for the prison itself.

Three things in that table trip people up. The first is White Deer. The roster puts FCI Allenwood Medium in White Deer and the other two in Allenwood, and all three send mail to a White Deer post office box — so a visitor who types “White Deer” into a map application because that is what the envelope says may aim at the wrong gate on a campus where the gates are separate. The traffic light on Route 15 is the landmark, not the town name.

The second is the Low’s other name. The Bureau writes ALF as both “FCI Allenwood Low” and “LSCI Allenwood” — the Corrections Information Council noted in 2024 that the Bureau “uses the terms… interchangeably,” and older Justice Department reports use LSCI. It is one prison.

The third is the camp: there is no camp here. The roster records no satellite camp at any of the three institutions, the First Step Act guide’s roster of institutions by region lists only the complex and the three prisons, and the Bureau’s June 2026 list of drug-treatment locations names no Allenwood camp. The Allenwood Federal Prison Camp — which held G. Gordon Liddy, Jeb Stuart Magruder, Charles Colson, and E. Howard Hunt after Watergate, and which the press called a country club — opened on April 23, 1952, and closed on July 18, 2005; by July 2021, its 1,067 acres had been declared surplus and put up for sale. The penitentiary’s December 2023 handbook still routes visitors from Williamsport “past the entrance to the Federal Prison Camp at Allenwood,” eighteen years after the gates shut.

Two other Pennsylvania prisons are easily confused with this one. Lewisburg, a few miles down the same road, is no longer a penitentiary: the Bureau calls it FCI Lewisburg, a medium. And USP Canaan, near Waymart, is Pennsylvania’s other high-security penitentiary — a separate prison with its own camp. Our guide to federal prisons in Pennsylvania lists all nine.

What is the security level at USP Allenwood?

USP Allenwood is a high-security penitentiary, the top of the Bureau’s ordinary custody ladder. Fifteen of the Bureau’s 118 institutions carry that level and all fifteen are penitentiaries, so a man designated here has landed in the smallest and most restricted tier of the federal system. The July 2025 audit records the penitentiary’s custody levels as In and Maximum.

How the points decide the building

The Designation and Sentence Computation Center in Grand Prairie, Texas, scores each man under the Bureau’s security designation rules, Program Statement 5100.08. Twenty-four points or more means high security and sixteen to twenty-three a medium, so at Allenwood twenty-four points sends a man to the penitentiary and sixteen sends him two miles up the road to the Medium.

Public Safety Factors override the score, and three of them set a floor at high security however low the points: validated membership of a disruptive group listed in the Central Inmate Monitoring System, more than thirty years left to serve (life sentences included), and a guilty finding on a serious institutional violence code during simultaneous disturbances. The disruptive-group factor rests on an intelligence judgment made after a man arrives, which is why it can be argued about.

Factors are recorded on form BP-337 at designation and added or removed afterward on form BP-338; both sit in the central file. To learn why a relative is at a penitentiary rather than a medium, read those two forms first; our guide to federal prison security levels and Public Safety Factors explains them.

Getting out of a penitentiary

A Management Variable is the Bureau’s written override of its own score, approved by the Designation and Sentence Computation Center administrator, and our guide to federal prison transfers sets out how that request is built. But there is a second route out of Allenwood that exists almost nowhere else, and it runs through Psychology Services rather than the unit team’s paperwork. Because every housing unit here is a treatment unit, leaving one is a clinical decision as much as a classification decision, and the Corrections Information Council found in January 2024 that transition out of the Transitional Care Unit has no fixed timetable at all: “both staff and the resident must concur that the resident is prepared and willing to transfer back to the general population.” A family arguing for a move should be arguing in the psychology record, not only on the classification form.

Why does USP Allenwood hold only 351 men?

USP Allenwood held only 351 men as of September 2026 because the Bureau cut its population on purpose. The Corrections Information Council, inspecting on January 31, 2024, recorded that “the USP population has been significantly reduced below the rated capacity to facilitate the establishment of a Secure Administrative Unit (SAU) for residents with serious mental health needs who are awaiting placement into a mental health treatment program or who refuse mental health program treatment.” People who did not need one of the specialty units, it added, “have been transferred to other BOP facilities.”

Date	Population	Capacity recorded	Source
September 19, 2013	1,018	1,174 design capacity	DC Corrections Information Council inspection report
January 31, 2024	282	586 rated capacity	DC Corrections Information Council inspection report
June 4, 2024	251	—	DOJ OIG, E&I Report 25-062, population panel
2025 (undated form entry)	249	252 designated capacity	FCC Allenwood PREA audit report
September 2026	351	—	BOP population report

The capacity figure itself has been rewritten twice — 1,174, then 586, then 252 — which is what re-rating a prison for a different mission looks like on paper. And 351 men in September 2026 against the designated capacity of 252 recorded in July 2025, thirteen months earlier, is about 139 percent. No published document says whether the Secure Administrative Unit has opened; the Council recorded it as planned in January 2024 and said that once it exists, people who need it “will be transferred to USP Allenwood.”

The four units

The Council toured the Transitional Care Unit and one Reintegration Unit in January 2024. What it found:

• The Transitional Care Unit — “the only unit of its kind in the BOP,” established in 2018 for people with severe mental health needs. Twenty-six participants against a capacity of forty-five. Referrals arrive from institutions across the country and Allenwood screens them; active gang-participation status or an incident of violence within the previous twelve months rules an applicant out. The unit has its own medical care area, outdoor recreation yard, and GED classes. Nine of the twenty-six were under civil commitment — held on a court order rather than a sentence.
• The Secure Mental Health Step-Down unit — opened in 2015 “to provide services to residents with serious mental health needs and histories of violence.” Twenty-nine residents at the visit, with psychology staff working from offices inside the unit and running individual and group treatment.
• Two Reintegration Units — 187 men, who “are not segregated from the general population and can participate in outdoor recreation, educational and vocational programming, and other daily living activities in the same manner and frequency” as everyone else. With no separate general population to be kept away from, the ordinary federal practice of walling off a treatment unit does not apply.

Staffing matches the mission: seven mid-level providers acting as primary care providers, carrying a caseload of about forty people each against a Bureau guideline of about 330, and seven psychologists working solely with the Transitional Care and Step-Down populations. One disagreement is printed in the report itself — inspectors were told the Transitional Care Unit had three advance care psychologists, three interns, and three treatment specialists, while the Bureau’s written response says “the TCU has one coordinator and two advanced care psychologists.” Ask the unit team which is current.

Records disagree on the penitentiary’s medical care level. The Bureau’s 2024 care-level charts put it at level 2 in their table by region, but their list by level files “ALX – USP” under level 3, and the charts do not say which is right; the Corrections Information Council recorded level 3 after its September 2013 visit. For mental health, the charts put USP Allenwood at care level 3, as the 2013 inspection also did. Our page on the Bureau’s care-level rules explains the levels.

The Mental Health Step Down Program

Five institutions in the federal system are approved to run the residential Mental Health Step Down Program, and the penitentiary is one of them. The August 2026 First Step Act Approved Programs Guide names them in the program’s own detail entry — USP Allenwood, FCI Atlanta, FCI Butner Medium I, FMC Fort Worth, and FCI Sheridan — and the guide’s separate programs-by-institution grid marks the same five. USP Allenwood is the only penitentiary among them, and the only one at high security. The others are a low, two mediums, and a medical center. For a man whose points put him at a penitentiary and whose illness needs a residential unit, this is the address.

The guide describes it as a unit-based residential course for people with serious mental illness “who do not require inpatient treatment but lack the skills to function in general population,” run as a modified therapeutic community, worth 500 First Step Act credit hours, and delivered by Psychology Services. Allenwood’s version is a secure step-down: the people it serves have histories of violence as well as serious mental illness, which is why it sits behind a penitentiary’s perimeter rather than a medium’s.

Because the program runs in five places, getting into it usually means getting transferred: a written request through Psychology Services and the unit team, supported by the psychology record, decided as a redesignation. Approval on a Bureau list is not the same as a bed; ask for the waiting list and the current census in the same request.

The Special Management Unit is gone

USP Allenwood no longer has a Special Management Unit. The Justice Department’s Inspector General recorded the closure in a footnote on the first page of its July 2017 review of restrictive housing: “The USP Allenwood SMU closed in October 2016, during the course of our review. USP Lewisburg is the only remaining BOP institution that maintains the SMU program.” In June 2016 the unit had held 124 men against Lewisburg’s 1,166.

Listings that still describe an SMU here also carry its rules — a fifty-dollar weekly commissary cap, five hours of recreation a week, restricted property — and families plan around rules that no longer apply. What replaced it, on the same campus, is the treatment architecture described above. Our guide to special housing and restrictive units explains how the Bureau’s remaining restrictive programs work.

Who are the notable inmates at USP Allenwood?

The best-known prisoner at USP Allenwood is James Eagan Holmes. Of the five men published lists routinely place here, he is the only one the Bureau’s records put at the penitentiary; the facility code in each man’s record is below.

Name	Register number	Bureau record (facility code)	Case
James Eagan Holmes	02350-122	USP Allenwood — code ALP. Held here, age 38	Convicted in Colorado state court of the 2012 Aurora cinema murders and sentenced to twelve life terms. The locator’s release-date field for him reads “STATE PRIS”, an entry the Bureau’s page explaining locator results does not define
Louis Daidone	39065-053	FCI Butner Medium II, North Carolina — code BTF, not ALP. Serving life, age 80	Former acting boss of the Lucchese crime family
Howard Mason	24651-053	FMC Devens, Massachusetts — code DEV, not ALP. Serving life, age 67	Convicted of ordering the 1988 murder of a New York City police officer
Mohamud Salad Ali	77992-083	USP Florence – High, Colorado — code FLP, not ALP. Serving life, age 50	Convicted over the 2011 hijacking of a yacht off Somalia

Louis Daidone’s listing shows how such an error compounds: BTF is FCI Butner Medium II, one of four separate prisons on the Butner campus, each with its own code and mailing address, so a letter sent on the strength of a directory listing can be wrong twice over. A fifth name on several lists, a physician serving life for health care fraud, does not appear in the Bureau’s records at USP Allenwood.

How do I find someone at USP Allenwood?

To find someone at USP Allenwood, use the Bureau’s free public Inmate Locator and search by the eight-digit register number if you have it. The number is the reliable key — the locator matches a committed name, not the name a family uses — and it covers everyone in federal custody since 1982. A man held here shows as “Located at: Allenwood USP”; “Allenwood Medium FCI” or “Allenwood Low FCI” means one of the other two prisons, with a different mailing box and, for the Low, a different visiting day. If the locator shows no result, the usual explanations are state rather than federal custody, pretrial detention under the U.S. Marshals Service, or a judgment that spells the name differently. See how federal register numbers work.

How do I write to someone at USP Allenwood?

Letters to someone at USP Allenwood use this address block, exactly as the institution’s handbook gives it. The committed name and register number go on the first line; mail without a register number does not get delivered.

Inmate mail	Committed Name and Register Number United States Penitentiary Allenwood P.O. Box 3000 White Deer, Pennsylvania 17887

The handbook states that “all incoming general correspondence is opened, screened, and photocopied to include greeting cards and photographs, prior to delivery.” Send copies, not a child’s original drawing or the only print of a photograph. Mail reaches the units after the 4:15 p.m. stand-up count on weekdays, and there is no weekend or holiday delivery.

Outgoing mail is different at a penitentiary than at a camp. The handbook records the national correspondence rule as it applies here: outgoing mail from a sentenced person at a medium or high security institution “may not be sealed by the inmate and may be read and inspected by staff.” Envelopes must carry the committed name, register number, and full return address in the top left corner or they come straight back; address labels have to be printed from a TRULINCS terminal, with an exception for the Special Housing Unit and for unscheduled lockdowns; and every envelope leaves stamped “Mailed from U.S. Penitentiary.”

Legal mail is the exception, and only if it is marked. Correspondence from an attorney is opened in the addressee’s presence and not read, but only where the sender is clearly identified on the envelope and the front carries the words “Special Mail — Open only in the presence of the inmate.” An unmarked letter from a law office is handled as ordinary mail, so the person inside must tell the lawyer to mark it. At USP Allenwood, the Corrections Information Council “heard three accounts of staff opening legal mail outside of the presence of the inmates” when it inspected in September 2013. Our guides to attorney-client communication in the Bureau of Prisons and writing to someone in federal prison cover the rules and the common rejections.

Never put money in a letter. Funds that arrive in correspondence are returned to the sender with instructions to use the lockbox.

How do I send money to someone at USP Allenwood?

Money for someone at USP Allenwood goes to the Bureau’s national lockbox in Iowa or through one of two wire services, never to the prison itself; all three routes need the committed name and register number on the instrument and the envelope.

Route	Where the funds are sent	Posting time
Postal money order or cashier’s check	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. Non-postal money orders and non-government checks are held 15 days
Western Union Quick Collect	Code city FBOP, DC	Two to four hours for funds sent between 7:00 a.m. and 9:00 p.m. Eastern; otherwise by 7:00 a.m. the next morning
MoneyGram	Receive code 7932, company name Federal Bureau of Prisons, Washington, DC	As above

Cash and personal checks are returned. Money brought to a visit cannot be deposited, and the visiting supplement is blunt: inmates “are not authorized to handle or be in possession of money (bills or coins).” Our guide to sending money to a federal prisoner compares the routes and their fees.

Two local rules govern what the money can then do. Commissary spending here is capped weekly rather than monthly — see below — so a large deposit sits in the account rather than buying anything faster. And for someone in refuse status under the Inmate Financial Responsibility Program, the handbook sets the limit at twenty-five dollars a month and closes off UNICOR work and performance pay. Fixing the financial plan buys more here than another hundred dollars does.

What are the visiting hours at USP Allenwood?

Visiting at USP Allenwood runs Saturdays, Sundays, and all federal holidays, 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., under FCC Allenwood complex supplement ALX-5267.09C, Visiting Regulations, dated March 15, 2024, and signed by all three wardens.

There is no Friday visiting at the penitentiary. The supplement sets out both schedules in one sentence: the visiting rooms are open “Saturday and Sunday, and all federal holidays for the FCI and USP. The LSCI is open from 8:00 a.m. until 3:00 p.m., Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and all federal holidays.” Friday belongs to the Low; on a Friday, the penitentiary’s visiting room is closed.

Arrive early: no visitor is processed in after 2:00 p.m., and processing out begins at that hour so that the room is clear by three. The Bureau publishes no other visiting schedule for the penitentiary, so the supplement is the schedule.

Who can visit, and how often

• Visits run on points: eight a calendar month, two per visit regardless of length — four ordinary visits. No points are charged on a federal holiday, or for a legal, Minister of Record, or Prisoner Visitation and Support visit.
• The penitentiary’s own December 2023 handbook says nine points. Both documents are the Bureau’s; the complex supplement is fifteen months newer and governs. If a visit is refused on points, ask which document the visiting room is working from.
• Five visitors at a time, children included. More needs prior written approval, and requests made on the day “will be denied.” Where more than five approved visitors arrive, a split visit may be allowed — one interchange only, and whoever leaves does not come back that day. Extra points, likewise, must be approved in advance by the designated Associate Warden, “only when there is a significant need.”
• The visiting list holds twenty-five immediate family members and ten friends and other relatives. Regardless of security level, “the inmate must have known the proposed visitor(s) prior to incarceration,” though the Warden can waive that.
• Everyone needs a background check, including immediate family, with a National Crime Information Center check at each new institution, unless an NCIC check was run at another federal facility within the last 12 months, is in the man’s central file with a signed release, and nothing new has come to light.
• A felony conviction for drugs or violence within the past three years ordinarily produces a staff memo recommending denial; a visitor on supervision needs a letter from the supervising agency, and “[o]nly the Warden has the authority to deny a visitor from being added to an inmate’s visiting list.”

Two groups visit under tighter rules. Everyone in the Special Housing Unit has non-contact visits, one hour each. And anyone “pending designation or designated for ADX Florence,” or otherwise assessed as needing increased security precautions, visits through the non-contact rooms, immediate family only, one visitor at a time.

What visitors can wear and bring

Skirts, dresses, and shorts must be no more than one inch above the knee, slits included, and the rest is the usual national list: nothing tight, stretch, or see-through, no hoodies or sweat wear, no low-cut, halter, midriff, or sleeveless tops, no open-toe or open-back shoes, no hats, camouflage, torn clothing, or team gear. Two things trip people up because they are put on without thinking: watches of any kind and sunglasses. Color matters as much as cut — nothing may resemble the inmate uniform, so brown, beige, khaki, tan, green, gray sweats, and a plain white T-shirt as the only shirt are all turned away at the front lobby.

You may carry in a clear plastic purse or zip-lock bag, identification, jewelry you are wearing, two sanitary items, one vehicle key, life-supportive medication, and up to fifty dollars per adult in quarters or one- and five-dollar bills for the vending machines. Infant items are itemized to the piece — three diapers, three bottles three-quarters full, one sealed jar of baby food, a sippy cup, a spoon, a clear tote, wipes, one change of clothes, and one small blanket — and strollers, carriers, toys, newspapers, photographs, makeup, and breast-pump supplies are barred. Everything bought from the machines must be eaten before the visitor leaves.

Two rules end visits early, and they work together. If you arrive in a personal or rented vehicle you may not use the lobby lockers at all — anything you cannot bring in has to be locked in your car, and lockers are provided only for visitors arriving by public transportation. And once you have been checked in, “they will not be permitted to return to their automobile or leave the visiting area. If this occurs, the visit will be terminated.” Sort the car out before you walk to the door. Cell phones may not come inside at any time.

Identification and screening

Photo identification is required for everyone sixteen and over, showing photograph, name, date of birth, sex, height, eye color, and address. A passport works only with a U.S. visa stamp or I-94 form. Not accepted: a passport without a visa stamp, consular identification, border-crossing cards, photo cards from banks, businesses, high schools, or colleges, and anything altered, forged, or expired. One clause is easy to miss and increasingly common — an identification card marked “Federal Limits Apply” or “not for federal purposes” is not valid here. Check the front of your license before you travel.

Everyone clears a walk-through metal detector; a hand-held one is used only for someone carrying medical documentation that specifically describes their implant, or if the walk-through fails. Visitors sixteen and over get an invisible ink stamp checked under black light on entry and again before and after the visit. Vehicles are registered by make, model, plate, and space and are subject to search; a car found in staff parking cancels the visit, and one left in the lot after visiting ends is towed at the owner’s expense.

Then the ion scanner, whose sanctions are steeper than most families expect. Screening is random, and staff may test out of order on reasonable suspicion. Refusing means no visit for at least forty-eight hours. A confirmed positive means the visit is denied with re-entry possible after forty-eight hours; a second suspends visiting for thirty days, a third for ninety, and a fourth and each one after for a hundred and eighty — and those consequences follow a visitor between institutions. The supplement also instructs staff that “visitors must not be informed of the type of substance for which they tested positive.” Our page on searches, shakedowns, and contraband explains how these devices are used.

Getting there

The complex sits off U.S. Route 15 north of the town of Allenwood, about thirteen miles south of Williamsport and five miles north of Interstate 80. From I-80 take exit 210B to Route 15 north and drive roughly five miles; the institutions are on the left at the traffic light. Coming south from Williamsport, turn right at that light. Inside the complex, the penitentiary is to the right. The supplement gives the distance from Lewisburg twice and gives two different answers — eight miles in the body, twelve in the visitor handout — so navigate to the light rather than the mileage.

Plan the last mile before you set off. The handbook states that the area “has no public transportation (city bus service) between the institution and the surrounding areas,” while the visiting supplement gives Trailways Bus Lines for transport to the complex; the nearest lodging is in New Columbia, Lewisburg, and Williamsport. Visitors may not arrive before visiting opens and must leave immediately when a visit ends. The District of Columbia’s inspectors measured the trip from Washington in 2013 as 196 miles — three and a half hours by car, six and a half by bus.

How do phone calls and email work at USP Allenwood?

Calls from USP Allenwood go out, never in: the person inside places them on the TRUFONE system to numbers on an approved list holding up to thirty, using a nine-digit access code and voice recognition. Phones run 6:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m., seven days a week, including holidays. A single call should generally not exceed fifteen minutes, with at least 30 minutes between completed calls, and the Bureau’s telephone regulations, Program Statement 5264.09, issued September 3, 2026, set a limit of 510 minutes a month — 300 free to anyone eligible for First Step Act telephone incentives, and the other 210 purchasable by anyone who uses up those 300, eligible or not. The monthly limit does not apply to unmonitored legal calls. The extra hundred minutes that the 2008 policy gave in November and December went when that policy did; nothing is added over the holidays now. Everything except a properly arranged legal call is recorded, and the handbook says so of attorneys: anyone who puts a lawyer on the list does so “with the understanding that all calls made through the TRUFONE system are subject to monitoring.”

Email runs on TRULINCS, reached by families through CorrLinks, available here from 6:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. every day. Printing from the terminal costs three TRU-Units — fifteen cents — a page, the practical constraint on someone preparing a legal filing. One rule travels with a person: any restriction on phone, commissary, messaging, or visiting imposed at a previous institution continues here for the rest of the sanction. Our page on CorrLinks and TRULINCS explains the system, and email with a lawyer is not privileged — privileged writing goes by marked special mail.

What can people buy at the USP Allenwood commissary?

People at USP Allenwood can spend ninety dollars a week at the commissary, on items from the institution’s own order form. The cap is weekly rather than monthly, and the January–March 2025 commissary list says so at the top: “Inmates are allowed to spend $90.00 per week. STAMPS AND OTC MEDICATIONS ARE EXEMPT.” Men revalidate on Monday mornings and shop once a week.

Two limits are in play, and neither local document has caught up. The Bureau’s national monthly ceiling is $460: its trust fund rules, Program Statement 4500.13, issued May 7, 2026, raised it from $360. The December 2023 handbook prints both of its own numbers in consecutive sentences: “The National Spending Limit is $360.00. The weekly spending limit is $90.00 a week.” Four weeks at ninety dollars is three hundred and sixty. The national ceiling has since risen by a hundred dollars, and the local weekly figure has not been reissued. Ask the Trust Fund Supervisor in writing what the current weekly limit is before budgeting on either number.

The shopping rules are unforgiving. Sales run Monday through Wednesday by unit, on a quarterly schedule posted on the TRULINCS board. A man must be present when his unit is called “or he will forfeit his shopping privileges for the week. NO EXCEPTIONS.” Additions to the printed list are not authorized, and an altered or illegible form is not filled. Postage stamps, nicotine patches, over-the-counter medication, and copy cards are excluded from the limit.

Three items on the list stand out. A tablet costs $137.80 and a radio $68.90 — six or seven weeks of the entire limit for one purchase. A typewriter print wheel costs $49.35 and a ribbon $8.45, both marked local items only, a sign that men here still type legal work on machines. And the standardized items stocked at this men’s penitentiary include eye shadow, blush, lip gloss, and foundation in five shades — the Bureau’s national standardized list for transgender and intersex people, on a penitentiary order form. For what the national rules allow, see our page on the federal prison commissary.

What programs are available at USP Allenwood?

USP Allenwood’s programs are heavy on psychology and light on everything else, a different mix from what a penitentiary usually offers. The August 2026 First Step Act Approved Programs Guide marks this institution for anger management, basic cognitive skills, the Bureau literacy program, criminal thinking, dialectical behavior therapy, emotional self-regulation, English as a second language, illness management and recovery, the inmate companion program, LifeSkills Laboratories, the Mental Health Step Down Program, parenting, non-residential drug treatment, occupational education, Seeking Safety, social skills training, Threshold, and Wellness Inside and Out.

Drug treatment, and the RDAP that is not here

There is no Residential Drug Abuse Program at USP Allenwood. The Bureau’s June 2026 list of RDAP locations, printed inside the August 2026 guide, names FCI Allenwood Low and FCI Allenwood Medium and does not name the penitentiary; the guide’s programs-by-institution grid agrees.

Older records show a different picture. When the District of Columbia’s inspectors visited on September 19, 2013, they found RDAP running here with twenty-seven District residents enrolled, and named it, with the Challenge Program, among the institution’s best practices. Neither appears for this institution in the current guide. Since completing RDAP can mean up to a year off a sentence under 18 U.S.C. § 3621(e), a man who needs it and scores at high security is looking at a transfer request rather than a waiting list here — and that decision belongs to the Drug Abuse Program Coordinator and the Designation and Sentence Computation Center, not to the institution. Non-residential drug treatment is offered.

Education, vocational training, and UNICOR

Mandatory literacy and English-as-a-second-language classes run as they do everywhere: 240 instructional hours before a man may withdraw, and 480 hours or a GED before promotion above pay grade 4. People holding District of Columbia sentences can earn District Educational Good Time for GED, ESL, and marketable-level occupational training, and completing any of those here carries a fifty-dollar First Step Act incentive award.

Vocational training is where the expectation gap is widest. The handbook’s own table of vocational and apprenticeship offerings for this institution has one line in it: Personal Fitness Trainer Certification Program. That is the list, and a verified high school diploma or GED is required even for it. Listings that promise word processing, computer-assisted drafting, internet certification, and apprenticeships in cooking, quality control, and upholstery describe the institution as it was before the mission changed.

UNICOR is closed here. Asked by the Corrections Information Council in 2024 to publish a waiting list, the Bureau answered: “The UNICOR factory at the USP is currently closed due to the current mission changes at the USP.” Inspectors had found the program inactive and were told staff intended to reinstate it “once enough eligible participants are identified.” The factory used to upholster furniture for government offices, and in 2013 the Council singled it out as a best practice precisely because a working factory at a penitentiary is unusual. The Bureau’s 2024 answer also said the Medium’s and the Low’s factories posted waiting lists; the August 2026 First Step Act guide lists Federal Prison Industries at the Low and here, not at the Medium.

Psychology, faith-based, and reentry programming

Psychology is the institution’s center of gravity. Beyond the Step Down Program and the Transitional Care Unit described above, the guide marks the penitentiary for dialectical behavior therapy, illness management and recovery, social skills training, Seeking Safety, and the inmate companion program — and for LifeSkills Laboratories, a ninety-hour course teaching health and hygiene, budgeting, self-advocacy, cleaning, and cooking to people with serious mental illness in a purpose-built laboratory space. The Inspector General’s December 2024 inspection of FMC Devens recorded that several institutions “had been approved and had received FSA funding for a LifeSkills Laboratory. However, only one institution, U.S. Penitentiary Allenwood, had been fully activated.” Approval and funding are not delivery, and there Allenwood was the one place delivering.

Religious Services runs the faith-based side, and the current guide marks Threshold here; Life Connections runs at five other institutions. In 2013 the Council found Islam the largest religious group at the penitentiary, three chaplains serving eighteen faith groups, and a separate preparation area for halal meals — a detail that still shows on the commissary list, which flags kosher and halal items throughout. Psychology Services works out of Corridor 2, between Religious Services and Education, and out of Unit 2A. The way in is an Inmate Request to a Staff Member, a word during mainline, or — in a crisis — telling any staff member at all. The institution runs a suicide-watch companion program with published criteria, including no 100-series incident report in three years. The handbook also states that “this institution does not have a Resolve Program,” the Bureau’s trauma treatment course, so anyone who needs that must ask about a transfer.

What is daily life like at USP Allenwood?

Daily life at USP Allenwood is built around counts and a split compound. The table below is from the penitentiary’s 2023 handbook; treat it as the shape of the day rather than a timetable, and note that a unit whose men are all in a treatment program runs its own schedule on top of it.

	Weekdays	Weekends and holidays
Wake-up	6:00 a.m.
Breakfast	6:00 a.m.	6:30 a.m.
Lunch	About 10:30 a.m., or when morning programming ends
Dinner	Immediately after the 4:15 p.m. count clears
Stand-up counts	4:15 p.m. and 9:00 p.m.	10:00 a.m., 4:15 p.m., and 9:00 p.m.
Other counts	About 1:00 a.m., 3:00 a.m., and 5:00 a.m.
Controlled movement	Two moves, each ten minutes, the second called only after the compound clears
Telephones and TRULINCS	6:00 a.m. – 10:00 p.m., seven days a week including holidays
Unit lockdown	8:30 p.m.; no television after 9:00 p.m.

The split compound shapes everything else. The handbook states that “USP Allenwood has a split compound,” so movement is called in two waves: the first begins around the half hour and runs ten minutes, the second only once the compound has cleared. Recreation access therefore rotates, because the two halves cannot be out together. Someone arriving from a medium will find the day noticeably more segmented.

Two features of life here exist almost nowhere else in the federal system, both from the Council’s January 2024 inspection. The program units run a token economy: residents earn currency for taking part in programming and meeting goals, and spend it at a small store inside the unit — a second economy alongside the weekly ninety dollars at the commissary, earned rather than deposited. And the units post call-outs and the day’s schedule on white boards, so a man does not have to wait in line for a TRULINCS terminal to learn when his medical appointment is.

Food service feeds the whole complex from a national menu, with medical diets by self-selection at mainline and a certified religious diet through the chaplains. The handbook’s sternest line is about taking food out: “FOOD ITEMS MAY NOT BE REMOVED FROM FOOD SERVICE INCLUDING FRUIT.” The rule makes sense next to what the Inspector General found in June 2024 in a kitchen its report calls only “the FCI kitchen,” described below.

What do inspectors say about conditions at USP Allenwood?

The Inspector General found few food-service deficiencies at FCC Allenwood in 2024, the complex passed its 2025 PREA audit, and the District of Columbia’s inspectors recorded a penitentiary rebuilt around mental-health treatment. FCC Allenwood is one of the small number of institutions the Justice Department’s Inspector General has walked into unannounced, and the District of Columbia’s Corrections Information Council has inspected the penitentiary twice, eleven years apart, because District residents are held here. The most recent inspection of the penitentiary itself was in January 2024.

The Inspector General’s unannounced inspection, June 2024

At 10 a.m. Eastern on Tuesday, June 4, 2024, the Inspector General told six federal prisons it would begin inspecting them within the hour. Teams of four arrived at eleven and stayed until Thursday, June 6. FCC Allenwood was one of the six, chosen “based on their relative scores from the OIG’s prison inspection risk assessment tool, as well as the volume and nature of complaints submitted to the OIG.” The findings were published a year later as Concurrent Inspections of BOP Food Service Operations, E&I Report 25-062, on June 17, 2025. On the Inspector General’s own count in May 2026, in Report 26-055, it had by then inspected fourteen Bureau institutions since 2023 — seven individual inspections, six in this food-service round, and an ongoing effort at FCI Berlin.

Allenwood came out well: “In comparison,” the report says, “FCC Allenwood and MCC Chicago had the fewest deficiencies of the institutions we inspected, and we came away with a positive impression of their food service operations.” Inspectors found the food service areas clean and no obvious sign that the food was unsafe. Their findings at the complex were these. Food Service was staffed at 89 percent, 33 of 37 posts filled, two of those on administrative leave. In the warehouse, “a significant amount of ice had accumulated at the threshold to the freezer, posing a slip-and-fall hazard,” which an employee said had been a continuing problem; the Bureau later replaced faulty gaskets. And there were no security cameras inside the food storage warehouse, as at four of the other five institutions — though the report adds a qualification: “However, inmates did not work in this area, thus mitigating the risk associated with a lack of cameras.”

One finding from that inspection is not about the penitentiary. The drop-ceiling discovery — that inmates were hiding diverted food above the ceiling tiles, and that staff “have consistently found stolen food inside the drop ceiling space” — was made “in the FCI kitchen,” and employees told the inspectors they believe inmates are carrying the food “to other areas of the FCI.” The report counts two FCIs at the complex, a medium and a low, and never says which one’s kitchen it means; either way, it does not place the finding at the penitentiary. The report notes that diverted food “is considered contraband and can be used as a type of currency within a correctional environment,” and the Bureau responded that staff now search drop-ceiling areas more often. Here it is context for the handbook’s rule about fruit, not a finding about the USP.

The 2024 and 2013 inspections of the penitentiary

The District of Columbia Corrections Information Council inspected the penitentiary on January 31, 2024, and published its report on June 27, 2024, with the Bureau’s written response alongside. Its findings rest on small numbers, and the denominators matter: 103 District residents were held across the three Allenwood prisons and 52 interviewed; at the penitentiary there were seventeen District residents and seven completed surveys. Seven surveys cannot measure a prison of 282; what the inspectors saw themselves, set out earlier on this page, carries more weight. Two limits travel with any citation: they were not taken through the Special Housing Unit, so nothing in the report describes segregation, and on several staff-conduct complaints the Bureau declined to respond because “the CIC did not provide FCC Allenwood with detailed and specific information to investigate or substantiate any allegations of misconduct.”

The earlier inspection, conducted on September 19, 2013, and published on November 3, 2014, describes a different prison: 1,018 men against a design capacity of 1,174, four housing units of two pods each holding 256 apiece, a Special Management Unit the inspectors were not permitted to enter, a working UNICOR upholstery factory, RDAP, and the Challenge Program. Of 120 District residents then held, 25 were interviewed and roughly sixty concerns recorded — medical care led with eleven, staff conduct with ten.

Three findings from that visit still have force. The Council recorded that “several inmates report retaliation by correction officers for filing administrative remedies,” and heard three separate accounts of legal mail opened outside the presence of the addressee. Its remedy tables record that of the 46 medical complaints filed at the institution, two were answered, and of the 28 staff complaints, none. A remedy request rejected on a technicality has not been decided, and the rejection notice is the document to read first. The Council also named a practice here it wanted the whole Bureau to copy: a weekly open house in the Records Office where a man could go through his sentence computation with records staff and get an error fixed before it cost him time.

The 2025 PREA audit and the sexual-abuse figures

FCC Allenwood was audited under the Prison Rape Elimination Act on July 29–31, 2025, by an independent auditor, Lynni O’Haver of Corrections Consulting Services. The final report is dated September 10, 2025, and the complex passed: forty-five standards met, none exceeded, none unmet. In the twelve months before the audit, it recorded five allegations of sexual abuse and four of sexual harassment, all inmate-on-inmate and none referred for criminal investigation. Forensic examinations after a sexual assault are done at a local hospital rather than on site.

The audit is also the most precise public description of the penitentiary that exists, because it breaks its figures out by institution: a designated capacity of 252, an undated “current population” of 249, an age range of 22 to 71, and 537 admissions in twelve months of which 418 stayed thirty days or more. The average length of stay was 337.9 days. Fewer than eleven months, at a high-security penitentiary, against 536.2 days at the Medium (the form gives the Low 627.8, with no unit). Men do not serve out sentences here; they come for a program and move on.

A separate federal source counts allegations differently, and its numbers are higher. The Government Accountability Office published per-institution counts for 2020 to 2024 in May 2026. For USP Allenwood it recorded twelve allegations of sexual abuse where another incarcerated person was the alleged perpetrator, and twenty-one where a Bureau employee was — the staff figure rising from none in 2021 to four in 2022, six in 2023, and nine in 2024. Four cautions belong with those numbers, all from the report itself. They are reported allegations, not findings, and nationally, from 2014 through 2022, most ended unsubstantiated — which means there was not enough evidence either way, not that the allegation was false. The Office publishes no substantiation rate for any individual prison; its two tables count on different bases, from different systems as of different dates, so they cannot be added; and it does not adjust for population, so these counts cannot rank one prison against another. The within-institution trend is what the data supports, and here it rises.

Mental health oversight, and staffing

Inspectors have come here for the mental health work before. Between June and August 2015, the Inspector General visited seven federal institutions for its review of restrictive housing and mental illness, published as E&I Report 17-05 in July 2017, and USP Allenwood was one — selected “based on their special RHU programs or the large number of inmates with mental illness in their RHUs.” Across the seven, “six of the seven institutions we visited… at the time of our visits were understaffed by at least one mental health staff position.” The report does not say which six, so it does not show whether Allenwood was among them.

On staffing generally, the most recent account is the union’s. In March 2025 the president and vice-president of the American Federation of Government Employees local at this penitentiary told a Williamsport newspaper that Allenwood was 113 correctional officers short, against 114 openings a year earlier — no improvement in twelve months. Officers were working sixteen-hour days and nurses were being pulled from Health Services to cover officer posts. The union also gave a structural reason the vacancies persist: the Bureau assigns pay by locality, and Allenwood and Lewisburg sit in the “rest of the United States” band, the lowest, while USP Schuylkill is paid 11.37 percent more as part of the Philadelphia locality and USP Canaan 20.42 percent more as part of a New York one. The retention incentive for officers had been cut from ten percent to five, and for medical staff from twenty-five to twelve and a half. These are the union’s figures, given for Allenwood without separating the three prisons.

Staffing shortfalls are why a callout is canceled, a group does not meet, or a visit is cut short, and at an institution whose purpose is treatment delivered by psychologists, a vacancy is the program.

USP Allenwood in the news

Recent news about USP Allenwood centers on two prosecutions, one for threats against staff and one for a 2020 attack on officers; older items concern two inspection reports, a death reported by the Bureau, the 2016 closure of the Special Management Unit, and the end of the Allenwood camp.

• August 2026 — the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Pennsylvania announced on August 27 that Robert Foust, 42, an inmate at USP Allenwood, had been indicted for threatening federal officers; the indictment alleges that on August 5 and November 6, 2025, he threatened to assault and murder Bureau employees, among them a corrections officer, a corrections counselor, and a prison physician. Indictments are allegations, and a person charged is presumed innocent unless and until found guilty.
• November 2025 — Abdulrahman El Bahnasawy pleaded guilty to assault, assault with intent to commit murder, possession of contraband, and providing material support to ISIS, over an attack on December 7, 2020, in which he stabbed two correctional officers at USP Allenwood with a weapon made from part of a steel desk in his cell. One officer lost his right eye. When he was restrained, staff found a note in his sock reading “This is a terrorist attack for the Islamic State.” He was already serving forty years for plotting a mass-casualty attack in New York City in 2016.
• June 2025 — the Inspector General published its unannounced food-service inspection of this complex, conducted in June 2024. In March that year union officers had said the institution was 113 correctional officers short.
• June 2024 — the District of Columbia Corrections Information Council published its inspection, recording that the penitentiary has no general population housing unit and that its UNICOR factory has closed.
• December 2020 — the Bureau posted one news release reporting the death of a person held at USP Allenwood; the Bureau’s releases are listed on its press release page.
• October 2016 — the Special Management Unit closed, leaving USP Lewisburg as the Bureau’s only remaining SMU. Eleven years earlier, in July 2005, the Allenwood Federal Prison Camp had closed after fifty-three years; its site was declared surplus federal property and offered for sale in 2021.

Frequently asked questions about USP Allenwood

Problems at USP Allenwood: where we can help

The problems that recur at USP Allenwood are not the ones that recur at an ordinary penitentiary, because its housing units are all treatment units, and its inspection record points to the same short list:

• Getting into a treatment unit, or getting out of one. The Mental Health Step Down Program runs at five institutions and this is the only penitentiary among them; the Transitional Care Unit is the only one of its kind in the Bureau. Both are reached by written request through Psychology Services and a redesignation decision, and leaving the Transitional Care Unit has no timetable. A well-documented psychology record does more work than a transfer form.
• Mental health treatment that is not being delivered, and legal mail opened outside the addressee’s presence — three accounts of the latter reached the Council’s inspectors here. Both start with a written request to staff and run into the administrative remedy process, where every rung carries a deadline. See medical care in federal prison, and Federal Tort Claims Act claims where a failure has caused injury.
• Administrative remedies rejected rather than answered. The Council’s tables show 51 of 107 discipline appeals rejected at the regional level in a single year, and inmates reporting retaliation for filing. A rejection is a procedural defect, not a decision, and it is usually curable — but only inside the time limits.
• RDAP, which does not run here. A man scored to high security who needs the residential drug program and the reduction under 18 U.S.C. § 3621(e) needs a transfer, requested early enough to matter.
• Designation and redesignation. Security points, Public Safety Factors, and Management Variables decide whether someone stays at a penitentiary or moves to the Medium two miles away. All three are arguable. See federal prison transfers.
• Discipline, segregation, and First Step Act credits. Disciplinary proceedings that cost good conduct time and earned credits, and Special Housing Unit placements that outlast their justification — in a prison whose SHU no outside inspector has been permitted to tour.
• Visiting refusals — on the prior-relationship rule, on a visitor’s supervision status, or after an ion-scan positive that carries escalating suspensions between institutions. Only the Warden can refuse to add someone to a visiting list.
• Halfway house and home confinement placement under the Bureau’s placement procedures (see our pages on halfway houses, home confinement, and early release), and errors in sentence computation — the thing this institution’s own Records Office open house was praised for catching.
• 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

• USP Allenwood, Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2026. The Bureau’s facility page, with address, contact details, population, and inmate-mail block.
• USP Allenwood Commissary List, January–March 2025, Federal Bureau of Prisons, USP Allenwood, 2025. Items, prices, and the $90 weekly spending limit.
• Complex Supplement ALX-5267.09C, Visiting Regulations, Federal Bureau of Prisons, FCC Allenwood, 2024. Visiting days and hours, points, visiting lists, dress code, identification, and screening at the three Allenwood prisons; replaced supplement ALX-5267.09B (2023).
• USP Allenwood Inmate Admission and Orientation Handbook, Federal Bureau of Prisons, USP Allenwood, 2023. Mail, commissary limits, telephones and TRULINCS, counts and movement, meals, vocational training, and psychology services.
• Trust Fund/Deposit Fund Manual, Program Statement 4500.13, Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2026. Sets the $460 commissary spending limit and the deposit routes.
• Inmate Security Designation and Custody Classification, Program Statement 5100.08, Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2006, as amended in 2026. Security-level scoring and Public Safety Factors.
• 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. Program availability by institution, including the Mental Health Step Down Program, LifeSkills Laboratories, and RDAP locations.
• Institution Care Levels for Medical Assignment and Institutional Mental Health Care Levels, Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2024. Released under Freedom of Information Act request 2024-03455 and published by the Washington Lawyers’ Committee.
• Press Releases, Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2020. Includes the December 2020 release reporting a death at USP Allenwood.

Audits and inspections

• Inspection of the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ U.S. Penitentiary Canaan, U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, 2026. Report 26-055, with the count of Bureau institutions the office has inspected since 2023.
• Federal Prisons: Improvements Needed to Prevent, Detect, and Address Sexual Abuse, U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2026. GAO-26-107343, with allegation counts for USP Allenwood.
• PREA Audit Report: Federal Correctional Complex Allenwood, Corrections Consulting Services, LLC, 2025. Complex-wide audit by Lynni O’Haver, on site July 29–31, 2025.
• Concurrent Inspections of BOP Food Service Operations, U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, 2025. Report 25-062, including the unannounced June 2024 inspection at FCC Allenwood.
• Inspection of the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ Federal Medical Center Devens, U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, 2024. Report 25-009, on the activation of LifeSkills Laboratories.
• FCC Allenwood Report on Findings and Recommendations, District of Columbia Corrections Information Council, 2024. Inspection of January 31–February 1, 2024, covering FCI Allenwood Low, FCI Allenwood Medium, and USP Allenwood, with the Bureau’s written response.
• Review of the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ Use of Restrictive Housing for Inmates with Mental Illness, U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, 2017. Report 17-05, including the October 2016 closure of the USP Allenwood Special Management Unit.
• Inspection Report: USP Allenwood, District of Columbia Corrections Information Council, 2014. Inspection of September 19, 2013.

Court records

• Inmate Charged with Threatening Federal Officers, U.S. Attorney’s Office, Middle District of Pennsylvania, 2026. Robert Foust’s indictment.
• Inmate Pleads Guilty to Assault on Corrections Officers, U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Public Affairs, 2025. Abdulrahman El Bahnasawy’s guilty plea.

News and other sources

• COs Say Short Staffing at Allenwood Could Lead to Public Safety Concerns, NorthcentralPA.com, 2025. Reporting by Melissa Farenish.
• Pa. Prison Camp Once Called a ‘Country Club’ for Notable Inmates Goes on the Market, PennLive, 2021. Reporting by John Beauge.
• 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