FCI Lompoc II (formerly USP Lompoc) | Lompoc Federal Prison

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

FCI Lompoc II at a glance

FCI Lompoc II is a low-security federal prison for men at 3901 Klein Boulevard in Lompoc, California, with two minimum-security camps, holding 2,234 people as of September 2026. Until April 4, 2024, it was called USP Lompoc. It shares Federal Correctional Complex Lompoc with FCI Lompoc I, the separate prison across the road that was called FCI Lompoc until the same renaming.

Official name	FCI Lompoc II (Federal Correctional Institution, Lompoc II) · formerly USP Lompoc
BOP code	LOM · complex LOX
Security level	Low; men
Population	2,234 (as of September 2026)
Visiting	Saturdays, Sundays and federal holidays, 8:30 a.m.–3:00 p.m.
Inmate mail	FCI: Inmate Name and Register Number · FCI Lompoc II · Federal Correctional Institution · 3901 Klein Boulevard · Lompoc, CA 93436 Camp: Inmate Name and Register Number · FCI Lompoc II Camp · Satellite Prison Camp · 3705 West Farm Road · Lompoc, CA 93436
Send money	Lockbox · Western Union (code city FBOP, DC) · MoneyGram (receive code 7932)
Phone	805-735-2771 · Fax 805-736-1292
Street address	3901 Klein Boulevard, Lompoc, CA 93436 · Santa Barbara County
Judicial district	Central District of California
BOP region	Western
Designated capacity	2,016 · camp 328 · 3,244 across the complex
Housing	Cells and dormitories
Medical care level	Level 2 · complex-wide
RDAP	See where the residential program is
UNICOR	Yes · agribusiness (farm)
Camp	Satellite camp and Camp N · minimum security

Of the 2,234, 1,895 are inside the institution, 220 at the satellite camp and 119 at a second camp the Bureau lists as Camp N. FCI Lompoc II is one of the federal prisons in California and the only one the Bureau has renamed from a penitentiary; it falls in the Bureau’s Western Region. In the spring of 2020 this complex had one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in the federal system, which produced a class action, a preliminary injunction and one of the first two inspection reports the Inspector General issued in its pandemic series.

FCI Lompoc II is the prison that used to be USP Lompoc

FCI Lompoc II is the former USP Lompoc, the penitentiary on Klein Boulevard; get this backwards and you will write to the wrong prison. The neighboring prison, called FCI Lompoc for decades, is now FCI Lompoc I. The numbering runs against intuition: the older, plain-named institution took the I, and the renamed penitentiary took the II.

The two institutions at FCC Lompoc, and which is which

Both are low security and both sit inside Federal Correctional Complex Lompoc, on adjoining land north of the city. They do not share a street address, a telephone number or a population count. Counts are as of September 2026.

Institution	Code	Was called	Address	Camp	Population
FCI Lompoc II (this page)	LOM	USP Lompoc	3901 Klein Blvd	Yes — two	2,234
FCI Lompoc I	LOF	FCI Lompoc	3600 Guard Rd	No	885

The Bureau’s own records keep the two apart. Its website treats LOM, and not LOF, as recently renamed, which is why this institution’s page on bop.gov, and not its neighbor’s, carries the notice that “this facility has recently undergone a name change to reflect its updated mission and security level.” The March 2024 PREA audit, written a month before the rename, records the three population blocks as Camp, FCI and USP. The Bureau’s internal population labels still read LOMPOC II FCI, LOMPOC II FCI-CAMP and LOMPOC II FCI-CAMP N here, against a single line reading LOMPOC FCI next door.

What changed, and on the Bureau’s own dates

The security level changed first and the name caught up later. A table of Bureau data published by the Justice Department’s Inspector General in July 2025, in its audit of the Bureau’s oversight of restraints, gives both dates: the security level went from medium to low on March 23, 2023, and the name went from USP to FCI on April 4, 2024. The same table shows that USP Lompoc was a medium-security penitentiary before the change, not a high-security one; of the six penitentiaries renamed in the April 2024 action, only Atlanta and Lompoc were already medium.

The Bureau announced the renaming on April 4, 2024, explaining that its Population Management and Capacity Planning Committee had recommended the changes in January to match missions and security levels that had already changed, under Program Statement 1001.14 on naming Bureau property.

Where the old name still appears in current Bureau documents

The old name still appears in several current Bureau documents. The Bureau’s First Step Act Approved Programs Guide (August 2026) still lists this institution in its own key as “Lompoc USP · USP · LOM” and the neighboring one as “Lompoc FCI · FCI · LOF” — twenty-eight months after the rename. The Inspector General’s staff-survey dashboard still labels this institution’s results “Lompoc USP.” And the Admission & Orientation handbook the Bureau publishes for both prisons, from 2015, refers throughout to “the Medium,” “the Low,” “South Camp” and “North Camp”: there, “the Medium” means this institution and “the Low” means FCI Lompoc I, and several rules differ between them.

One more oddity is an error. The FCI Lompoc II page on bop.gov offers its PREA audit under the link text “FCI Lompoc I PREA Report,” and the FCI Lompoc I page offers the same document as the “FCI Lompoc II PREA Report.” Both links serve the identical file, the audit of the whole complex. The labels are crossed; the file behind them is the right one either way.

What is the security level at FCI Lompoc II?

FCI Lompoc II is a low-security institution, with minimum security at its two camps. The Bureau reclassified this prison from medium to low on March 23, 2023, and although the buildings did not change, the rules did: at a low, a man ordinarily seals his own outgoing letters and lives in a housing unit rather than a cell block under controlled movement all day.

The physical plant is still a penitentiary’s. The 2024 PREA audit counted 94 buildings and 16 housing units across the complex, nine of them multiple-occupancy cell units and seven open dormitories, with 144 segregation cells and not one single-cell housing unit on the site. The Inspector General, in its 2020 review of the complex, described the cells here as “open bar cells (as opposed to solid doors).” That is the shape of the place: bars and tiers on one side, dormitories on the other, camps beyond them.

How a man is scored into a low, and what can move him

Designation is decided at the Bureau’s Designation and Sentence Computation Center in Grand Prairie, Texas, under the Bureau’s security designation rules: security points set the starting level, a Public Safety Factor — a sex offense or a long sentence — sets a floor points alone cannot go below, and a Management Variable lets staff hold someone at a level the points do not call for. Because Lompoc II sits at the top of the low range with a former penitentiary’s plant, it takes men whose points are on the high side of low and men stepping down from mediums. If the score is the problem, the argument is made in writing to the Unit Team at a program review and, failing that, through the administrative remedy process. Our guide to federal prison transfers sets out what moves a designation.

The camp, the North Camp, and the mailing address problem

This institution reports three separate populations, not two: as of September 2026, 1,895 men at the institution, 220 at “LOMPOC II FCI-CAMP” and 119 at “LOMPOC II FCI-CAMP N.” The complex handbook calls them South Camp and North Camp, puts the residential drug treatment unit at North Camp and a psychology office in the chapel area at South Camp, and notes that men at both camps have self-service washers and dryers the institution does not have.

The mailing addresses do not match the populations. The Bureau publishes three population lines but only two inmate mailing addresses for code LOM: the institution at 3901 Klein Boulevard and a single camp address at 3705 West Farm Road. There is no published Camp N address. If a letter comes back, or if deposits appear not to be reaching him, the first question to put to the Unit Team in writing is which camp he is assigned to and which address the mailroom uses for it.

Who are the notable inmates at FCI Lompoc II?

Of the names that circulate for FCI Lompoc II, the Bureau’s Inmate Locator shows one man in custody here now, Samuel Bankman-Fried, and one recorded as having escaped from its camp in July 2026. The Bureau publishes no roster of who is held at any institution, and the name lists found online are built from old news reports that are usually years out of date.

• Samuel Bankman-Fried, register 37244-510. The locator records him at facility code LOM — this institution — with a projected release date of May 3, 2044. National reporting places him at “a federal prison in Lompoc,” which is true of two prisons on the same road; the Bureau’s own record names this one, and mail and money sent to the other address will not reach him. He is the only person on this list the locator currently shows in custody here.
• Omar Briceno-Quijano, register 09783-509. On July 23, 2026, the institution announced that he had been found missing from the minimum-security camp. He was 35, serving 14 years imposed in federal court in Colorado in 2022 for conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine and heroin and conspiracy to commit money laundering, and officials referred the matter to the U.S. Marshals Service and the FBI. The locator now reads “Escaped On: 07/23/2026” and names no prison; the record behind it still carries this institution’s code and no projected release date.
• Chi Mak, register 29252-112, a defense-contractor engineer convicted in 2007 of conspiring to export U.S. naval technology to China and sentenced in 2008 to 293 months. Listings that say he is serving a 24-year sentence here are out of date. The locator now reads “Deceased: 10/31/2022,” and the record behind it gives his last facility as LOF, FCI Lompoc I, the other prison.
• Demetrius Flenory, register 13037-078, a founder of the Black Mafia Family, whom older pages place at Lompoc serving 30 years. The locator records an actual release date of January 27, 2026, and a last recorded facility of the Miami residential reentry office. He has been released.

Three further names that circulate for Lompoc — Christopher Boyce, Reed Slatkin and Ivan Boesky — each have locator records showing release from a residential reentry office elsewhere, and nothing in the Bureau’s public data ties any of them to this institution, so they are not listed above.

One death is recorded here in the Bureau’s own memorial list, and it is a staff death. Senior Officer Specialist Scott J. Williams died in the line of duty at USP Lompoc on April 3, 1997, and is one of the twenty-seven names the Bureau read at its Correctional Workers’ Week memorial service in Washington on May 5, 2026.

How do I find someone at FCI Lompoc II?

To find someone at FCI Lompoc II, search the Bureau’s Inmate Locator by register number if you have it, or by first and last name with race, age and sex if you do not. The register number is eight digits with a hyphen and never changes for the life of a sentence, so it is the single most useful thing to write down.

Read the result carefully, because the two Lompoc prisons display almost the same name. A man held here is shown as located at “Lompoc II FCI”; a man at the other Lompoc prison is shown at “Lompoc I FCI,” a different institution with a different address and telephone number. One letter separates them, and the codes behind the screen, LOM for this institution and LOF for FCI Lompoc I, never appear on it. Nor does the result say whether a man is at the institution or at one of the camps, which report under the same code. For someone who has left custody it shows only a date and a status, such as release, escape or death, and no facility at all. If it returns nothing, he is probably not in Bureau custody: a pretrial detainee held for the Marshals, someone in state custody, or someone in immigration detention will not appear. Our explainer on how inmate number searches work covers the differences.

How do I write to someone at FCI Lompoc II?

Write to someone at FCI Lompoc II using the address block that matches where he is held, with the register number on the envelope. Mail without it is returned to sender.

If he is at the institution	If he is at the camp
Inmate Name and Register Number FCI Lompoc II Federal Correctional Institution 3901 Klein Boulevard Lompoc, CA 93436	Inmate Name and Register Number FCI Lompoc II Camp Satellite Prison Camp 3705 West Farm Road Lompoc, CA 93436

These are the two inmate mailing addresses the Bureau publishes for code LOM. General correspondence is opened and read outside his presence, and money must never go in a letter: cash enclosed with correspondence is contraband.

Legal mail is treated as special mail only if the envelope is marked “Special Mail — Open only in the presence of the inmate” and carries the sender’s name and an identification that the sender is an attorney. Marked that way it is opened in front of him and inspected for contraband but not read; unmarked, a lawyer’s letter is ordinary mail. The Bureau’s correspondence regulations and our guides to writing to someone in federal prison and to attorney-client communication in the Bureau set out the rules in full.

How do I send money to someone at FCI Lompoc II?

Money for someone at FCI Lompoc II goes through one of three national routes, none of them to the prison itself. The institution accepts nothing through its mailroom, and the visiting supplement says in terms that no money, check or money order will be taken from a visitor for deposit.

• By mail, to the national lockbox. A money order made out to his committed name and eight-digit register number, sent to Federal Bureau of Prisons, P.O. Box 474701, Des Moines, Iowa 50947-0001, with your name and return address in the upper left corner. Nothing else may be in the envelope; anything enclosed with the money order is destroyed. Non-postal money orders and non-government checks are held 15 days. Personal checks and cash are refused.
• Western Union Quick Collect. At an agent, by phone on 1-800-634-3422 option 2, or online at Western Union. Enter the register number with no spaces or dashes followed immediately by his last name, his committed full name on the attention line, and the code city FBOP, DC.
• MoneyGram ExpressPayment. At an agent with the blue form, or online through MoneyGram up to $300. Company name Federal Bureau of Prisons, city and state Washington, DC, receive code 7932, register number then last name, committed full name on the beneficiary line.

Funds sent by Western Union or MoneyGram between 7:00 a.m. and 9:00 p.m. Eastern post within two to four hours, seven days a week; anything later posts by 7:00 a.m. the next morning. Get the name or number wrong and the money may land in a stranger’s account and stay there: both companies warn that funds posted to the wrong person may not be recoverable. More detail is in our guide to sending money to a federal inmate.

What are the visiting hours at FCI Lompoc II?

Visiting at FCI Lompoc II is on Saturdays, Sundays and federal holidays, 8:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., for the institution and both camps alike. The hours come from FCC Lompoc Complex Supplement LOX 5267.09d, “Visiting Regulations,” dated July 16, 2025, and signed by Complex Warden B. Birkholz, which replaced the December 2022 edition. There is no weekday visiting.

Two cut-offs in that supplement matter. No visitor is processed through the front entrance before 8:30 a.m. or after 2:00 p.m. — arrive at 2:15 and you will not get in, though the room stays open until three. And no vehicle may enter the visitor lot before 8:00 a.m.; waiting on the shoulder of the access road or parking anywhere else on federal property, staff housing included, can cost the day’s visit and, the supplement says, can lead to suspension of visiting privileges.

The supplement is the only published visiting schedule for Lompoc II, and the Warden can restrict or cancel visiting at any time. The Bureau’s visiting regulations set the national rules behind it, and our guide to visiting a federal inmate explains them. Call 805-735-2771 before you travel.

Who can visit, and how the six points work

Visits are rationed by points. Each man gets six visiting points a calendar month, and a Saturday or Sunday visit costs two points regardless of how long it lasts, so six points buys three weekend visits. Visits on federal holidays are excluded from the deduction, which makes a holiday Monday the most valuable visiting day of the year here. Approved Prisoner Visitation and Support volunteers are not charged points at all and go to the front of the processing line.

An approved list holds ten people at most, and approved friends may be capped at three depending on how many family members are on it. The visitor must have known him before he was incarcerated unless the Warden waives it, and anyone outside confirmed immediate family may be background-checked. Four people may visit at once, children under sixteen included. If the room fills, staff clear it in a set order: volunteers first, then visitors who traveled the shortest distance, then the earliest arrivals, an order to keep in mind when planning a trip from out of state.

The dress code, and what you may carry in

The color rules are the ones people trip over: no khaki and no gray of any kind, because those are inmate colors, and no plain white T-shirt as the only shirt. Also barred are watches, sunglasses, hats, gloves, open-toed shoes, see-through or revealing clothing, sleeveless tops, hoodies, athletic pants, gang insignia and sports team merchandise. Knee-length Bermuda shorts are allowed; skirts and dresses must reach the bend of the knee.

What you may carry in is short: one clear purse no larger than eight inches, and only enough prescription medication in its original container to preserve life during the visit, left at the officer’s station. Vending machines take cards only, so a debit or credit card is the only way to buy your visit a sandwich. Two provisions are unusual enough to name: certified therapy and seeing-eye dogs are authorized with a California certification, and the handler may bring exactly four clear waste bags and no other color; and infant items are itemized down to two bottles, six diapers and two blankets, with no strollers and no baby carriers.

Identification, screening and the Special Housing video room

Everyone sixteen and over needs a state or government photo identification carrying the REAL ID compliance marking, a passport with a United States visa stamp, or an I-94 form. What is expressly not accepted: a passport with no visa stamp, a Mexican consular card, a border crossing card, and photo identification from a bank, a business, a high school or a college. Screening is a metal detector for everyone, a random pat search, and random ion spectrometry testing: fail the detector and you are not admitted, refuse the ion scan and you cannot visit for forty-eight hours. Stepping back outside the front entrance after processing ends the visit.

If he is in the Special Housing Unit the visit still happens, but not in the visiting room and not face to face. Every social visit for a man in the SHU at FCC Lompoc takes place in the non-contact video room at South Camp, over live monitors, capped at one hour and timed. He is escorted there in hand restraints and may refuse, in which case staff will tell you at the South Camp desk and you will be asked to leave. A trip to see someone in the SHU is a trip to that video room.

Getting there

The complex sits immediately east of Vandenberg Space Force Base, and the directions turn on that. The highway exit is signed for Vandenberg, not for the prison, and mapping applications frequently route visitors toward base gates where an unauthorized vehicle will be turned around. The Bureau’s own written directions, in the complex handbook, are keyed to the base.

• From Santa Barbara, 50 to 60 minutes: U.S. 101 north to the Lompoc/Vandenberg exit, which connects to Highway 1 into the city of Lompoc. At the end of Highway 1 turn left on Ocean Avenue, drive through to Floradale Avenue, turn right and follow the signs to the facility.
• From Santa Maria, about 25 miles: Highway 135 to Highway S-20 to the Santa Lucia Canyon Road exit, which runs directly to the facility and to the downtown hotels.
• From Los Angeles International, three to four hours: I-405 north to U.S. 101 north to Highway 1 north. The handbook warns that this route runs through the worst of the Los Angeles traffic.

Santa Maria airport is 25 miles north and Santa Barbara 50 miles south; both are commuter fields with rental cars, and the handbook notes Santa Maria is often closed on foggy mornings. City of Lompoc Transit runs buses on weekdays and Saturdays and not at all on Sundays or legal holidays, so a visitor relying on the city bus can reach a Saturday visit and cannot reach a Sunday one. The directions are the 2015 handbook’s, and it calls the base Vandenberg Air Force Base, which was redesignated Vandenberg Space Force Base on May 14, 2021.

How do phone calls and email work at FCI Lompoc II?

Phone calls at FCI Lompoc II run one way: he calls you, and you cannot call him. Calls run on the Bureau’s TRUFONE system using a nine-digit access code and a voice-verification enrollment, every number has to be added to an approved list, and every call is monitored and recorded except a properly arranged unmonitored legal call.

Under the Bureau’s telephone regulations, Program Statement 5264.09, issued September 3, 2026, the allowance is 510 minutes a month: 300 minutes free to anyone eligible for First Step Act telephone incentives, and 210 more that anyone can buy once the 300 are used up. A single call should generally not exceed 15 minutes, at least 30 minutes must pass between completed calls, and the monthly limit does not apply to unmonitored legal calls. The 2008 policy’s 100 extra minutes for November and December did not survive its rescission. The hours are local to this complex and narrower than the national rule: the handbook sets telephone operation from 6:00 a.m. to no later than 9:45 p.m., with one exception — men in the re-entry unit may use the phone until 11:00 p.m. Access is normally blocked Monday through Friday from 7:30 to 10:30 a.m. and from 12:30 p.m. until after the 4:00 p.m. count clears, because those are working hours, so a call on a weekday afternoon before the count falls inside a blackout.

Email runs through TRULINCS and is not the internet: he composes on a shared terminal, you reply through CorrLinks after accepting an invitation, messages are plain text with no attachments, and there is a per-minute charge. The same system carries prescription refill requests and a Justice Department sexual-abuse reporting mailbox that goes straight to the Inspector General. Our guides to CorrLinks and TRULINCS and to inmate phone calls cover setting both up from the outside.

What can people buy at the FCI Lompoc II commissary?

People at FCI Lompoc II can spend up to $460 a month at the commissary, the ceiling set by the Bureau’s trust fund rules, Program Statement 4500.13, issued May 7, 2026, which records the increase from $360. During the November and December holiday period the ceiling goes up by $50, for no more than one validation period. Items that do not count against it include stamps, over-the-counter medication and vitamins, copy cards and paper, footwear, mattresses and a secured media device. Revalidation is automatic once a month, and at this complex the validation date is the fifth digit of the register number multiplied by three, plus one — so a man whose fifth digit is a five revalidates on the sixteenth.

The 2015 handbook the Bureau still publishes for this complex states that “the National Spending Limit is 370.00 but may be further restricted at the local level,” a figure that has never been the national limit in that form and is in any event superseded. Figures of $360, the limit until May 2026, or $320 are out of date wherever they still appear.

The commissary order form is the oldest current document on this institution’s page: headed “FCC LOMPOC COMMISSARY,” revised in 2014 and signed by an Associate Warden. Treat its prices as historical and its rules as probably still operative, because the rules are the useful part. The rule that decides a man’s week is the shopping-day rotation: his day is fixed by a two-digit range of his register number, and the ranges rotate every quarter, so it changes four times a year.

Quarter	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday
First quarter, January–March	25–49	50–74	75–99	00–24
Second quarter, April–June	50–74	75–99	00–24	25–49
Third quarter, July–September	75–99	00–24	25–49	50–74
Fourth quarter, October–December	00–24	25–49	50–74	75–99

The form does not say which two digits of the register number it means, so a man reading it for the first time has to ask.

Three more rules apply from the first commissary day. Read the “out of list” board before handing in the sheet, because there are no add-ons and no substitutions. All sales are final the moment you leave the sales window. And items marked with a small (c) are those approved for men on a religious diet, which is how the kosher and halal entrees, capped at fourteen a week, are identified. Alongside the soups, tortillas and coffee, the 2014 form sells a typewriter ribbon at $6.70 and a correction ribbon at $5.80, a Casio calculator and a Spanish-English dictionary at $1.30. Typewriter ribbons on a commissary list in the 2010s tell you how much of the legal work in this complex was still being done. Our page on federal commissary items and limits has the national picture.

What programs are available at FCI Lompoc II?

The programs available at FCI Lompoc II are the ones marked for it in the Bureau’s First Step Act Approved Programs Guide (August 2026), which records for each institution the programs that earn First Step Act time credits. For this institution it marks anger management, basic cognitive skills, criminal thinking, emotional self-regulation, the literacy program, English as a second language, faith-based conflict management, family programming, national parenting, four kinds of occupational education, post-secondary education, social skills training, Threshold, Seeking Safety, non-residential drug treatment and Federal Prison Industries, alongside productive activities including Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, drug education, opioid use disorder treatment, victim impact and trauma education. Being marked in the guide is not the same as being delivered: a program appears there if the institution is approved to run it, not if a class is running this quarter or if there is a seat. The question to put to the Unit Team in writing is when the next cycle starts and where he sits on the list.

Drug treatment, and where the residential program actually is

The Bureau’s own records disagree about where the Residential Drug Abuse Program runs at Lompoc, and it matters because the program carries up to a year off a sentence under 18 U.S.C. § 3621(e).

The August 2026 guide contains a list of RDAP locations totaling 57 programs at 50 locations. In the Western Region column it names “FCI Lompoc” once. On the guide’s own key that name maps to code LOF — FCI Lompoc I, the neighboring institution — and the guide’s programs-by-institution table agrees, marking residential drug treatment for LOF and not for LOM. So on the current national record, the residential program at this complex belongs to the other prison.

The complex’s own handbook points the other way. It describes a psychology department staffed complex-wide by a chief psychologist, two drug abuse program coordinators, three staff psychologists, six residential and three non-residential drug treatment specialists and a technician, and it locates one of the department’s offices “in RDAP at North Camp” — the population the Bureau counts under this institution as Camp N. The handbook is from 2015 and the guide from 2026, so the newer document should control, but the older one is the only source that says where in the complex the unit physically sits, and the camp it names still reports under code LOM.

Both halves of the record agree on two things. Non-residential drug treatment and the drug education course are marked for this institution. And a man found qualified for the residential program is transferred to wherever it runs, which may mean a move within this complex or out of it. If RDAP is the point of the sentence plan, put the question to the drug abuse program coordinator in writing: which unit would a qualification send him to? The interview window opens roughly 42 to 24 months before release, and missing it is the most common way the year is lost.

UNICOR at Lompoc: the Bureau’s farm

Federal Prison Industries runs factories at most institutions. At Lompoc it runs a farm, and it is the only agriculture operation in the corporation. UNICOR’s agribusiness division lists a single point of contact for the whole division — a Lompoc operations manager — and describes the operation as the Bureau’s dairy farm at Lompoc, selling produce to the Bureau and to local government customers; its listings are broccoli in crowns and bunches, large lima beans in fifty-pound sacks, and livestock hay in round bales averaging 1,400 pounds.

The August 2026 guide lists Federal Prison Industries at this institution and at FCI Lompoc I, and does not say which staffs which part of the operation. Practically it means a Lompoc work assignment can be agricultural rather than industrial, that pay grades and the waiting list follow the ordinary UNICOR rules, that hiring priority goes to men within three years of release and to veterans, and that the hours count toward time credits.

Education, work assignments and vocational training

Literacy is compulsory: a man without a high school diploma or its equivalent must enroll in the GED program, and good conduct time does not vest while he is coded as making unsatisfactory progress. Above entry level, every job in the institution requires a diploma, a GED or a documented exemption, which is why a pay rise starts at the education department rather than the work detail. The guide marks all four categories of occupational education here and post-secondary education; which of them is running changes with the instructor and the funding, so ask education for the current vocational training catalog.

Faith-based programming and the companion program

The chaplaincy runs worship, religious education, the religious diet program, ceremonial meals and holiday observance, and approves a minister of record for a man’s visiting list. The guide marks faith-based conflict management, Threshold and Embracing Interfaith here, along with the Aleph correspondence course program, which it marks at this institution and not at FCI Lompoc I; it marks Life Connections at neither. Requests for a religious diet or an accommodation go to the chaplain rather than the Unit Team, as our overview of religious programs in federal prison explains.

One program runs here and not next door. The Bureau conducts suicide watches at this institution only, so the inmate companion program — men trained to sit with someone on watch — exists only here; FCI Lompoc I runs a peer mentor program instead, and the guide’s institution table records exactly that split. Selection requires a sentenced man with no 100-series incident report in three years, not in financial responsibility or education refusal status, and psychologically stable.

What is daily life like at FCI Lompoc II?

Daily life at FCI Lompoc II is built around counts: at least five in twenty-four hours, with an extra at ten in the morning on weekends and holidays. The schedule below is the complex handbook’s (2015), the only published schedule for this institution; treat the times as the frame rather than the timetable.

Time	What happens
6:00 a.m.	General wake-up. Getting to work and to meals is the man’s own responsibility; sleeping in is a disciplinary matter
7:30 a.m. – 3:30 p.m.	Work hours, khaki uniform required. Telephones blocked 7:30–10:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. to the 4:00 p.m. count
4:00 p.m.	Standing count. Call-outs for the following day are posted on the unit board after it clears
Evening	Evening meal, then controlled movement in ten-minute windows beginning ten minutes before each hour
9:45 p.m.	Telephones close, except the re-entry unit, which has until 11:00 p.m.
10:00 p.m.	Standing count
Weekends and holidays	Compound secured at 9:30 a.m. for a 10:00 a.m. count; brunch replaces two meals; visiting 8:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.

Controlled movement is the rhythm hardest to picture from outside. Outside working hours no one crosses the compound at will: staff announce a ten-minute window, and within it a man moves in one direction only. Miss it and he waits for the next hour. During the evening meal he may go out to the yard, the gym or the chapel, but he is secured inside whichever he chose until the next movement is called.

Housing is cells and dormitories both, and no single-cell housing anywhere on site. Laundry is exchanged one for one, at this institution on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and at the camp on Thursdays. Identification cards must be carried the moment a man steps out of his quarters. Recreation runs to hobby craft — ceramics, leatherwork, mosaics, crochet, sculpture, woodworking and lapidary — plus organized sport, table games, music and wellness classes. Because the institution was activated before 1996 it falls under the Zimmer Amendment, which bars the Bureau from spending money on R-rated films, on instruction in boxing, wrestling, martial arts or weightlifting, and on electric instruments. Recreation has its own sanction ladder, separate from the disciplinary process: a first violation brings an incident report and a recommended seven-day suspension, a second removal from league play or thirty days.

What happened at Lompoc during COVID-19?

FCC Lompoc had one of the first and worst coronavirus outbreaks in the federal prison system, and it produced more documentation than almost any other institution: an Inspector General inspection, a certified class action, and a preliminary injunction ordering the Bureau to reconsider every medically vulnerable man here for release to home confinement.

The outbreak, on the Inspector General’s numbers

The complex held about 2,700 men in four facilities in the spring of 2020 — a penitentiary, a correctional institution and two camps — with 416 staff. Its first positive staff test came on March 27, 2020, and its first positive inmate test on March 30. By May 11 the Bureau reported 25 staff and 912 men with active infections and two deaths, and by May 13 more than 900 men at Lompoc had contracted the virus. Of 53 staff tested by early May, 32 were positive.

The often-quoted statistic that more than 75 percent of men at Lompoc tested positive describes the other prison, not this one. Universal testing was run only at the FCI — all 1,162 of its men, from May 4, 2020 — and by May 11 at least 891 of them had tested positive. That institution is today FCI Lompoc I. Lompoc officials then told the Inspector General they would not keep testing everyone “because the outbreak at the USP and camps had subsided.”

The true infection count at this institution in 2020 was never established, because the Bureau never tested everyone here.

What the Inspector General found

The Inspector General inspected FCC Lompoc remotely between April 23 and May 1, 2020, and published Pandemic Response Report 20-086 on July 23, 2020 — telephone interviews, documents, data and a staff survey, with no site visit. It and the companion report on FCC Tucson were the first two the Inspector General issued in its pandemic series.

• Medical staffing stood at 62 percent before the outbreak, on the Health Services Administrator’s own account, and the shortage “was among the biggest challenges in mitigating COVID-19 transmission.” By April 30 the Bureau had sent nine temporary-duty medical staff, raising the complement from about 24 to about 33.
• Staff movement restrictions arrived fifteen days late. The Bureau ordered institutions with cases to limit staff movement on March 31 and the Western Regional Office told Lompoc the same day to plan to eliminate movement between the USP, the FCI and the camps; the acting Complex Warden’s memorandum went out April 14. Officials said they could not compartmentalize staff until enough borrowed officers arrived; by April 30 the Bureau had deployed 99, raising non-medical staffing from about 390 to about 490.
• A man who reported nausea, vomiting, malaise and a dry cough on March 22 was examined on four separate days through March 26 without being tested or isolated, because he had not left the institution and had no known contact. The hospital admitted him March 26, tested him March 27 and confirmed him positive March 30. The Inspector General concluded the institution “should have taken greater precautions to isolate an inmate with an indeterminate illness.” Screening was separately found “not fully effective”: two staff came to work in late March after symptoms the process did not catch.
• The complex had no permanent leadership. The Complex Warden post fell vacant on January 19, 2020, and was not filled until June 7; three officials served as acting Complex Warden during the outbreak, and nine of the fourteen managers interviewed were temporary-duty or acting. One wrote that USP Lompoc “had an acting Warden and no Captains, which likely led to [a] lack of decision making and action.”
• Restrictions escalated from suspended visits on March 13, to a “stay in place” order on April 1, to a full health lockdown from April 20 that suspended showers, telephones, computer terminals and commissary. During that lockdown, the report records, approximately 1,000 men at the USP had no access to showers; small controlled movements resumed on May 8. Men were confined to their cells twenty-four hours a day without recreation — more restrictive, the Inspector General noted, than ordinary Special Housing Unit placement.
• Home confinement barely moved. Between April 4 and May 15 the Central Office sent Lompoc nine rosters naming 509 men as potentially eligible; review plus a fourteen-day pre-release quarantine meant three weeks or more per transfer. As of May 13, with more than 900 men infected, eight had been transferred to home confinement.
• Of 109 Lompoc staff who answered the survey, 36 percent said more hygiene supplies for inmates was an immediate need and 55 percent said the same for staff.

Torres v. Milusnic: what the court actually ordered

On May 16, 2020, five men at Lompoc filed a class petition against the Warden and the Director of the Bureau in the Central District of California, represented by the ACLU Foundation of Southern California and the Prison Law Office. On July 14, 2020, Judge Consuelo B. Marshall granted a preliminary injunction and certified a provisional class in a fifty-page order reported at 472 F. Supp. 3d 713. The class was everyone in post-conviction custody at FCI Lompoc and USP Lompoc, then and in future, who was over fifty or had a listed underlying condition — lung disease, serious heart conditions, diabetes, chronic kidney disease, immunocompromise, obesity, asthma, hypertension, HIV, dementia and smoking among them. Both Lompoc institutions were inside it.

The court ordered less than is usually described. It did not order anyone released. It ordered the Bureau to make “full and speedy use” of its CARES Act authority and to evaluate each class member’s eligibility for home confinement in a way that gave “substantial weight to the inmate’s risk factors for severe illness or death from COVID-19 based on age (over 50) or Underlying Health Conditions.” Around that it built a schedule: a sealed list of every class member; written notice to each man that he was being considered, with free calls or emails so he could put a release plan together; a sealed list of eligibility decisions with a written explanation for every denial; published compassionate-release criteria that took the virus into account; and a site visit with confidential attorney-client contact.

The case ran more than two years, was recaptioned Garries v. Milusnic as the original petitioners went home, and ended on October 11, 2022, when the court granted final approval of a class settlement and awarded class counsel $375,000 in fees. Two related rulings mark the limit of what habeas can do about conditions here: Macias v. Bradley (C.D. Cal., Nov. 10, 2020) held that a petition resting on the USP Lompoc outbreak and seeking social distancing, masks and better air handling raised conditions claims that must be brought as a civil rights action rather than under 28 U.S.C. § 2241, and Lomeli v. Birkholz (S.D. Cal., July 26, 2023), applying Pinson v. Carvajal, held that a complaint about care and conditions at FCC Lompoc is not at the core of habeas.

What do inspectors say about conditions at FCI Lompoc II?

Three bodies have looked at this complex and published what they found: the Inspector General in 2020, a contract auditor under the Prison Rape Elimination Act in 2024, and the federal court that supervised the Bureau here from 2020 to 2022. The District of Columbia’s Corrections Information Council has never inspected Lompoc.

The 2024 PREA audit of the complex

The most recent independent review is the Prison Rape Elimination Act audit of Federal Correctional Complex Lompoc, conducted on site March 5–7, 2024, by Mark McCorkle of Corrections Consulting, LLC, and finalized on March 28, 2024. It runs to 149 pages and covers the whole complex, so read its figures as complex figures.

The audit found no standard out of compliance: thirty-eight met, seven exceeded, none unmet. In the twelve months before it, the complex recorded six allegations of sexual abuse — four inmate-on-inmate and two staff-on-inmate — producing five administrative investigations and no criminal investigations, and zero allegations of sexual harassment. Some numbers on the form are more useful than the compliance finding. Designated capacity across the complex was 3,244 against a population of 3,193 on the audit date, and the form records the complex as having been over capacity at some point in the previous twelve months; capacity for this institution alone was 2,016, and it held 1,895 as of September 2026. The complex was not accredited by the American Correctional Association, the National Commission on Correctional Health Care or CALEA in the preceding three years. Forensic medical examinations after a sexual assault are done neither on site nor at a hospital but at a rape crisis center. The facility employs no criminal investigators of its own; criminal investigation of sexual abuse falls to an outside Justice Department component.

Staffing, cameras and the thirty-day video window

The audit counted 402 staff who may have contact with men in custody, 59 of them hired in the previous twelve months, alongside 13 contractors and 108 volunteers. Set that against the 2020 record — medical staffing at 62 percent, 99 officers borrowed from other institutions to cover mandatory posts — and the pattern here is a staffing problem that surfaces whenever anything else goes wrong. It surfaced in the Inspector General’s overtime advisory too: in fiscal year 2019 FCC Lompoc logged 91,610 overtime hours costing $4,537,285, about one and a half percent of the Bureau’s entire overtime bill. And in its 2021 chaplaincy audit this complex appeared among the worst-staffed chapels in the system, with three chaplains for 2,842 men.

One PREA finding carries a practical deadline. The complex upgraded from a five-recorder camera system installed in 2018 to an eight-recorder system, added ten digital cameras at the South and North camps and replaced 45 analog cameras. The upgrade raised retention of recorded video from fourteen days to thirty. Thirty days is how long the footage of an assault, a use of force, a fall or a medical emergency exists. If the video matters, a written preservation request has to reach the institution inside that window, and a month is not long when mail into a federal prison takes a week.

Where the Inspector General has looked, and where it has not

The DOJ Office of the Inspector General has not conducted an on-site inspection of this facility. Its 2020 review of this complex was explicitly remote — telephone interviews, document review and survey data, with no site visit — and it has not returned. Since 2023 the Inspector General has run a program of unannounced on-site inspections of federal prisons; on its own count in May 2026, in its report on USP Canaan, it had by then inspected fourteen institutions, seven individually and six as part of a concurrent review of food service operations, with a further effort under way at FCI Berlin. Neither Lompoc institution is among them.

Twenty-six of its published products name this complex, and four are criminal cases against its staff. A former Lompoc officer pleaded guilty to wire fraud in August 2020, and another was sentenced for wire fraud in April 2023. Most recently, a serving Lompoc correctional officer was arrested on May 28, 2026, on a complaint charging conspiracy to introduce contraband, and on August 5, 2026, he and his wife each pleaded guilty. The Inspector General’s account is that between about March and September 2023 a man inside paid the officer to bring in contraband including suboxone, with more than $6,650 moving to the officer’s wife through a payment app while intermediaries handed over the goods in person. That is the most current independent evidence of how contraband enters this complex, and it entered through the staff entrance.

FCI Lompoc II in the news

Recent news about FCI Lompoc II centers on the August 2026 guilty pleas of a correctional officer and his wife, the July 2026 walkaway from the camp and the Bureau’s May 2026 memorial service; older items concern the 2024 renaming, the 2023 change in security level, the Lompoc coronavirus litigation and three deaths the Bureau reported in 2020 and 2021.

• August 5, 2026 — Paul and Sylvia Betancourt each pleaded guilty in the Central District of California to conspiracy to introduce contraband to a federal inmate. Paul Betancourt was a correctional officer at FCC Lompoc; the Inspector General’s Los Angeles office investigated.
• July 24, 2026 — the institution announced that Omar Briceno-Quijano, 35, had been found missing from the minimum-security camp the previous afternoon and remained unaccounted for, and referred the matter to the U.S. Marshals Service and the FBI.
• May 5, 2026 — at the Bureau’s annual memorial service in Washington, Senior Officer Specialist Scott J. Williams, killed at USP Lompoc on April 3, 1997, was read among the Bureau’s twenty-seven fallen.
• April 4, 2024 — the Bureau renamed USP Lompoc as FCI Lompoc II, one of six penitentiaries renamed that day, and renumbered the neighboring FCI Lompoc as FCI Lompoc I.
• March 23, 2023 — the institution’s security level changed from medium to low, on the date the Bureau later gave the Inspector General.
• October 11, 2022 — the district court granted final approval of the class settlement in the Lompoc coronavirus litigation and awarded class counsel $375,000 in fees.
• April 2020 to October 2021 — the Bureau posted three news releases reporting the deaths of people held at USP Lompoc, as this institution was then named, or at its satellite camp; the Bureau’s releases are listed on its press release page.
• July 14, 2020 — the district court certified a provisional class covering both Lompoc institutions and ordered the Bureau to evaluate every medically vulnerable class member for home confinement, giving substantial weight to his risk factors.

Frequently asked questions about FCI Lompoc II

Problems at FCI Lompoc II: where we can help

The problems we help with at FCI Lompoc II are the ones visible in this complex’s own record, and they are not the problems of a different prison.

• Medical care that is not arriving. The Inspector General found this complex running at 62 percent medical staffing before the pandemic, and it was the first thing that broke under pressure. The route is a written request to health services, then the administrative remedy process, and every rung has a deadline. Where delay or neglect has caused injury, a Federal Tort Claims Act claim has its own two-year clock. See medical care in federal prison.
• Evidence on a thirty-day timer. Video here is retained for thirty days. If there has been an assault, a use of force, a fall or a missed medical emergency, a written preservation demand needs to reach the institution inside that month.
• RDAP eligibility and where the program runs. The Bureau’s own records point at two different Lompoc institutions for residential drug treatment. Getting a straight written answer about which one a qualification leads to, and getting the interview inside the 42-to-24-month window, is worth doing early. See our federal prison early release practice.
• First Step Act time credits — whether the programs he is in are the ones the August 2026 guide actually credits at this institution, and whether the credits are being calculated and applied.
• Designation and transfer, including a move between the institution and the camps here, and the Public Safety Factors and Management Variables that hold a score where it is. Our guide to federal prison transfers and our federal prison consulting services cover both.
• Contraband investigations that sweep in the wrong man. An institution that finds drugs it did not expect writes incident reports widely. Disciplinary proceedings that threaten good conduct time under the Bureau’s discipline rules are defensible, and Special Housing Unit placements that outlast their reason are challengeable — including protective custody, where at this complex the only social visit available is an hour on a video monitor at South Camp.
• Halfway house and home confinement placement under the Bureau’s placement procedures; compassionate release under the Bureau’s reduction-in-sentence rules where health has changed; and sentence computation errors measured against the Bureau’s sentence computation manual.
• 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 Lompoc II, Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2026. The Bureau’s facility page, including its name-change notice.
• Visiting Regulations, Complex Supplement LOX 5267.09d, Federal Bureau of Prisons, FCC Lompoc, 2025. Hours, points, visitor lists, identification, dress and Special Housing Unit video visits.
• FCC Lompoc Inmate Admission & Orientation Handbook, Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2015. Directions, counts, telephone hours, psychology staffing, the companion program, recreation rules, commissary validation and the $370 figure.
• FCC Lompoc Commissary Order Form, Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2014. Shopping-day rotation, order rules, quantity caps and stocked items.
• Inmate Legal Activities, Program Statement 1315.08, Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2026. The national policy this institution’s page links in place of a local supplement.
• Trust Fund/Deposit Fund Manual, Program Statement 4500.13, Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2026. Sets the $460 commissary spending limit, the holiday increase, the exclusions and revalidation.
• Inmate Telephone Regulations, Program Statement 5264.09, Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2026. The 510-minute monthly limit, call length and the gap between calls; replaced Program Statement 5264.08 (2008).
• 2026 Correctional Workers’ Week Memorial Service, Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2026. Names Senior Officer Specialist Scott J. Williams among the Bureau’s fallen.
• First Step Act Approved Programs Guide, Federal Bureau of Prisons, Reentry Services Division, 2026. Program availability by institution; its key still names this institution “Lompoc USP.”
• Name Changes Approved for Seven FBOP Facilities, Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2024. The renaming of USP Lompoc, made under Program Statement 1001.14, Naming Bureau Property.
• Press Releases, Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2020–2021. Includes the three releases reporting deaths at USP Lompoc and its satellite camp.

Audits and inspections

• PREA Audit Report: Federal Correctional Complex (FCC) Lompoc, Corrections Consulting, LLC, 2024. One audit of the whole complex, by auditor Mark McCorkle; the same file is posted on both Lompoc facility pages.
• Inspection of the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ U.S. Penitentiary Canaan (Report 26-055), U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, 2026. The Inspector General’s count of institutions inspected since 2023.
• Audit of the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ Oversight of the Use of Restraints (Report 25-070), U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, 2025. Bureau data on the Lompoc name change and the change from medium to low security.
• 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. The chaplain-to-inmate ratio at FCC Lompoc.
• Management Advisory: Analysis of the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ Fiscal Year 2019 Overtime Hours and Costs (Report 21-011), U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, 2020. FCC Lompoc overtime hours and costs.
• Remote Inspection of Federal Correctional Complex Lompoc (Pandemic Response Report 20-086), U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, 2020.

Court records

• BOP Correctional Officer and Wife Pleaded Guilty for Conspiracy to Introduce Contraband to a Federal Inmate, U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, 2026. The August 5, 2026 guilty pleas of Paul and Sylvia Betancourt.
• BOP Correctional Officer and Wife Arrested for Conspiracy to Introduce Contraband to a Federal Inmate, U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, 2026. The May 2026 complaint against Paul and Sylvia Betancourt.
• Lomeli v. Birkholz, No. 3:23-cv-00448 (S.D. Cal.), U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California, 2023. The July 26, 2023 decision applying Pinson v. Carvajal and dismissing an FCC Lompoc conditions petition for want of core habeas jurisdiction.
• Pinson v. Carvajal, 69 F.4th 1059 (9th Cir. 2023), U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, 2023. Conditions-of-confinement claims lie outside the core of habeas.
• Former BOP Correctional Officer Sentenced for Wire Fraud, U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, 2023. A former FCC Lompoc officer’s sentence.
• Torres v. Milusnic, No. 2:20-cv-04450 (C.D. Cal.), U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, 2020. The Lompoc coronavirus class action: the July 14, 2020 order (published as 472 F. Supp. 3d 713) and the October 11, 2022 final approval, later captioned Garries v. Milusnic.
• Macias v. Bradley, No. 2:20-cv-07114 (C.D. Cal.), U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, 2020. The November 10, 2020 decision that conditions claims arising from the USP Lompoc outbreak lie outside the core of habeas under Nettles.
• Former BOP Correctional Officer Pleaded Guilty to Wire Fraud, U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, 2020. A former FCC Lompoc officer’s guilty plea.
• United States v. Chi Mak, 683 F.3d 1126 (9th Cir. 2012), U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, 2012. Chi Mak’s 2007 conviction and 293-month sentence.
• Chinese Agent Sentenced to Over 24 Years in Prison for Exporting United States Defense Articles to China, U.S. Department of Justice, 2008. Chi Mak’s sentence.

News and other sources

• Inmate Walks Away from Minimum-Security Lompoc Prison Camp, Santa Barbara Independent, 2026. By Tyler Hayden. Omar Briceno-Quijano’s walkaway from the camp.
• UNICOR Agribusiness, UNICOR (Federal Prison Industries), 2026. The Lompoc farm operation and its products.
• History, U.S. Space Force, Vandenberg Space Force Base, 2026. The redesignation of May 14, 2021.
• 18 U.S.C. § 3621(e), Imprisonment of a convicted person, U.S. Code (Legal Information Institute).
• 28 U.S.C. § 2241, Power to grant writ, U.S. Code (Legal Information Institute).

Sources reviewed September 2026.

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