Alaska Prisons | DOC | Prison Inmate Search

Clicking on any of the Alaska facilities below will direct you to an information page with Inmate Search, Visitation, Mail, Phone, Email, Most Wanted and FAQ for families and friends.

Search for an Inmate or Active Arrest Warrant in Alaska

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Alaska Department of Corrections - Prisons & Inmate Search

Alaska State Prisons and Juvenile Facilities

Alaska is one of six states with a unified corrections system. There are no county jails: the Alaska Department of Corrections (DOC) runs both the jails that hold people right after arrest and the prisons that hold people serving sentences, often in the same building. Corrections was once a division of the state health and social services department and became its own cabinet department in 1984.

The DOC operates 13 correctional facilities, from Ketchikan in Southeast Alaska to Nome, Bethel and Fairbanks. In mid-2025 about 4,300 people were held in DOC institutions: roughly 2,400 sentenced prisoners, 1,800 people awaiting trial, and a small number of federal detainees. About 9% are women. Hundreds more live in community residential centers (Alaska’s halfway houses) in Anchorage, Fairbanks, Juneau, Bethel and Nome, or are on electronic monitoring as they finish their sentences.

Major Alaska prisons

Goose Creek Correctional Center (Point MacKenzie): the largest prison in the state, holding more than 1,100 men
Spring Creek Correctional Center (Seward): Alaska’s maximum-security prison for men with long sentences
Hiland Mountain Correctional Center (Eagle River): the state’s prison for women
Anchorage Correctional Complex: the busiest booking and pretrial facility in the state
Wildwood (Kenai), Palmer, Fairbanks, Lemon Creek (Juneau), Yukon-Kuskokwim (Bethel), Anvil Mountain (Nome), Ketchikan, Mat-Su Pretrial and the Point MacKenzie Correctional Farm

Where do new prisoners go first?

Because there are no county jails, a person arrested in Alaska is booked straight into the nearest DOC facility, such as the Anchorage Correctional Complex, Fairbanks Correctional Center or Lemon Creek in Juneau. After sentencing, the DOC classifies them by security level and medical and program needs and decides where they will serve their time. That often means a move to Goose Creek, Spring Creek or Hiland Mountain, sometimes hundreds of miles from home.

How to find an inmate in Alaska

Alaska doesn’t have a separate online inmate locator. Custody checks go through VINELink, which shows whether a person is in DOC custody and where. You can also sign up there for free alerts when the person is moved or released. For anything else, call the facility directly.

Death penalty and recent changes

Alaska has no death penalty. The territorial legislature abolished it in 1957, two years before statehood. The last execution took place in Juneau in 1950. Alaska has no plans for a new prison, but the prison budget has grown about 70% in ten years, driven by inmate health care and overtime from short staffing. In 2026, some lawmakers proposed studying a return to housing long-term prisoners out of state, as Alaska did in Arizona and Colorado until 2013, when Goose Creek opened.

Alaska juvenile facilities

The Alaska Division of Juvenile Justice (DJJ), now part of the Department of Family and Community Services, runs six secure youth facilities. They are the McLaughlin Youth Center in Anchorage, the Mat-Su Youth Facility in Palmer, the Kenai Peninsula Youth Facility, the Fairbanks Youth Facility, the Johnson Youth Center in Juneau and the Bethel Youth Facility. Their detention units hold young people while their cases are in court, and their treatment units hold youth a judge has committed for longer-term care. Juvenile records are confidential, so parents and guardians should call the facility or their juvenile probation officer directly.

To search for an inmate or juvenile, or to learn how to visit, call, write or send money to someone in the Alaska Department of Corrections or Division of Juvenile Justice, choose a facility from the list below.