Illinois Inmate Finder

You can locate an Illinois inmate by using the Illinois Department of Corrections website. You can search by the inmate’s IDOC number, which is a unique prisoner number assigned by the department of corrections. Or, you can search by birth date and last name. To use the Illinois inmate finder, technically you will only need to know the inmate’s last name. However, you can save yourself a lot of search time if you know the inmate’s birth date, especially if the inmate has a common last name. Without a birth date, the Illinois inmate finder website will display every Illinois prisoner who shares the last name and even names related to the last name. For example, if you type in “Rob” it will show you last names like “Roberts,” “Robins,” and “Robinson.” To use the Illinois inmate finder, enter a name in the above form.

The Illinois Department of Corrections inmate finder will only show you prisoners who are part of the state prison system, which accounts for people who have been convicted of state crimes. If you are searching for someone who committed a federal crime and is being held in a federal prison in Illinois, you will have to use the federal inmate finder to locate that prisoner. The Illinois Department of Corrections recommends searching for federal prisoners through the Federal Bureau of Prisons website.

If you are unable to locate an Illinois inmate through either website, you might want to call the Illinois Department of Corrections directly at 217-558-2200. Sometimes information is not entered into the database if a person has not yet been processed through the system or if there is an error in entering the person’s information. You might not be able to find out anything online about people who are still at an Illinois county jail awaiting their trial or sentence, as Illinois does not put people into the public record database until after they have been sentenced.

Each state has a different policy about when to remove state prisoners from their database. In Illinois, once a person has been served his sentence, his information will be taken out of the database. However, sometimes the information remains in the database even after someone has been been released from prison because the person is out on parole or probation. Technically, an inmate is still part of the corrections system until the entire sentence is served. If a sentence includes parole, probation, community service, etc., then the person’s information will remain listed on the Illinois inmate finder website even after they are no longer an inmate.