World Prisons
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United States · VA · Pennington Gap

United States Penitentiary

High-securityLowLow
Verified
Aging · 5mo ago
Sources last reviewed on

Data is aggregated from public sources and may be incomplete or out of date. Always verify with primary sources before acting on any figure. See data sources.

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Capacity

125

Current population

—

Occupancy

—

Year opened

2002

Operational

Figures from official sources · verified 28 May 2026 · methodology

Facility profile

Population held

Mixed/unknown

Opened

2002

Region

VA

Security level

High-security

Death-row facility

No

Conditions

No conditions summary available yet.

Visiting

No visiting information available.

Mailing

No mailing information available.

Practical info

Contact the operator's website for inmate-specific procedures.

Known issues

No major issues documented in our database.

Notable inmates

  • Viktor Bout
    Viktor Bout
    1967 · arms trafficker

    Viktor Anatolyevich Bout (; Russian: Ви́ктор Анато́льевич Бут, romanized: Viktor Anatolyevich But; born 13 January 1967) is a Russian arms dealer and politician.

  • Whitey Bulger
    Whitey Bulger
    1929–2018 · criminal

    James Joseph "Whitey" Bulger Jr.

  • Juan Matta-Ballesteros
    1945–2025 · drug trafficker

    Juan Ramón Matta-Ballesteros (also spelled Mata-Ballesteros; January 12, 1945 – October 30, 2025) was a Honduran major narcotics trafficker who has been credited with being one of the first to connect Mexican drug traffickers with the Colombian cocaine cartels.

Source: Wikidata + Wikipedia.

Contact & address

Hickory Flats Road, Pennington Gap 23277
+1 276 546 0150
[email protected]
Official site

Conditions Risk Score

Derived signal — not a judgement. How it's calculated

0/100
Low concern0/100
Overcrowding
0/30
Oversight reports
0/30
Structural flags
0/15
Death signals
0/15
Conditions text
0/10

This facility scores 0. The national average across 7,437 scored United States facilities is 2 — 2 points below national average.

Related facilities

All in United States →

Same country, matched on type + security level where possible.

Compared to other facilities in United States

7436 peers
Capacity (beds)this: 125 · peers avg: 547 (77%)

Reports

  • marshall-project8 Jan 2016

    ndshakes, the toilet phone, and the “shoe bomber.” This article was published in collaboration with Vice . Not many people ever make it out of the ADX. Officially called the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence — and colloquially known as the “Alcatraz of the Rockies” — the ADX is the highest-security federal prison in the country, located in the Colorado

    source

Data completeness

52%

How many of our profile fields are populated. We surface this so families and researchers know the limits.

Sources

Cite this page

Under CC-BY-4.0. Include the URL and access date; the site is a living reference and entries can change.

APA
World Prisons. (2026). United States Penitentiary. Retrieved October 20, 2026, from https://worldprisons.com/prisons/united-states-penitentiary
Chicago
"United States Penitentiary." World Prisons. Accessed October 20, 2026. https://worldprisons.com/prisons/united-states-penitentiary.
BibTeX
@misc{worldprisons-united-states-penitentiary,
  author = {{World Prisons}},
  title = {United States Penitentiary},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://worldprisons.com/prisons/united-states-penitentiary},
  urldate = {2026-10-20}
}