Why Surviving the Feds exists

The Surviving the Feds story

Surviving the Feds comes out of nearly two decades of conversations. In every facility Bilal Khan passed through, he and the friends he made inside talked about the same thing: the problems and pitfalls they and their families faced. Over and over, it came down to one thing: knowledge. In the feds, it's the blind leading the blind, in the worst possible way.

A man gets charged, and most likely he's locked in jail until his case is over. He has one lifeline: his family. They answer the phone and hear something they never wanted to hear: despair. That pain sends them searching the internet late at night, where the "information" comes from advertisers, snake-oil salesmen and people who have no idea what's going on.

How to tell someone doesn't know what they're talking about

They'll tell you everyone has to go through Oklahoma City to "get their number." That's wrong on both counts.

• Not everyone goes through Oklahoma City. People who self-surrender go straight to the prison they're designated to. Hundreds, if not thousands, go by bus. Almost everyone sentenced in Philadelphia, New York or New Jersey who is headed to a prison in the Northeast will probably be bused, and with fewer Con Air flights today, there are more buses. In the Northeast, most people wait at Lewisburg (now a medium-security prison) for a bus to their final prison.
• The number doesn't come from the BOP. The US Marshals Service assigns it when you're fingerprinted at the federal courthouse. Your "Marshal number" and your BOP register number are one and the same. Any time you're in federal court, you can ask the deputy marshal for it.
• The last three digits used to mean something. They showed the district where you were arrested (050 was New Jersey, for example). The Marshals stopped assigning numbers that way, and newer numbers end in 508, 509, 510, 511 and possibly 512. We believe, but can't confirm, the change was made to stop some prisoners from "claiming" the people from their home area.

That's why Surviving the Feds exists: so families get the truth from people who have lived it, for free.

The team

Bilal Khan

Founder · Inmate Advocate

Inmate Advocate and author of Surviving Pretrial and The 2255 Motion Handbook. He has spent years helping people in federal custody with their cases, and built Surviving the Feds so families don't have to learn the system the hard way.

Read Bilal's story →

More of the team, and their stories, will be here as people join.