Privacy

Who we are

prisoncheck is an independent free utility for prison families in England and Wales. It is not HMPPS, not a government service, and not a charity. For privacy enquiries or requests about your information, email hello@prisoncheck.co.uk.

Family reports

A report is the prison, the topic, when it happened, whose experience it was, how long it took, and what happened. For a wait you can give the day it started and the day it ended, and we count the days. Pages show the days, never your dates. We keep the original words and a structured reading of them. We do not ask who is inside.

A note with a phone number, an email, a link, abuse or a prison number is turned away. A note that might name someone, or accuse someone, waits for a person to read it before it goes up. If something on a page should not be there, write to hello@prisoncheck.co.uk and we will take it down.

Published reports appear on the prison page, labelled Community. That is the point of the site.

Family questions after a report

After you send a report we may ask two optional questions, for research into how a prison sentence reaches the whole family: how you are related to the person inside (for example partner, ex-partner, parent or grandparent), and whether children at home are waiting for contact with them, by age group (pre-school, primary, secondary, or college and further education). We do not ask for a child’s name or birthday. Skipping is one tap, and skipping changes nothing about your report.

We only keep your answers because you chose to give them. They are stored with that report, in a separate place that no page, feed or email reads, so they are never shown on prisoncheck. Researchers we work with only ever see totals that combine at least five families, never one family’s answers. We do not sell them.

The answers are deleted when the report is deleted. To have them removed sooner, write to hello@prisoncheck.co.uk.

Alerts

If you ask for a release estimate we store your email and the estimated date. We send the dates, then a few short guides timed to them: in the first two weeks, and as the date gets close. That does not sign you up for alerts. If you follow a prison we also store the prisons you picked, and the tick that you asked for the emails. We use that to send a weekly digest of what families reported, and a same-day note if phones go down or there is a lockdown. If you add a report you can optionally leave an email, or tap yes if you already follow, and a few days later we send one note: how many families looked at that prison since your report. That is a count of visits, never who they were.

If you ask for the Christmas reminders, we also store the day you asked, and send up to three short emails before Christmas with the dates for the prison you follow. They stop after Christmas, and the link in any email stops them sooner.

However you gave us your email, you also get the monthly update: one email a month from prisoncheck about what changed at prisons and what families reported. It can include a short, clearly marked box about ringyard, the landline for prison calls made by the team behind prisoncheck. Emails that are only about ringyard need their own tick, never pre-ticked. Without that tick, we never send you one.

Stop anytime from the link in any email, or write to hello@prisoncheck.co.uk. We delete the follow and stop the contact when you stop.

What we do not take

No payment details. No login. No date of birth. No prisoner number. We do not ask for your name to add a report, and never for a child’s name or birthday.

Counting visits

We count visits ourselves so we know which pages and tools help, and where families find us. Your browser keeps a random code, not your name, so a second visit counts as a return and not a new person. With it we record the page, the prison, where the visit came from (for example Google, TikTok or a Facebook group), and whether a tool gave an answer or a report was added. We also keep what is typed into the prison search box (up to 80 characters), so we can fix searches that find nothing. A search that looks like a person’s name is not kept. What you write in a report stays with the report, not with the visit count.

One small cookie remembers that you answered a “still correct?” question, so we do not ask again. Vercel, our host, keeps ordinary request logs and counts page views without storing anything on your device. DataFast also counts visits and where they came from, with two cookies holding random codes: one for your visit, one so a return visit counts as a return. We do not use advertising cookies.

Who holds it

prisoncheck is run by Greenhouse Partners Limited, a company registered in England and Wales (company number 17129501). It is the data controller: it decides how the information described above is used. The site is hosted on Vercel. Reports, the optional family answers, follows, contacts and visit counts sit in a Neon database. DataFast counts visits too. Emails go out through Resend. TypeSafe AI reads some search questions and visit-outfit descriptions to sort them; it does not get your email. These companies run servers in the United States as well as Europe. We do not sell your personal information or share it for advertising.

How long we keep it

Published reports stay up, without the device code once that is removed. Visit counts stay too, once nothing in them points to a device or a search. For the rest:

• Words held back for a read are dropped after 30 days if nobody publishes them. The wait or status stays up.
• A free-text report still waiting for a read after 30 days is deleted.
• Reports we took down, and phone answers someone changed, are deleted after 90 days.
• What was typed into the search box is kept for 90 days, then removed from the visit counts.
• The note of which alerts went to which address is kept for 90 days.
• When you stop our emails, we keep only your address and the date you stopped, so we never email you again by mistake. Everything else about you as a contact goes after 30 days.
• A wait you tracked is deleted 6 months after it ended, or after 12 months if it never did.
• The link between your email and a report you added, for the "you helped" email, goes after 12 months.
• An address that follows nothing, did not ask for the monthly update and has heard nothing from us for 12 months is deleted. A release-date reminder waits until 90 days after that date.
• The random device and session codes are removed from visit counts, reports and "still correct?" answers after 13 months. What is left counts visits, not people.
• The record of which emails we sent you is kept for 2 years, so a one-off email is not sent twice.

A nightly job does this. Our database keeps a rolling backup for 6 hours, so a deletion is final after that.

Your rights

You can ask what we hold, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. For email follows the unsubscribe link does that. For anything else write to hello@prisoncheck.co.uk. If you are unhappy with how we handled your information, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk.