Methodology
How a number earns the right to appear here
This project is only as good as its discipline about evidence. Everything below is applied to every figure on the site, and where a rule forces us to publish less, we publish less. Each section is a summary; the detailed page behind it carries the full rule.
What this site tries to prove, and what it refuses to infer
Detention Receipts traces public money to the record that moved it: an appropriation, an award, a contract action, the recipient, the facility, the documented conditions, and the institutional decision point that is still open. The claim we try to establish is narrow and checkable — that a named body committed a stated amount on a stated date under a stated authority, and that named sources record what happened at the place that money paid for.
We refuse to infer the rest. Sequence is not causation. A payment near an event does not establish influence, a quid pro quo, or retaliation. A contract is not a finding of negligence, illegality, or fault. Conduct is not described as corrupt, fraudulent, abusive, or preventable unless a cited source establishes it, and then the finding is attributed to whoever reached it.
Absence in a dataset is never treated as absence in the world. A record we cannot find reads as not established in the sources currently indexed — not as zero, not as none, and not as an estimate.
How to read the evidence labels
Every claim carries a label describing what its sources do, not how serious it is. Observed means a named source records the event directly. Attributed means a named investigator, court, examiner or agency reached the finding, and we name them. Modeled means an estimate produced under a stated method and counterfactual. Allegation means asserted but not established. Disputed means credible sources conflict. Unknown means the indexed records do not answer the question.
Records also carry an evidence grade describing the paperwork behind them, and every displayed number traces to a source with a URL and a retrieval date. Repetition of one source by several outlets is not corroboration.
Why money figures are not interchangeable
An appropriation is not an obligation; an obligation is not an outlay; a plan is not a bed. Obligation is money legally committed under an award. Outlay is money actually paid out. Current award value is what the award is worth as modified to date. Potential value is a ceiling if every option is exercised, not a forecast that it will be. A guaranteed minimum is a contractual floor, not a population count.
Those quantities are shown side by side and never summed into one headline. A figure the source did not report reads as not reported. Every sum states its coverage: a dataset total is never presented as a national total.
How facilities and institutional roles are matched
Facilities are matched by canonical identity, not by name resemblance. Shared names, promoted aliases, shared addresses and annex relationships are flagged for human review before any two records are joined, and a flag is a question about identity rather than a conclusion.
Roles are never collapsed. Award recipient, parent company, property owner, operator, subcontractor, medical provider and contracting authority can all be different parties, and each relationship is time-bounded and sourced. Where the record does not establish an operator or an owner, the field says so instead of inheriting a guess from a neighbouring record.
How Human Cost records are constructed and bounded
Human Cost separates observed harm, attributed findings and modeled estimates, and never blends them into a single number. The fixed research cohort, later official notices, and post-release reporting are separate lanes with their own windows and inclusion rules; they are published side by side and are never added together into a live total.
A person record leads with the name and the sourced account, then the administrative facts. A facility association is a custody location, not a finding of responsibility. Cause, preventability and responsibility are separate questions, and each is answered only where a cited source answers it.
How political-finance and lobbying records are treated
Political-committee filings, company-reported political activity, and lobbying disclosures are separate categories with separate filers, definitions and periods. They are never added to each other and never added to federal award, obligation or outlay totals. In-house reported lobbying expense and outside-firm reported lobbying income are different accounting objects and are not combined into a single lobbying figure.
A contribution or a lobbying filing establishes that a filing exists. On its own it establishes no influence, no causation and no quid pro quo. A null money value means the cited filing supplies no figure; it does not mean zero.
How dates, corrections and source health work
Every figure is time-bounded. Each claim carries its own publication, effective and retrieval dates, and those dates control. A later site snapshot does not make an older source current; it only states when the record was last read.
Corrections are versioned on the affected record with the date applied, and a superseded figure stays visible as history. Automated retrieval watches federal award records and writes detected changes to a review queue; retrieval is not publication, and a source outage never changes what a record says.
Challenge anything here
If a figure is wrong, an entity is mismatched, or a characterization overreaches, send it to us. Accepted corrections are recorded on the affected record with the date they were applied.
Submit a correction