As provided by State Statute, all adult males sentenced to the NDCS by the County and District Courts of the State of Nebraska are received into the correctional system at the Diagnostic and Evaluation Center.
Initially the facility was set-up to handle one inmate per bed (176 inmates), but overcrowding has forced the prison to add beds to the single person rooms and has brought those numbers consistently over 200-250% capacity resulting in the average population of 470.