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About County Inmate Search
An independent directory that organises county-level custody records into one place.
What we do
County jail rosters are public records, but they are scattered across thousands of separate county systems, many built decades ago and difficult to read. We collect those published records county by county, present them in a consistent format, and explain what each field means and what a family member can do next.
Where the data comes from
Every published county page is built from that county sheriff, jail or agency-authorised booking source. We link to the original source on each page and record the time of the last successful sync. We do not add to or reinterpret the underlying records, and we do not publish booking photographs.
What we are not
We are not a law enforcement agency, a court, a detention operator, a background-check provider, or the official custodian of any record. Nothing here is legal advice, and this site must not be used to make decisions about employment, housing, credit, insurance or tenant screening. Those decisions are governed by the Fair Credit Reporting Act and require a consumer reporting agency.
What we deliberately do not publish
Searching for someone in a county jail usually leads to a site that publishes their booking photograph and then charges to take it down. The underlying records are public; the extortion layer is something people added on top. This directory was built to be the same records without that layer.
So four things are excluded by design, in every county, with no exceptions:
- Booking photographs. Many counties publish them. We do not republish them.
- Dates of birth.
- Home addresses.
- Identifying numbers such as social security or driver's licence numbers.
This is not a policy statement that could quietly lapse. It is enforced in the code: an automated test scans both the collection software and every published record before anything goes live, and the build fails if any of those fields appear. The custody record serves the accountability purpose on its own; the photograph and the personal identifiers mostly serve harm, and they follow people who were never convicted of anything for years.
How it is built
County jails do not write their own software — they buy it, from a few dozen vendors. So the work is a set of adapters, one per vendor system, rather than one scraper per county. Each county page here currently covers 510 counties across 41 states, rebuilt from the official source several times a day, with the time of the last successful sync printed on the page.
Where a facility record exists in the US Department of Homeland Security HIFLD dataset, the county page also carries the jail's address and phone number. For a family, that is often the more useful half: someone booked in the last few hours will not be in any sync yet, and the booking desk is the only real-time answer.
Coverage is partial and not random. It follows which vendor systems publish a machine-readable roster at all, so a county missing from this directory is not a statement about that county. The data report explains the method and the known skews, and publishes the aggregate figures as free CSV and JSON under a Creative Commons Attribution licence.
Accuracy and corrections
Custody records change by the hour, and booking data is generated quickly by people under pressure. Names are misspelled, charges entered at intake often differ from what a prosecutor ultimately files, and release times lag. We can normalise formatting and timestamp our syncs, but we cannot verify the underlying facts — which is why every page links back to the source.
If something here is wrong, out of date, or should not be published, tell us through the corrections and removal page. We review every request individually, we never charge a fee, we do not ask for identification documents, and we do not work with reputation-management firms.
How the site is funded
Advertising. That is what keeps the directory free to use and, just as importantly, keeps removals free — there is no version of this site where paying us gets a record taken down faster.