The State Line
Three questions decide how much of this record a resident can get without a lawyer: does anybody inspect the jail, does the law require a death in custody to be reported, and is the result published. We have not yet established the answers for Alabama.
Not yet researched. When it is, the answer goes here and nowhere else — one law layer per state, so the county pages stay about the county.
Compare all fifty states →That is the one thing every county in America has in common. The jail belongs to the people of the county and is paid for out of their taxes. The sheriff who runs it is elected. The judge who decides who sits in it is elected or appointed. Three offices, enormous power, and almost nobody watching.
How much is your sheriff — and your judge — costing you?
Nationally, almost 77% of the people who died in local jails in 2019 had not been convicted of anything, and suicide was the leading single cause of those deaths. The Justice Department is required to count deaths in custody and does not do it properly — a Senate investigation found it failed to identify more than 990 such deaths in a single year. MoBetta is building the county-by-county record instead.
Your VOTE is POWERFUL.
The sheriffs who run these jails are elected. So are the commissioners who pay for them.
Deadlines, ID rules and Alabama’s own election office, from vote.gov — the official U.S. government voter site. Where you vote on the day is set by your county election office.
Alabama — all 67 counties open. Click any county on the map, or see the transparency scoreboard below.
This is our jail
Every county in Alabama was checked against the same ten questions on 2026-09-29. This measures disclosure, not conduct — what a county publishes about a building its taxpayers own. A county can raise its score in an afternoon by posting a document.
Not scored: Not examined (40) — the county's and sheriff's own sites could not be read, a gap in the research rather than a finding: Autauga County, Barbour County, Bibb County, Bullock County, Butler County, Calhoun County, Choctaw County, Clay County, Cleburne County, Coffee County, Conecuh County, Coosa County, Crenshaw County, Dale County, DeKalb County, Elmore County, Fayette County, Geneva County, Greene County, Hale County, Henry County, Houston County, Jackson County, Lamar County, Lauderdale County, Lee County, Lowndes County, Macon County, Marengo County, Marion County, Monroe County, Perry County, Pickens County, Pike County, Randolph County, Russell County, Sumter County, Tuscaloosa County, Washington County, Wilcox County.
Alabama has no state agency that sets and enforces standards for county jails; the law that once gave a state agency jail-inspection duties was repealed in 2015. The sheriff has legal custody of every county jail (Ala. Code § 14-6-1), and every sheriff's seat is on the November 2026 ballot. A county earns the inspections or deaths mark here only when it posts that material on its own site; a sheriff's Facebook page is not counted. Counties shown as not scored are ones whose own pages could not be found or read in this research, not ones found to publish nothing.