The Detention Center
Not found
- Operated byNot found
Transparency rating
The Building
You paid for it. Here is what the record says it cost.
- Year builtNot found
- Original costNot found
- Paid for byNot found
- BedsNot found
Since then
- Not found
The Sheriff
Sheriff Heath Taylor
- Runs the jailYes — by law the sheriff has legal custody and charge of the county jail (Ala. Code § 14-6-1)
- CurrentNamed in the Alabama Sheriffs Association directory; not confirmed on a county page
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Alabama Sheriffs Association directory · checked 2026-09-29
The Judges
Alabama's circuit and district judges are elected state judges. A district judge or magistrate usually sets bail soon after arrest; felony cases are tried in circuit court.
Who sets bail in Russell County
- Circuit Court: Alabama's Twenty-Sixth Judicial Circuit, which serves Russell County alone. Circuit judges are elected circuit-wide to six-year terms and try felony cases.
- District Court: the Russell County District Court. District judges are elected countywide to six-year terms; a district judge or magistrate usually sets bail soon after arrest.
- The county's bond schedule
- Share of the jail population held pretrial
- Median time from booking to first appearance
Source: the state judiciary · checked 2026-09-29
The County Commission
They pay for the jail. The sheriff runs it.
- What they controlThe county budget that funds the sheriff's office and the jail, and the jail building itself.
- What they don'tDay-to-day operations. By law the sheriff has legal custody and charge of the jail and everyone held in it (Ala. Code 14-6-1). No state agency sets and enforces standards for the jail.
- NoteCounty Commission site not opened.
- The boardRussell County Commission
- Where the jail money is decidedNot found
Notes on the record
- County not examined: no page on the county's or sheriff's own site could be opened.
- Search found the sheriff's site rcso.org, but its jail-info and in-custody pages are blocked to our reader by robots.txt and the home page was refused.
- What was tried: guessed domains russellcountyal.gov, russellcountysheriff.com, russellso.org and co.russell.al.us refused; rcso.org/jailinfo.html and rcso.org/inCustodySearchFeed disallowed by robots.txt.
- Sheriff name is the association-directory lead only.
- Rescue pass (29 Sep 2026): one search again returned rcso.org/jailinfo.html and rcso.org/inCustodySearchFeed; both still disallowed by robots.txt, and the rcso.org home page was refused. No county-commission site appeared in results (only Facebook, the Secretary of State and aggregators, all ignored). Still not examined.
- State inspection/oversight: 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.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Russell County and what it costs the people who live here. 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 (Bureau of Justice Statistics, Mortality in Local Jails, 2000–2019).
How much is your sheriff — and your judge — costing you?
Your VOTE is POWERFUL.
The sheriff is elected — every Alabama sheriff's seat is on the November 2026 ballot. So are the commissioners who pay for the jail, and the judges who set bail.
Names verified 2026-09-29 · dollars and outcomes still being gathered