The Detention Center
Yuma County Detention Center
- Operated byYuma County Sheriff's Office, Detention Bureau. Paid for through the Yuma County Jail District, a separate taxing and financing body funded by a dedicated county sales tax
- What it is'The Yuma County Detention Center is a maximum-security facility designed to receive, process and house inmates who are detained prior to trial, as well as inmates in different phases of the criminal justice system. The Detention Center also houses inmates sentenced by County and City courts'
- Rated capacity'The facility has a rated capacity of 756 inmates'
- Daily population'During 2025, the average daily population was 424 which reflects a 2.91% increase over the 2024 average daily population of 412.' The male population rose 2.91% and the female population 4.41%; the juvenile population 'remained the same and comprised less than 1% of the total inmate population'. A published pie chart for 2025 gives adult males 83.25%, adult females 16.75%, juvenile males 0.00% and juvenile females 0.00%
- Jail address200 W. Court Street, Yuma, AZ 85364, published as the inmate accounts mailing address. Releases are waited for 'in the Gazebo located off of 1st Street (directly behind the Detention Center Booking area)'
- Who else it holds, and at what price'The Yuma County Jail District currently maintains inter-governmental agreements with the Cocopah Indian Tribe and the Quechan Indian Tribe for the housing and safekeeping of inmates under their jurisdiction while they await Tribal court disposition.' 'The agencies are billed on a monthly basis at the rate of $135.89 per inmate, per day.' The FY2027 Jail District budget also books Intergovernmental-Federal revenue of $50,000 and Intergovernmental-Reimbursements of $275,000
- FoodTrinity Services Group has held the Jail District food service contract since April 1, 2007. 'From January to December 2025, they provided a total of 490,969 meals, with a total cost of $750,898.67. Of this total, 15,375 meals were provided under contract to the Yuma County Juvenile Detention Center.' Average 1,300 adult meals and 45 juvenile meals a day; 'The average cost per meal during 2025 was $1.55'
- Medical'In April 2023, the Yuma County Sheriff's Office (YCSO) partnered with AB Med for Medical Director services,' under Dr. Erik McLaughlin. Published 2025 volumes: 5,269 intake assessments, 362,277 medication administrations, 6,067 sick calls, 3,041 psychiatric visits, 1,298 provider visits, 590 chronic care visits, 1,040 fourteen-day assessments, 1,799 wound care encounters, 7,211 medication-assisted treatment doses and 908 withdrawal protocols completed
- Visitation is remote only'In 2020, the Yuma County Detention Center made a significant change to the inmate visitation policy by transitioning from in-person visitations to video visitations exclusively. This policy change has resulted in a 6,550% surge in inmate visitations. In 2025 there were 115,785 successful video visitations.' Video visits run through Combined Public Communications at inmatesales.com. No price is published. Professional visits for attorneys, clergy and programme staff are still conducted in person
- Telephones and tablets'Inmate telephone services, Chirper devices (inmate texting devices), and tablet services are provided by Combined Public Communications (CPC).' Phone accounts can be funded either as Direct Pay, where 'Call time is added to your phone number', or PIN Debit, where the inmate 'can call any phone number with the funds you deposit'. No per-minute rate is published. The Jail District's Detention Facility Commissary fund books 'Telephone Revenue' of $300,000 for FY2027
- Deposit fees are published in fullAccess Corrections fee schedule effective 09/01/2025: for deposits of $0.01-$19.99, $4.95 by web or mobile app, $6.95 by phone, $4.95 at the lobby kiosk by card, $4.00 kiosk cash, $5.95 walk-in retail; $20.00-$99.99, $7.95 / $9.95 / $7.95 / $4.00 / $5.95; $100.00-$199.99, $9.95 / $11.95 / $9.95 / $4.00 / $5.95; $200.00-$300.00, $11.95 / $13.95 / $11.95 / $4.00 / $5.95. CashPay Today is a flat $5.95 for deposits up to $999.95
- CommissaryRun through Access Securepak, delivered weekly on Thursdays. 'There is a processing fee for each commissary order that is subject to change,' but no amount and no item price list is given. 'The profits from commissary sales, telephone use, and remote visits are used to purchase items used by the inmates. No tax dollars are used to subsidize the inmate purchases, which include library books, educational supplies, and inmate supplies such as televisions, DVD players, recreational equipment and the inmate Law Library'
- ProgrammesReligious services in English and Spanish including religious diets and video visits with religious providers, self-help and life skills, legal material and a law library, reading and recreational material, haircuts, substance abuse counselling and notary services, supported by a screened volunteer programme
- Jail tours'In an effort to educate the local community about the Yuma County Detention Center, the Detention Center staff conducts tours of the Sheriff's Office and Detention Center. The tours are available to the general public.' Under-18s are not admitted
- What was triedThe Sheriff's Office site yumacountysheriff.org in full via its own site map - Detention Bureau, Admitting, Billing, Classification, Commissary, Education, Food Services, Grievances, Jail Industries, Medical, Programs, Transport, Training, Bond Information, Court Information, Inmate Release, Inmate Accounts, Inmate Mail, Inmate Property, Visitation, About Us, History, Command Staff, FAQ, News, Public Notices and the PDF gallery; the county site yumacountyaz.gov including Board of Supervisors, Board Members, Office of Management and Budget, Budgets & Related Information, Courts, Superior Court Judges, Justice Court Judges, CIP project updates, Facilities Management and About the County; the Tyler Technologies inmate portal; and the adopted FY2026-27 Estimate of Revenues and Expenditures. No year of construction, no construction cost, no death in custody, no PREA audit result for the adult jail and no inspection result was found
Source: Yuma County Sheriff's Office - Detention Bureau · checked 2026-08-23
Transparency rating
6/10Partial- ✓The jail is named
- ✓Who is in custody
- ✓Beds and daily population
- ✓What it costs taxpayers
- ✗Deaths in custody — not published
- ✗PREA audits — not published
- ✗Independent inspection — not published
- ✓Who else it holds, and for how much
- ✓How to post bond
- ✗Phone, video and commissary rates — not published
The Building
You paid for it. Here is what the record says it cost.
- Year builtNot found. Neither the Sheriff's Office nor the county publishes a construction date for the Yuma County Detention Center. The Sheriff's Office history page is detailed back to 1864 but records milestones of the office, not of the building
- Original costNot found
- Paid for byThe Yuma County Jail District pays for the jail. Its FY2027 revenue is $25,006,239, made up of a dedicated county sales tax of $22,370,000, Intergovernmental-State $1,778,739, Intergovernmental-Reimbursements $275,000, Fees $217,500, Interest $300,000, Intergovernmental-Federal $50,000 and Miscellaneous $15,000. The district levies no property tax. Alongside it the Detention Facility Commissary fund raises $629,000 including $300,000 of telephone revenue and $280,550 of fees, and the Jail Enhancement Fund raises $334,500 mostly from state money. A Jail District Replacement Fund is budgeted at $19,419,190 for FY2027 and receives a $5,000,000 transfer in, and Debt Service - Jail District is $505,777. Nothing was found about how the existing building was originally paid for
- Beds756. 'The facility has a rated capacity of 756 inmates.' The 2025 average daily population was 424, up from 412 in 2024 - roughly 56% of rated capacity
Since then
- 2020: visitation converted from in-person to video only, 'resulting in a 6,550% surge in inmate visitations'
- April 2023: medical director services contracted to AB Med
- A Jail District Replacement Fund carrying $19,419,190 for FY2027 appears in the county budget, but no project description, timetable or cost total is published
The Sheriff
Sheriff Leon N. Wilmot
- Runs the jailYes. The Sheriff's Office states its own authority: the powers and duties of the Sheriff under ARS 11-441 include 'taking charge of the county jail, including a county jail under the jurisdiction of a county jail district, and the prisoners in the county jail'. The Detention Bureau is one of the office's three bureaus
- How the office is filledElected countywide to a four-year term. The Sheriff's Office quotes Article 12, Section 3 of the Arizona Constitution in full on its history page, and notes that the November 3, 1964 amendment changed county officers from two-year to four-year terms
- Terms served'In 2012, Wilmot successfully campaigned for the office of Sheriff of Yuma County and took the oath of office in January 2013. Sheriff Wilmot was re-elected to a second term in 2016, and a third term in 2020. He is currently serving his fourth term as Sheriff of Yuma County, having been re-elected in 2024'
- CareerBegan as a Reserve Deputy in 1985 while serving as a Marine at MCAS Yuma; hired full time July 11, 1987; Chief Deputy from February 22, 2004 until retirement in September 2012. 'a 40-year career of public service serving the citizens of Yuma County'
- Office motto'Dedicated to Service'
- Who runs the jail day to dayCaptain Ana Duarte, Jail Commander, who 'joined the Sheriff's Office as a Detention Officer on May 12, 2012'. Captain Kelly Milner is Administrative Captain. The Detention Bureau 'is headed by a Captain and four Lieutenants'. Major Eben Bratcher is Operations Chief
- ContactYCSO Main Office, 141 S. 3rd Avenue, Yuma, AZ 85364; (928) 783-4427. Detention Center (928) 782-9871
- Detention staffingThe FY2027 county budget funds 262.400 full-time equivalent positions in the Yuma County Jail District fund, at $17,681,524 in salaries and $24,818,511 in total estimated personnel compensation, plus 6.000 FTE in the Detention Facility Commissary fund, 4.000 in the Jail Enhancement Fund and 1.000 in Jail District Other Grants
Still needed
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Yuma County Sheriff's Office - About Sheriff Leon Wilmot · checked 2026-08-23
The Judges
Arizona Superior Court judges outside Maricopa and Pima Counties are elected countywide in nonpartisan elections to four-year terms; in Maricopa and Pima they are appointed by the Governor from a nominating commission's list and then stand for retention. Yuma is an elective county, with seven Superior Court divisions and three court commissioners. Justices of the peace are elected to four-year terms in their precinct - the Arizona Supreme Court states that 'Each county has justice courts that are presided over by a justice of the peace, who is elected for a four year term' - and Yuma has three justice precincts plus a Hearing Officer and Initial Appearance Master, Carly Sandoval, who is the judicial officer most people booked into the county jail will actually see first. Yuma County names every one of these officers on its own site, which is more than most Arizona counties do. All of them are state judicial officers, not county officials, even though the county pays for the justice courts. The practical effect in Yuma is the same as everywhere in Arizona: the elected sheriff holds the prisoner and an independently elected judge decides whether the prisoner stays.
Superior Court in Yuma County - Presiding Judge
- David M. Haws. The Arizona Supreme Court's Presiding Judges list names 'Judge David Haws' for Yuma County, and the county courts page names 'The Honorable David M. Haws' as Presiding Judge at 250 W. 2nd Street Suite E, Yuma, AZ 85364, main (928) 817-4083
Superior Court in Yuma County - Divisions
- Division 1 - Mark Wayne Reeves
- Division 2 - R. Erin Farrar
- Division 3 - Claudia Gonzalez
- Division 4 - David Haws
- Division 5 - Roger Nelson
- Division 6 - Nathaniel T. Sorenson
- Division 7 - Darci D. Weede
- Commissioner 1 - vacant or unnamed on the county's own list
- Commissioner 2 - Eliza B. Johnson
- Commissioner 3 - Levi Gunderson
Yuma County Justice Courts - Presiding Judge and precincts
- Presiding Judge Gregory S. Stewart, Yuma County Justice Center, 168 S. 2nd Ave. Suite A, Yuma, AZ 85364, main (928) 817-4100
- Justice of the Peace 1 - Gregory Stewart
- Justice of the Peace 2 - Scarlett Harper
- Justice of the Peace 3 - Jones M. Russ
- Justice of the Peace Hearing Officer / Initial Appearance Master - Carly Sandoval. This is the officer most likely to set release conditions on someone booked into the Yuma County Detention Center overnight
Constables - three precincts
- Yuma County publishes Constable Precinct #1, #2 and #3 pages under Government. A constable is an elected peace officer who serves process for the justice court, not a judge
Still needed
- The county's bond schedule
- Share of the jail population held pretrial
- Median time from booking to first appearance
Source: the state judiciary · checked 2026-08-23
The County Commissioners
They pay for the jail. The sheriff runs it.
- What they controlThe detention budget, the building itself, and the agreements that let other agencies rent its beds.
- What they don'tDay-to-day operations. The sheriff is separately elected and answers to voters, not to the board.
- The boardBoard of County Commissioners →
- Where the jail money is decidedAgendas and minutes →
Notes on the record
- named is marked yes. The Sheriff's Office publishes a Detention Bureau page headed with the facility's full name, the Yuma County Detention Center, and the county's own site links to it from Government > Sheriff.
- roster is marked yes. The Sheriff's Office runs a Tyler Technologies inmate web portal at inmatesearch.yumacountysheriff.org for facility AZ0140000, searchable by name, subject number or booking number, filterable to 'In Custody' and by booking date range, with the housing facility named as Yuma County Detention Center. The county attaches its own accuracy disclaimer: 'The public inmate web inquiry updates data periodically.'
- capacity is marked yes, and Yuma is unusually forthcoming here. It publishes both halves the check asks for on the same page - a rated capacity of 756 and a 2025 average daily population of 424 - and then goes further, giving the prior year's figure of 412 for comparison, the direction of change for male, female and juvenile populations, and a separate PDF breaking the 2025 population down as 83.25% adult male and 16.75% adult female with no juveniles.
- contracts is marked yes, and this is the strongest single disclosure in either county in this group. The Billing Department page names the counterparties - 'inter-governmental agreements with the Cocopah Indian Tribe and the Quechan Indian Tribe' - and then publishes the price: 'The agencies are billed on a monthly basis at the rate of $135.89 per inmate, per day.' Very few sheriff's offices publish a per-diem rate at all.
- budget is marked yes. The county publishes adopted and tentative Estimates of Revenues and Expenditures, budget resolutions and compensation resolutions back to FY2021/22, as full Arizona Auditor General budget form sets, alongside ClearGov budget books and Budget in Brief editions. The jail is legible in them: six separate funds carry jail money and each is broken out by revenue source, expenditure and staffing.
- bond_info is marked yes. The Bond Information page explains that most non-domestic misdemeanours have set bonds, that a felony arrestee 'will have to appear in court within 24 hours and a Judge may set a bond', that the Admitting Clerk at (928) 782-9871 will say whether someone is bond-eligible and name the court of record, and that 'The Yuma County Detention Center will accept cash bonds in the exact amount ONLY after business hours.' It also states the limit on the office's own role: 'Per Arizona state law, the Yuma County Detention Center is not permitted to recommend a bondsman, nor assist you in contacting a bondsman.'
- fees is marked no, and this is the closest call in the group. Yuma publishes a complete Access Corrections deposit fee schedule effective 09/01/2025, priced by deposit band and by channel, which is more than most counties publish about anything. But the check asks for phone, video visit and commissary rates, and none of those three is given: telephone service is routed to Combined Public Communications with no per-minute rate, video visits are booked through the same vendor with no price, and Access Securepak commissary carries only 'a processing fee for each commissary order that is subject to change'. What is published is the cost of putting money in, not the cost of spending it. The county also publishes a full public records fee schedule - $3.00 for a case report, $1.00 for an incident report, $5.00 per CD for photos, audio or video, $3.00 per fingerprint card, and no charge for an adult arrest record, a booking photo or a letter of incarceration - but those are records fees, not the fees this check asks about.
- prea is marked no for the adult jail, with a caveat worth stating precisely. Yuma County does publish a 'PREA Information' page, but it sits under Courts > Juvenile Justice Center, and covers the juvenile detention facility run by the Superior Court's juvenile probation department, not the Yuma County Detention Center run by the Sheriff. No PREA audit result for the adult jail was found on the Sheriff's Office site, which was read page by page from its own site map.
- deaths is marked no. The Sheriff's Office press releases were checked and the only recent item with 'death' in the title, the Suspicious Death releases of June and August 2026, concerns the killing of a 15-year-old in the 11700 block of S. Adams Avenue and the arrest of a suspect who was then booked into the Detention Center. It is not a death in custody.
- inspections is marked no. Arizona has no state jail inspection body, and no independent inspection result of any kind is published by the county or the Sheriff.
- A note on where the county lives online. Yuma County runs the county site at yumacountyaz.gov but the Sheriff's Office at yumacountysheriff.org, a separate non-.gov domain; the county's own Government > Sheriff link redirects there. The Sheriff's site is plain HTML with a genuine, complete site map, which is why the detention pages could be read exhaustively; the county site is a CivicPlus site behind an Akamai edge that returns 'Access Denied' to plain requests and blocks sitemap.xml, so its pages were reached with ordinary browser headers by following navigation.
- The county's Elected Officials / Representatives List page returns 403 to this researcher, so the sheriff's elected status is sourced instead to the Sheriff's Office's own account of his four elections and to Article 12, Section 3 of the Arizona Constitution, which the same office quotes in full on its history page.
- Board of Supervisors, five members elected to four-year terms from five districts. Martin Porchas is District 1 Supervisor and Chairman, Jonathan Lines is District 2, Darren Simmons is District 3, Marco A. 'Tony' Reyes is District 4 and Lynne Pancrazi is District 5. Two of the five have direct Sheriff's Office histories: Supervisor Simmons 'retired from the Yuma County Sheriff's Office with 27 years service' in November 2015 'and continues to volunteer his time as a Reserve Lieutenant to this day', and Supervisor Lines says he 'played a key role in securing funding for transformative initiatives such as the regional Law Enforcement Training Academy'. County offices are at 197 S. Main St., Yuma, AZ 85364. Yuma County has a Jail District. Under ARS Title 48, Chapter 25 an Arizona county jail district is a taxing and financing body, not an operator, and Yuma's levies no property tax: it appears in neither the primary nor the secondary levy schedule of the FY2027 budget, and is funded instead by a dedicated county sales tax of $22,370,000 for FY2027 out of total district revenue of $25,006,239. The Yuma County Jail District fund (02300) is budgeted at $46,219,596 of expenditure for FY2027 with 262.400 FTE. Around it sit four more jail funds: the Jail Enhancement Fund (02237) at $829,727, the Detention Facility Commissary fund (02286) at $1,616,149, Jail District Other Grants (02308) at $1,260,254 and Debt Service - Jail District (03500) at $505,777. The largest single line is capital: the Jail District Replacement Fund (04403) is budgeted at $19,419,190 for FY2027, after $21,811,299 in FY2026 of which $7,174,381 was actually spent, and receives a $5,000,000 interfund transfer in FY2027. The county publishes the fund but no project page explaining what the replacement is - the CIP pages cover roads and drainage only.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Yuma 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 who runs this jail is elected. So are the commissioners who pay for it.
The sheriff is on your ballot
The county recorder runs the election in Yuma County and prints the ballot the sheriff’s name is on. Links from USA.gov and vote.gov.
Names verified 2026-08-23 · dollars and outcomes still being gathered