San Francisco County, California — The Jail, the Sheriff, the Judges

The Detention Center

County Jail #2; County Jail #2 Annex; County Jail #3; Intake and Release Center

Operated bySan Francisco Sheriff's Office
County publishes jail namesYes — four facilities named on the Sheriff's Jails page
County Jail #2425 – 7th Street, San Francisco; all genders; rated capacity 392 beds
County Jail #31 Moreland Drive, San Bruno; opened 2005 (formerly County Jail #5); rated capacity 768 beds
County Jail #3 AnnexSan Bruno; rated capacity 372 beds
NoteCounty Jail #3 sits in San Bruno, San Mateo County, but is under San Francisco jurisdiction
Rated capacity1,562 beds across 3 facilities

Source: San Francisco Sheriff's Office — Current jail data and trends · 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
✗PREA audits — not published
✗Independent inspection — not published
✗Who else it holds, and for how much — not published
✓How to post bond
✗Phone, video and commissary rates — not published

This rates disclosure, not conduct — what San Francisco County publishes about a jail its taxpayers own, checked 2026-08-23. Nothing here says the jail is run well or badly. Every mark moves the moment the county posts the document.

The Building

You paid for it. Here is what the record says it cost.

Year builtCounty Jail #3 opened in 2005
Original costNot found
Paid for byNot found
BedsCounty Jail #2: 392 rated beds; County Jail #3: 768 rated beds; County Jail #3 Annex: 372 rated beds

Since then

County Jail #3 Annex was reopened as the jail population rose; the FY2026-27/FY2027-28 Sheriff budget request seeks $42 million and 110 positions to staff it

The Sheriff

Sheriff Paul M. Miyamoto

Title as publishedSheriff
Also serves asNot the coroner — San Francisco has an Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (https://www.sfgov.org/agency/medical-examiner)
JurisdictionConsolidated City and County of San Francisco

Still needed

Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail

Source: San Francisco Sheriff's Office — Organization Chart · checked 2026-08-23

The Judges

Large multi-judge court; only the Presiding Judge and Assistant Presiding Judge are listed, per the brief. Arraignments and preliminary hearings are heard at the Hall of Justice, 850 Bryant Street (Departments 9, 11, 12, 14, 17 and 20 in the assignment order effective May 18, 2026).

Superior Court of California, County of San Francisco — Presiding Judge

Rochelle C. East

Superior Court of California, County of San Francisco — Assistant Presiding Judge

Christopher C. Hite

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

The Sheriff runs the jails but does not determine cause of death; San Francisco has a separate Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.
Rated capacities are published by facility and daily counts, 30-day and 180-day population trends, demographics and length of stay are posted; the city also publishes a County Jail Population dataset at https://www.sf.gov/data--county-jail-population.
Jail phone calls have been free since August 10, 2020 — San Francisco says it was the first county in the nation to do so — but no commissary price list or video visit rate is published, so the fees check is recorded 'no'.
PREA: annual PREA case tables (2014–2022) with victim/accused/complaint/date/facility/disposition are published at https://sfsheriff.com/prea-annual-reports, but no independent PREA audit report was found.
The Sheriff's FY2026-27 and FY2027-28 budget request notes the jail population rose from an average of 797 in January 2023 to about 1,294 in February 2026.
No county-published contract or per-diem rate for holding other agencies' prisoners was found.
Eleven-member Board of Supervisors, elected by district; San Francisco is a consolidated city and county so the Board is both the county board and the city council.

What California law requires

San Francisco County posts a death-in-custody page.

Posts 7 of 7

The page is here. A dedicated page titled 'AB 2761 Death In Custody Reporting' quotes Penal Code 10008 in full and publishes a filterable table with columns Date of Death, Agency, County, Facility, Location of Death, Race, Gender, Age, Custody Status, Manner of Death and Means of Death — all seven required elements. Six deaths are listed, from 2/15/2023 to 3/20/2025, two of them at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital; two entries show manner and means as 'Pending'.

✓The agency with custodial responsibility
✓The county where the death occurred
✓The facility — and where inside it
✓Race, gender and age
✓The date of death
✓Custodial status — awaiting arraignment, awaiting trial, or incarcerated
✓Manner and means of death

California Penal Code § 10008, enacted by AB 2761 and in force since January 2023, requires the agency with custodial responsibility to post these seven items on its own website within ten days of a death in custody, and to update them within thirty days if the facts change. California is the only state in the country with this duty. Checked 2026-08-23. This records what is published, nothing more.

The record

15 people have died in the San Francisco County jail since 2017.

2 by suicide

6 illness or medical

15 deaths in all, 2016 onward

Deaths where the person had not been convicted of the charge holding them15 of 15

Most recent death on the state's record2025-03-20

Deaths: Texas Justice Initiative, the cleaned copy of the Texas Attorney General’s custodial death reports — the state’s own public index carries no cause of death and has not been refreshed since August 2025. Population: Texas Commission on Jail Standards monthly report. Counted, not estimated.

These three offices decide who sits in a cell in San Francisco 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 elections office runs the polling place in San Francisco County and prints the ballot the sheriff’s name is on. Links from the California Secretary of State and vote.gov.

Names verified 2026-08-23 · dollars and outcomes still being gathered