San Luis Obispo County, California — The Jail, the Sheriff, the Judges

The Detention Center

San Luis Obispo County Jail (with the San Luis Obispo Honor Farm)

Operated bySan Luis Obispo County Sheriff-Coroner, Custody Division
County publishes a jail nameYes — San Luis Obispo County Jail
Jail address1585 Kansas Avenue, San Luis Obispo, CA 93405
Average daily population 2025512
Bookings 20257,904 incarcerated persons booked; 435 booked through alternative sentencing
Housing units named in death postingsWest Housing; 'Kansas Jail'
Rated capacity844 beds across 2 facilities

Source: San Luis Obispo County Sheriff's Office — Jail / Custody FAQs · 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 Luis Obispo 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 builtNot found
Original costNot found
Paid for byNot found
BedsNot found — the county publishes average daily population (512 in 2025) but no rated bed count

Since then

Not found

The Sheriff

Sheriff Ian Parkinson

Title as publishedSheriff-Coroner
Also serves asCounty Coroner — the county department is named 'Sheriff-Coroner' and the office runs a Coroner Unit
Headquarters and jail address1585 Kansas Avenue, San Luis Obispo, CA 93405

Still needed

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

Source: County of San Luis Obispo — Sheriff-Coroner · checked 2026-08-23

The Judges

The court publishes assignments by department rather than a bail calendar; criminal departments 1, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 sit at the San Luis Obispo Courthouse, with additional departments in Paso Robles.

Superior Court of California, County of San Luis Obispo — Presiding Judge

Tana Coates

Superior Court of California, County of San Luis Obispo — Assistant Presiding Judge

Jesse J. Marino

Superior Court of California, County of San Luis Obispo — Supervising Judge, Criminal Division

Crystal T. Seiler

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

San Luis Obispo is one of the fully itemised PC 10008 postings in this group: the seven statutory elements are answered one by one, including custodial status and manner and means.
The Sheriff-Coroner runs both the jail and the Coroner Unit that determines cause of death of people who die in it.
The 2025 Annual Report gives the Sheriff's Office total budget for FY2024/25 as $130 million, of which $71,162,298 came from the General Fund, $41,474,796 from State Aid and $8,486,177 from Federal Aid; no detention-only figure is broken out, so the budget check rests on the total.
Fees: TouchPay deposit charges are published ($2.95 for deposits up to $200, $3.95 above), but inmate phone calls run through NCIC on collect or advance-pay accounts with no rate published, and Aramark/iCare commissary prices are not published; the check is recorded 'no'.
PREA is described in the Jail / Custody FAQ but no audit result is published.
The Sheriff's site search returns nothing for 'in-custody', 'custody death', '2761', 'death' or 'Penal Code 10008'; the postings were located through the FAQ page and BSCC's county list.
BSCC rated capacity for San Luis Obispo is 844 beds (County Jail 720, Honor Farm 124) — a state figure, not a county publication.
Five-member Board of Supervisors, elected by district.

What California law requires

San Luis Obispo County posts a death-in-custody page.

Posts 7 of 7

The page is here. The postings sit inside the Jail / Custody FAQ page under the heading 'PC 10008 In-Custody Death Reporting'. Each entry reprints the statute and answers all seven subdivisions item by item — for the 3/14/2026 death of Trenidad Castilleja Jr.: San Luis Obispo County Sheriff's Office; San Luis Obispo County; San Luis Obispo County Jail / West Housing; HIS / Male / 48; March 14, 2026; 'Pending Sentencing'; 'Accident / Toxic effects of fentanyl with ... hypertensive cardiovascular disease'; and it records next-of-kin notification on 3/15/26. Three deaths are posted (3/14/2026, 5/30/2025 and 8/6/2023); BSCC's county list points to the 2023 one as a standalone news article (https://www.bscc.ca.gov/icdr-county-info/).

✓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

11 people have died in the San Luis Obispo County jail since 2016.

2 by suicide

6 illness or medical

11 deaths in all, 2016 onward

Deaths where the person had not been convicted of the charge holding them8 of 11

Most recent death on the state's record2025-05-25

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 Luis Obispo 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 Luis Obispo 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