Sierra County, California — The Jail, the Sheriff, the Judges

The Detention Center

No jail. Sierra County operates a Temporary Housing Facility at the courthouse in Downieville.

Operated bySierra County Sheriff-Coroner's Office
County has no jailConfirmed — Sierra County does not appear in the state's rated-capacity file for local detention facilities
Facility the county does nameTemporary Housing Facility, 100 Courthouse Square, Downieville, CA 95936
What it isInitial booking and short-term holding only; no inmate visitation is permitted there
Where prisoners are heldPrimarily Nevada County's Wayne Brown Correctional Facility in Nevada City, occasionally the Plumas County Jail in Quincy, under contract with Nevada County
CapacityNot published
What the state reportsThe Board of State and Community Corrections lists no rated jail capacity for this county. People arrested here are held somewhere else.

Source: Sierra County — Temporary Housing Facility · checked 2026-08-23

Transparency rating

1/10Closed

✓The jail is named
✗Who is in custody — not published
✗Beds and daily population — not published
✗What it costs taxpayers — not published
✗Deaths in custody — not published
✗PREA audits — not published
✗Independent inspection — not published
✗Who else it holds, and for how much — not published
✗How to post bond — not published
✗Phone, video and commissary rates — not published

This rates disclosure, not conduct — what Sierra 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
BedsNo jail. Sierra County is absent from the state's rated-capacity file for local detention facilities; no capacity is published for the Temporary Housing Facility.

Since then

Not found

The Sheriff

Sheriff Mike Fisher

Title as publishedSheriff/Coroner
Also serves asCounty Coroner — the department is titled Sheriff-Coroner and maintains a Coroner Information page
Source noteNamed in the Board of Supervisors minutes of January 6, 2026; the department's own web page was not retrievable

Still needed

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

Source: Sierra County Board of Supervisors minutes, January 6, 2026 · checked 2026-08-23

The Judges

The entire bench is listed: two judges and one commissioner.

Superior Court of California, County of Sierra — Presiding Judge

Charles H. Ervin

Superior Court of California, County of Sierra — Assistant Presiding Judge

John "Jason" LaChance

Superior Court of California, County of Sierra — Commissioner

Robert J. Brodnik

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 'named' check is marked yes because the county names a detention facility on its own site — but it is a Temporary Housing Facility for booking and short-term holding, not a jail.
Sierra County is the sending agency, not the receiving one: it contracts with Nevada County to house its prisoners, and occasionally uses the Plumas County Jail. No rate is published for that arrangement. The contracts check asks about holding other agencies' prisoners, which Sierra County does not do, so it is marked no.
Roster: the Temporary Housing Facility page directs the public to search Nevada County inmates rather than publishing a Sierra County roster.
The Sierra County website intermittently blocks automated retrieval; the department menu was captured successfully through the Temporary Housing Facility page.
The state's death-in-custody file records 0 deaths for Sierra County.
Five-member Board of Supervisors, elected by district for four-year terms.

What California law requires

We could not find a death-in-custody page for Sierra County.

No page found

No in-custody death reporting page was found. The Sheriff-Coroner section's full navigation was retrieved and contains no AB 2761, PC 10008, in-custody death, or custodial death item. URLs checked: https://www.sierracounty.ca.gov/301/Temporary-Housing-Facility (which lists the department's complete menu), https://www.sierracounty.ca.gov/298/Sheriff-Coroner (repeatedly unreachable — robots.txt could not be fetched), https://www.sierracounty.ca.gov/814/Coroner-Information, https://www.sierracounty.ca.gov/337/Press-Releases. The state's death-in-custody data records zero deaths for Sierra County, so there may be nothing the county has been required to post. A page may exist somewhere we did not look. If you know of one, tell us and we will correct this.

—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.

These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Sierra 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 Sierra 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