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

The Detention Center

Sheriff's Detention Center — East; Sheriff's Detention Center — West; Minimum Housing Units 1 & 2; Re-Entry and Enhanced Alternatives to Custody Training (REACT) Center

Operated byStanislaus County Sheriff's Office — Detention Services
County publishes a jail nameYes — four adult detention facilities are each named with their own page under Detention Services
Sheriff's Office address250 E. Hackett Rd., Modesto, CA 95358
PREA Coordinator address424 E. Hackett Rd., Modesto, CA 95358
Video visitation vendorJailATM (SDC-East, REACT); ICSolutions (SDC-West, Minimum Housing)
Rated capacity1,646 beds across 3 facilities

Source: Stanislaus County Sheriff's Office — Detention Facilities · checked 2026-08-23

Transparency rating

5/10Partial

✓The jail is named
✓Who is in custody
✗Beds and daily population — not published
✓What it costs taxpayers
✓Deaths in custody
✓PREA audits
✗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 Stanislaus 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 — none of the four facility pages publishes a bed count or daily population

Since then

Not found

The Sheriff

Sheriff Jeff Dirkse

Title as publishedSheriff / Coroner — signature block on Sheriff's Office notices reads 'JEFF DIRKSE - SHERIFF / CORONER'
Also serves asCounty Coroner — the Coroner's Division is a division of the Sheriff's Office
Coroner's Division pagehttps://www.scsdonline.com/administration/coroner-s-division
UndersheriffLaBarbera

Still needed

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

Source: Stanislaus County Sheriff's Department — signed public notice (Adult Detention, Bureau of Administrative Services) · checked 2026-08-23

The Judges

Large multi-judge court; per the brief only the Presiding Judge and Assistant Presiding Judge are listed. Judge Westbrook was confirmed as Presiding Judge on July 1, 2026 following the resignation of Judge Sonny Sandhu, and serves through December 31, 2026. Commissioners who handle arraignment and bail calendars are not individually named on the court's published pages.

Superior Court of California, County of Stanislaus — Presiding Judge

Kellee Westbrook

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

Stacy Speiller

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

www.scsdonline.com refuses direct requests from this network (HTTP 403); every page cited here was read through a rendering proxy that returns the live page content.
PREA: the Sheriff publishes third-party final PREA audit reports for MHU, SDC-East, SDC-West and REACT (2019 and 2023 cycles) plus annual PREA statistical reports 2012-2022.
Fees: the Telephones page names ICSolutions and a signup number but publishes no rates. A May 17, 2019 public notice states paid video visitation was discontinued as of May 23, 2019; facility pages say each incarcerated person gets two free 30-minute video visits per week and that 'additional visits are paid per minute' without stating the rate.
Capacity: the four facility pages describe visiting rules only. No bed count, rated capacity or average daily population is published on the county's own site.
Bail: no bail-posting guidance was found in the Sheriff's site map (all Detention Services and Online Services pages checked); TouchPay is presented for inmate account deposits.
Contracts: no page publishing agreements to hold other agencies' prisoners, or per-diem rates, was found in the site map.
Five-member Board of Supervisors, elected by district.

What California law requires

Stanislaus County posts a death-in-custody page.

Posts 7 of 7

The page is here. A standing page titled 'In-Custody Deaths' states the office 'is required to post specific information, within 10 days, whenever a subject dies in our custody' in compliance with AB 2761 and Penal Code 10008. It lists thirteen dated entries under year headings 2023 through 2025 (most recent 12/13/2025), each linking to a one-page PDF headed '10008_Report'. The index page itself shows only dates. The report form carries all seven statutory headings — Name of Agency, County where Death Occurred, Facility, Location, Race, Gender, Age, Date of Death, Custodial Status, Manner and Means of Death — but the entered values sit in PDF form fields that did not render in text extraction, so the completeness of the individual entries could not be verified.

✓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

39 people have died in the Stanislaus County jail since 2016.

9 by suicide

14 illness or medical

39 deaths in all, 2016 onward

Deaths where the person had not been convicted of the charge holding them33 of 39

Most recent death on the state's record2025-12-13

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 Stanislaus 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 Stanislaus 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