The Detention Center
Downtown Detention Center and Denver County Jail (also called the Van Cise-Simonet Detention Center)
- Operated byDenver Sheriff Department
- Facility countTwo jail facilities, plus the Denver Sheriff Training Academy
- Court securityDSD also provides security for the Denver District and County Courts, state inmate transportation, and extradition duties
Source: Denver Sheriff Department — Facilities, Requests & Services · checked 2026-08-24
Transparency rating
6/10Partial- ✓The jail is named
- ✓Who is in custody
- ✓Beds and daily population
- ✗What it costs taxpayers — not published
- ✓Deaths in custody
- ✗PREA audits — not published
- ✓Independent inspection
- ✗Who else it holds, and for how much — not published
- ✓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
- Original costNot found
- Paid for byNot found
- BedsNot found
Since then
- Not found
The Sheriff
Sheriff Elias Diggins
- Runs the jailYes — the Denver Sheriff Department (DSD) operates two jail facilities
- How the office is filledAppointed, not elected; Denver is a consolidated city and county. The Sheriff is not listed among Denver's elected officials (Mayor, City Council, Auditor, Clerk & Recorder) on the city's own site, and appears instead as the head of a city department
- Department sizeOver 1,100 uniformed and non-uniformed staff
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Denver Sheriff Department overview (denvergov.org) · checked 2026-08-24
The Judges
Colorado judges are appointed through a judicial nominating commission and then face retention elections; they are state judicial officers, not county officials. Denver County Court is unique among Colorado county courts in being funded and operated by the City and County of Denver itself, with its own presiding judge, rather than run purely as a state judicial-district office.
2nd Judicial District — District Court Chief Judge
- Christopher J. Baumann
Denver County Court — Presiding Judge
- Kerri Lombardi
- The county's bond schedule
- Share of the jail population held pretrial
- Median time from booking to first appearance
Source: the state judiciary · checked 2026-08-24
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 DSD Data, Policies & Reports page publishes interactive 'Current Confined Population & Average Daily Population' reports and multi-year average daily jail population reports, satisfying the capacity check.
- The Office of the Independent Monitor (OIM), a civilian oversight agency created by the Mayor and City Council in 2004, monitors investigations into in-custody deaths involving DSD personnel and publishes annual and semiannual reports — used here for both the 'deaths' and 'inspections' checks, since it is an independent body whose existence and reporting the city publishes on its own site.
- The Data, Policies & Reports page has a titled 'Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA)' section and a PREA compliance contact email, but no specific published PREA audit result text or document could be confirmed from the page content retrieved, so 'prea' is marked no.
- No detention-specific budget figure, inmate-holding contract information, or specific phone/video/commissary rate schedule was found published on the DSD's own site.
- Colorado's statewide jail standards under the Colorado Jail Standards Commission became mandatory July 1, 2026; no published result specific to Denver was found (Denver is also subject to independent city oversight described above).
- Denver is a consolidated city and county with no separate Board of County Commissioners; the Denver City Council performs the equivalent legislative function citywide, and the Mayor (Mike Johnston) heads the executive branch.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Denver 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.
Names verified 2026-08-24 · dollars and outcomes still being gathered