The Detention Center
Not found
- Operated byClinch County Sheriff's Department
- JailCounty sheriff page says the Sheriff's Department operates the county jail; no name, address or capacity given
Source: Clinch County — Sheriff page · checked 2026-09-29
Transparency rating
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 Raymond Peterson
- Runs the jailYes — the county's sheriff page says the Sheriff's Department operates the county jail
- How the office is filledElected, four-year term
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Clinch County — Sheriff page · checked 2026-09-29
The Judges
Georgia's superior court judges are elected state judges who hear felony cases. For most charges a county magistrate sets bail soon after arrest; for the most serious felonies only a superior court judge can.
Who sets bail in Clinch County
- Superior Court: the Alapaha Judicial Circuit, which also serves Atkinson, Berrien, Cook and Lanier. Superior court judges are elected circuit-wide in nonpartisan elections to four-year terms and hear felony cases; for the most serious felonies only a superior court judge can set bail.
- Magistrate Court: the Clinch County Magistrate Court. For most charges a magistrate sets bail soon after arrest.
- The county's bond schedule
- Share of the jail population held pretrial
- Median time from booking to first appearance
Source: the state judiciary · checked 2026-09-29
The Board of Commissioners
They pay for the jail. The sheriff runs it.
- What they controlThe county budget that funds the sheriff's office and the jail, and the jail building itself. Some small counties have a sole commissioner; consolidated governments such as Athens-Clarke, Augusta-Richmond, Columbus and Macon-Bibb have a commission instead.
- What they don'tDay-to-day operations. By law the sheriff is the jailer of the county and appoints the other jailers, subject to the governing authority's supervision (O.C.G.A. 42-4-1). No state agency inspects the jail.
- NoteBoard name taken from the county site's navigation link; the board page itself was not opened.
- The boardClinch County Board of Commissioners
- Where the jail money is decidedNot found
Notes on the record
- Not fully examined: only the county's sheriff page opened; the board of commissioners page and other sub-pages were refused, so checks are left empty.
- The county sheriff page names the sheriff and says the department operates the county jail, but gives no jail name, address or capacity; its link list has no jail, bond, visitation or PREA pages.
- What was tried: https://clinchcountyga.gov/sheriff.html opened; https://clinchcountyga.gov/board-of-commissioners.html refused (HTTP 429 rate limit). The WebFetch proxy began refusing every request with HTTP 429 (rate limited, told not to retry) partway through this group; research stopped there.
- No WebSearch was used for this county.
- State inspection/oversight: Georgia law makes the sheriff the county's jailer. The Georgia Sheriffs' Association, an association of the state's sheriffs rather than a state agency, publishes jail standards and a statewide monthly jail report.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Clinch 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 is elected. So are the commissioners who pay for the jail, and the judges who set bail.
Names verified 2026-09-29 · dollars and outcomes still being gathered