Dooly County, Georgia — The Jail, the Sheriff, the Judges

The Detention Center

Dooly County Jail

Operated byDooly County Sheriff's Office
Jail address576 Pinehurst Hawkinsville Rd, Pinehurst, GA 31070
Jail phone(229) 645-0920
DepositsJailATM.com

Source: Dooly County Sheriff's Office — Detention · checked 2026-09-29

Transparency rating

Not scored. Dooly County's and its sheriff's own websites could not be reached or read in the session that produced this record, so their disclosures were never examined. This is a gap in the research, not a finding about the county.

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 Craig Peavy

Runs the jailYes — the Sheriff's Office Detention division runs the Dooly County jail
How the office is filledElected, four-year term (Georgia law)

Still needed

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

Source: Dooly County Sheriff's Office — Meet the Sheriff · 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 Dooly County

Superior Court: the Cordele Judicial Circuit, which also serves Wilcox, Crisp and Ben Hill. 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 Dooly County Magistrate Court. For most charges a magistrate sets bail soon after arrest.

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 2026-09-29

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.
NoteCounty government site not examined.
The boardNot found
Where the jail money is decidedNot found

Notes on the record

Directory website https://doolycountysheriff.com first refused (PROVENANCE_REQUIRED); a general search returned only aggregators, and a second search limited to doolycountysheriff.com returned the site. Dooly County, Georgia confirmed (Pinehurst, GA).
Opened: Detention and Meet the Sheriff. Meet the Sheriff names 'SHERIFF CRAIG PEAVY' (directory lead: S. Craig Peavy).
Detention page refers to the Dooly County jail, gives address and phone, a JailATM deposit link and a bondsmen link; no capacity, roster, rates, bond guidance or PREA on that page.
What was tried: FAQ (https://www.doolycountysheriff.com/faq) and Administration (https://www.doolycountysheriff.com/administration) pages were refused by the fetch proxy (HTTP 429 rate limit) and could not be read; bond, fee and staff details there are unverified, so this county is only partly examined.
Search cap reached; county government site and budget not examined.
Not scored: The sheriff's FAQ and administration pages were refused by our reader; only the detention and sheriff pages were read. Marking the rest 'not published' would claim more than was checked. Found published on the pages that did open: named.
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 Dooly 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