The Detention Center
Berrien County Jail
- Operated byBerrien County Sheriff's Office
- Jail address919 Port Street, St. Joseph, MI 49085.
- BedsNot found
Source: Berrien County, MI - Jail Information · checked 2026-09-19
Transparency rating
4/10Partial- ✓The jail is named
- ✓Who is in custody
- ✗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
- ✓Phone, video and commissary rates
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 Chuck Heit
- Runs the jailThe Sheriff has statutory custody and control of the county jail.
- How the office is filledElected, four-year term, MCL 51.70. Chuck Heit was elected Sheriff in November 2024 and sworn in December 2024, succeeding Leonard Bailey (2001-2023); he had served as Undersheriff since January 1, 2003.
- Statutory basisMCL 51.75 (county sheriff has charge and custody of the county jail)
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Berrien County, MI - Sheriffs of Berrien County · checked 2026-09-19
The Judges
Michigan circuit and district court judges are elected on a nonpartisan ballot to six-year terms under Mich. Const. art. VI — state judicial officers, not county officials.
Berrien County Circuit Court
- Not found
- The county's bond schedule
- Share of the jail population held pretrial
- Median time from booking to first appearance
Source: the state judiciary · checked 2026-09-19
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 boardBerrien County Board of Commissioners, 2025-2028 term: Sharon J. Tyler, Mamie L. Yarbrough, Julie Wuerfel, Teri Sue Freehling, Jon Hinkelman, David Vollrath, Robert P. Harrison, Alex R. Ott, R. McKinley Elliott, Rayonte Bell, Chokwe Pitchford, and Jim Curran, per the board's own page. →
- Where the jail money is decidedAgendas and minutes →
Notes on the record
- berriencounty.org actively blocks generic automated fetches (robots.txt fetch rate-limited and a bot-verification/CAPTCHA challenge on several pages, e.g. /1103/Annual-Report and /848/Contact-Sheriff-Administrative-Personnel); pages that did load were read via a text-rendering fetch of the same official URLs, not a cache or aggregator.
- The Inmate Search page (558) links to an 'Inmate Lookup Tool' at iml.berriencounty.org/IML, a county subdomain, and states 'Bond information is accurate as of bookings beginning 6/12/25 to the present date.'
- The county's general 'About Us' sheriff page still names the previous sheriff ('Sheriff Bailey') in its mission-statement text, but the office's own history page (428) and staff directory (EID=105) confirm Chuck Heit as the current, sitting sheriff.
- Annual Budget / Budget Reports pages exist on berriencounty.org (e.g. /1387/Annual-Budgets, /349/Budget-Reports) but could not be opened past the site's bot-verification challenge, so budget is recorded as not found rather than guessed.
- State inspection/oversight: Michigan county jails operate under the Michigan Department of Corrections' Administrative Rules for Jails and Lockups (promulgated under MCL 791.262), with periodic compliance inspections; Benzie County's own site cites continuous compliance since 2000 with a inspection most recently in 2022, and Calhoun County's 2020 annual report references state and federal inspections conducted that year.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Berrien 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 2026-09-19 · dollars and outcomes still being gathered