The Detention Center
Genesee County Jail
- Operated byGenesee County Sheriff's Office
- Jail address1002 South Saginaw Street, Flint, MI 48502
- BedsMaximum capacity of 580 inmates; operates as a direct-supervision facility
Source: Genesee County Sheriff's Office - Corrections Division · checked 2026-09-19
Transparency rating
3/10Closed- ✓The jail is named
- ✗Who is in custody — not published
- ✓Beds and daily population
- ✓What it costs taxpayers
- ✗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 — not published
- ✗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
- Beds580
Since then
- Not found
The Sheriff
Sheriff Christopher R. Swanson
- Runs the jailThe Genesee County Sheriff's Office operates the Genesee County Jail at 1002 South Saginaw Street, Flint, plus the Flint City Lockup, work-detail, tether, and work-release programs
- How the office is filledElected, four-year term, MCL 51.70
- Statutory basisMCL 51.75 (sheriff has 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: Genesee County Sheriff's Office · 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.
Genesee 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 boardNot found (geneseecountymi.gov blocks automated access via robots.txt; a 2025-2026 adopted county budget was reachable through a separate document-hosting subdomain, but the commissioners/board pages themselves were not) →
- Where the jail money is decidedAgendas and minutes →
Notes on the record
- Corrections Division page links to the state MDOC OTIS prisoner search, ConnectNetwork visitation, and Express Account commissary deposits, but no jail-specific inmate roster, PREA page, inspection report, contract, bond, or fee schedule was found on gcsomichigan.com.
- Genesee County's FY2024-2025 adopted budget (hosted on the county's Revize document platform) lists a Building & Grounds Corrections (Dept 309.00) line of $1,754,650 (salaries $163,685; fringe benefits $180,480; supplies/operating $895,485; capital outlay $515,000); this is a facilities-maintenance sub-budget, not the full Corrections Division operating budget.
- The county's main site (geneseecountymi.gov) blocks automated fetching via robots.txt, which limited direct verification of the Board of Commissioners' current chair; news search results independently named both Dale K. Weighill and (in an older post) Delrico Loyd as chair at different times, but neither could be confirmed by opening an official page, so this is recorded as not found rather than guessed.
- Given Genesee County's larger size, this entry should be treated as a starting point for further direct verification (e.g., FOIA requests) of roster, deaths, PREA, inspections, contracts, bond and fee disclosures.
- State inspection/oversight: Michigan Department of Corrections conducts county jail inspections under state administrative rules; no inspection report was found published on gcsomichigan.com.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Genesee 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