The Detention Center
Gratiot County Jail
- Operated byGratiot County Sheriff's Office
- Jail address214 E Center Street, Ithaca, MI 48847 (Gratiot County Courthouse complex)
- Capacity70 inmates; 13 full-time staff plus 1 jail administrator and up to 6 temporary officers; major facility upgrade completed in 2001
Source: Gratiot County, MI - Sheriff's Office · checked 2026-09-19
Transparency rating
6/10Partial- ✓The jail is named
- ✓Who is in custody
- ✓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
- ✓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
- Beds70
Since then
- Major facility upgrade completed in 2001
The Sheriff
Sheriff Tom Clark
- Runs the jailGratiot County Sheriff's Office operates the Gratiot County Jail
- How the office is filledElected, four-year term, MCL 51.70
- Statutory basisMCL 51.75 gives the sheriff 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: Gratiot County, MI - 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.
Gratiot 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 boardGratiot County Board of Commissioners: Dave Owens (D1), Jan Bunting (Vice Chair, D2), Timothy Gay (D3), Steve Sopocy (D4), George Bailey (D5)
- Where the jail money is decidedNot found
Notes on the record
- The jail roster is provided via a vendor-hosted JailTracker system (omsweb.public-safety-cloud.com) linked directly from the Sheriff's Office's own page; that linking page on the office's own domain is cited as the source.
- Bond payments are handled through the ExpressAccount system, linked as an external quick link from the Sheriff's Office's own page.
- The county's Death Index page (https://www.gratiotmi.com/254/Death-Index) is a vital-records (birth/death certificate) index, not a jail-death disclosure, so it was not used for the deaths check.
- Budget Book fiscal year 2023/2024 (archived on the county's own site) shows Sheriff Department staffing (17-21.38 FTEs across FY2022-2024), a dedicated Sheriff Deputy Millage Fund (Fund 207, $790,655 budgeted for 2023-24, funded by a 0.4486 mill property tax levy), and a Jail Commissary/Sheriff fund (Fund 595, $87,750 budgeted revenue).
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Gratiot 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