The Detention Center
Hillsdale County Jail
- Operated byHillsdale County Sheriff's Office
- Jail address165 W. Fayette Street, Hillsdale, MI 49242
- Capacity67 inmates in general population, plus holding cells for another 13 pre-arraignment
Source: Hillsdale County Sheriff's Office - HCSO Jail Services · checked 2026-09-19
Transparency rating
5/10Partial- ✓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 — 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
- Beds67 general population + 13 pre-arraignment holding
Since then
- Not found
The Sheriff
Sheriff Scott B. Hodshire
- Runs the jailHillsdale County Sheriff's Office operates the Hillsdale 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: Hillsdale 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.
Hillsdale 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 →
- Where the jail money is decidedAgendas and minutes →
Notes on the record
- Jail roster is provided via a vendor-hosted JailTracker system (omsweb.public-safety-cloud.com) linked from the Sheriff's Office's own Jail Services page; that linking page (on the office's own domain) is cited.
- The county's own 3-Year Budget History PDF shows jail-specific line items (e.g., Dept 265.08 'Jail Building and Grounds Maintenance': janitorial supplies, prisoner supplies, building and equipment repair, kitchen equipment, grounds maintenance) but no separately broken-out Sheriff/Corrections personnel budget was visible in the portion reviewed.
- The Sheriff's Office site has a 'Death Investigation Unit' link but no content describing in-custody deaths was found.
- A Michigan Attorney General press release (Jan. 2025) noted a former Hillsdale County Sheriff's Department sergeant was sentenced for assault of a county jail inmate; this is a state government source, not the sheriff's office's own site, and is noted here for context only, not used to satisfy any audit check.
- No dedicated fee-schedule page was found on the office's own site; the Jail Services page mentions a non-refundable eXpressAccount.com service fee on bond/deposit transactions but does not publish a fee schedule.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Hillsdale 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