The Detention Center
Houghton County Corrections Facility
- Operated byHoughton County Sheriff's Office
- Jail address403 East Houghton Ave, Houghton, MI 49931
- Capacity28-bed corrections facility; 9 full-time and 6 part-time corrections officers
Source: Houghton County Sheriff's Office - Corrections · 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 — 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 — 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
- Beds28
Since then
- Not found
The Sheriff
Sheriff Joshua B. Saaranen
- Runs the jailHoughton County Sheriff's Office operates the Houghton County Corrections Facility
- 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: Houghton County, Michigan - 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.
Houghton 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 boardHoughton County Board of Commissioners: Tom Tikkanen (Chairman, D1), Joel Keranen (D2), Glenn Anderson (D3), Gretchen Janssen (D4), Roy Britz (D5) →
- Where the jail money is decidedAgendas and minutes →
Notes on the record
- The county's own '2026 Jail Project' page states the Board has been discussing replacing the current jail 'since 1983' due to its age and lack of appropriate space, and that three prior replacement proposals were defeated (2000, 2010, 2018), with a May 2025 proposal for a new facility on Sharon Avenue also defeated in an August 2025 election; exact year the current jail was built was not stated.
- The county links to a 'Financial Dashboard' (an external MI Community Financial Dashboard tool) from its finance-related page, but no Sheriff/jail-specific budget figures could be confirmed from the pages opened.
- No jail roster, PREA, inspections, or contracts information was found published on the county or sheriff's office's own sites; third-party inmate-lookup aggregator sites exist but were excluded per methodology.
- Bond payments are handled through GovPayNow (PLC #1364), as stated on the Sheriff's Office's own Corrections page.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Houghton 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