The Detention Center
Mecosta County Jail
- Operated byMecosta County Sheriff's Office
- Jail location225 S. Stewart, Big Rapids, MI 49307 (Sheriff's Office/jail address)
- Jail AdministratorMark Danielson, per the county's own Sheriff page
- UndersheriffCasey Nemeth
Source: Mecosta County, MI - Sheriff · checked 2026-09-19
Transparency rating
1/10Closed- ✓The jail is named
- ✗Who is in custody — not published
- ✗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 — 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
- BedsNot found
Since then
- Not found
The Sheriff
Sheriff Brian Miller
- Runs the jailThe Sheriff's Office operates the Mecosta County Jail, per the county's own Sheriff page
- How the office is filledElected, four-year term, MCL 51.70
- Statutory basisMCL 51.75 gives the elected county 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: Mecosta County, MI - Sheriff · 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.
Mecosta 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 boardhttps://www.mecostacounty.org/government/board_of_commissioners.php →
- Where the jail money is decidedAgendas and minutes →
Notes on the record
- The Sheriff's Office page publishes a general service-fee list for civil process, incident reports, and traffic crash reports (e.g., $9.00 for a crash report, $2.00/$1.00 per page for incident reports), but no jail-specific booking/housing fee schedule, so 'fees' is marked 'no' for jail transparency purposes.
- Visitation is scheduled through the third-party icsolutions.com platform rather than the county's own site.
- What was tried: fetched a guessed Finance page (404) looking for a Sheriff/jail budget line; none was found. No jail capacity/bed count, roster, death records, PREA policy, inspection reports, contracts, or bond information were found published on the county's own site.
- State inspection/oversight: Michigan county jails are subject to inspection under the Michigan Department of Corrections' Administrative Rules for Jails and Lockups (authorized under MCL 791.262 et seq.); no county-published inspection reports were found on mecostacounty.org.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Mecosta 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