The Detention Center
Cortland County Jail
- Operated byCortland County Sheriff's Office
- Jail address54 Greenbush Street, Cortland, NY 13045
- Budget lineA3150 Jail, under the Sheriff's Department
Source: Cortland County 2026 Adopted Budget · checked 2026-09-20
Transparency rating
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 Mark E. Helms
- Runs the jailYes — the county budget carries the jail under the Sheriff's Department
- How the office is filledElected county sheriff
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Cortland County 2026 Adopted Budget · checked 2026-09-20
The Judges
New York's county and supreme court justices are state judicial officers, not county officials; city, town and village justices also set bail for people arrested in their areas.
Cortland 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 2026-09-20
The County Legislature or Board of Supervisors
They pay for the jail. In most counties the sheriff runs it.
- What they controlThe jail budget, the building itself, and the agreements that rent its beds to other agencies. Several counties also have an elected County Executive. In Westchester a county Department of Correction runs the jail rather than the sheriff.
- What they don'tDay-to-day operations, and state oversight. The sheriff is separately elected and keeps the jail in most counties (NY Correction Law art. 20), while the State Commission of Correction sets the standards, inspects the facility and investigates every death in custody. The five New York City counties have no county sheriff jail at all — the city Department of Correction runs them.
- The boardCortland County Legislature →
- Where the jail money is decidedAgendas and minutes →
Notes on the record
- The supplied /206/Sheriff URL returned 404; the county's own site lists the Sheriff's Office on a separate domain, cortlandcountysheriffny.gov.
- That sheriff's domain, and the county's own sheriff and correctional-facility pages (/351, /415, /1194, QuickLinks), were refused to our reader by robots.txt or returned server errors, so the jail pages could not be examined and most checks could not be judged from published pages.
- What did open: the county's sitemap, the Legislature agendas-and-minutes page and the 2026 adopted budget.
- The 2026 adopted budget carries 'A3110 Civil & Administrative', 'A3120 Road Patrol' and 'A3150 Jail' under the Sheriff's Department, and names Mark E. Helms as Sheriff.
- Also tried and refused: the county's Public Safety page, the Judiciary and Public Safety Committee page, a 2015 jail study executive summary and a 2003 inmate housing costs document in the county document centre, all of which returned server errors.
- No county page we could open names the jail, so the 'named' check stays 'no' rather than being scored from a page we never saw.
- Not scored: The sheriff's own domain and every county sheriff/correctional-facility page were refused by robots or returned errors; only a sitemap, minutes page and budget were read. Marking the rest 'not published' would claim more than was checked. Found published on the pages that did open: budget.
- State inspection/oversight: New York's State Commission of Correction oversees every local correctional facility in the state, sets the minimum standards they must meet, inspects them, and investigates every death in custody.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Cortland 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 legislators who pay for it.
Names verified 2026-09-20 · dollars and outcomes still being gathered