Franklin County, New York — The Jail, the Sheriff, the Judges

The Detention Center

Franklin County Jail

Operated byFranklin County Sheriff's Department
Jail addressBare Hill Road, Malone, NY 12953
Published jail materialThe county's HALT Act reporting page for the Sheriff's Department carried no documents when read

Source: Franklin County Sheriff's Department · checked 2026-09-20

Transparency rating

0/10Closed

✗The jail is named — not published
✗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

This rates disclosure, not conduct — what Franklin County publishes about a jail its taxpayers own, checked 2026-09-20. Nothing here says the jail is run well or badly. Every mark moves the moment the county posts the document.

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 Jay Cook

Runs the jailYes — the Franklin County Jail is under the Sheriff's Department, which publishes a booking line
How the office is filledElected county sheriff

Still needed

Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail

Source: Franklin County Sheriff's Department · 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.

Franklin County Circuit Court

Not found

Still needed

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 boardFranklin County Legislature →
Where the jail money is decidedAgendas and minutes →

Notes on the record

The supplied franklincony.org address redirects to the county's own franklincountyny.gov site, which opened normally.
The Sheriff's Department page names Sheriff Jay Cook and gives a booking line, but the county publishes no jail page: no facility name, capacity, visiting, commissary, bail, PREA or fee information was found anywhere under the Sheriff's section.
The Sheriff's HALT Act reporting page exists but held no documents when read.
The county publishes adopted and tentative budgets back to 2015, but the 2026 and 2025 budget PDFs both came back with no machine-readable text, so we could not see a sheriff or jail line and the budget check stays 'no'.
Nothing here is a finding about the jail itself, only about what the county chooses to publish.
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 Franklin 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