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

The Detention Center

Washington County Correctional Facility

Operated byWashington County Sheriff's Office
Jail address399 Broadway, Fort Edward, NY 12828
Opened2003
Capacity"capable of holding up to 179 inmates at full capacity"
Bookings1,263 people booked in during 2012 (1,037 male, 226 female)
Boarded-in prisoners384 boarded-in prisoners produced $550,955 in revenue (county statistics page)

Source: Washington County — Corrections · checked 2026-09-20

Transparency rating

4/10Partial

✓The jail is named
✗Who is in custody — not published
✓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

This rates disclosure, not conduct — what Washington 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 built2003
Original costNot found
Paid for byNot found
Beds179

Since then

Not found

The Sheriff

Sheriff Jeffrey J. Murphy

Runs the jailYes — the Sheriff's Office runs the Washington County Correctional Facility
Corrections staffing56 full-time and about 20 part-time officers, sworn as New York State Peace Officers
Other divisionsCivil, Road Patrol, Investigations, K-9, Marine, Emergency Response Team, Snowmobile, Drug Task Force

Still needed

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

Source: Washington County Sheriff · 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.

Washington 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.
NoteBoard resolutions and budget documents are posted in the county's document centre; our reader was repeatedly rate-limited there.
The boardWashington County Board of Supervisors
Where the jail money is decidedNot found

Notes on the record

Access was awkward: robots rules blocked our reader from the county site's entry pages, and the corrections, sheriff, statistics, payment and HALT pages opened only as links found through a search.
The statistics page publishes the 179-inmate capacity, 2012 bookings and visit counts, and the revenue from boarding in other agencies' prisoners; no contract document itself is published, so the contracts check stays "no".
Bail: the Money & Payment Services page explains cash, in-person credit card and online payment and says a fee is charged, but publishes no rate; commissary and tablet accounts run through Access Corrections and GettingOut, again with no rates.
The county publishes monthly and annual HALT Act segregated-confinement tables citing SCOC Part 7006, reporting zero people in segregated confinement from 2022 through 2026.
Budget: the 2025 budget packet message on the county site discusses sheriff staffing and costs; the separate adopted-budget PDFs were repeatedly refused to our reader with rate-limit errors, so no jail line could be quoted.
No inmate roster, PREA material, inspection report or death-in-custody record was found on the county site.
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 Washington 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