Adams County, Ohio — The Jail, the Sheriff, the Judges

The Detention Center

Not found

Operated byAdams County Sheriff
What the county publishesNo jail page on the county site; the county office directory links a "Current inmates list" on the sheriff's own domain
Jail addressNot found
Rated capacityNot found

Source: Adams County Ohio — County Offices · checked 2026-09-20

Transparency rating

Not scored. Adams County's and its sheriff's own websites could not be reached or read in the session that produced this record, so their disclosures were never examined. This is a gap in the research, not a finding about the county.

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 Kenny Dick

Runs the jailYes — under Ohio Rev. Code 341.01 the sheriff has charge of the county jail; the county's own pages do not describe a jail.
How the office is filledElected, four-year term (Ohio Rev. Code 311.01)
Office110 West Main Street, West Union

Still needed

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

Source: Adams County Ohio — Sheriff · checked 2026-09-20

The Judges

Ohio common pleas judges are elected to six-year terms; municipal and county court judges also set bail for people arrested in their areas. They are state judicial officers, not county officials.

Adams 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 Commissioners

They pay for the jail. The sheriff runs it.

What they controlThe jail budget, the building itself, and the agreements that send prisoners to a regional jail or rent beds to other agencies. In Cuyahoga and Summit, the elected County Executive and County Council.
What they don'tDay-to-day operations. The sheriff is separately elected and has charge of the county jail by state law (Ohio Rev. Code 341.01) — unless the county uses a regional jail run by a multicounty board.
NoteThree elected commissioners listed: Barbara Moore Holt, Kelly Jones, Jason Hayslip. Office at 215 North Cross Street, Suite 102, West Union.
The boardAdams County Board of Commissioners →
Where the jail money is decidedAgendas and minutes →

Notes on the record

The BSSA directory listed a communitynotification.com vendor portal for Adams County; that is not a county page. The county's own site is adamscountyoh.gov and the sheriff's own site is adamscountyso.com.
The county's Sheriff page names Kenny Dick (BSSA lists "Kenneth Dick"); the county page's spelling is used.
The county publishes no jail page: no jail name, address, capacity, budget line, PREA, deaths, inspection report, contract or fee schedule was found on either county domain.
Roster: the county's County Offices page links "Current inmates list" at adamscountyso.com/AdamsCoSO_Inmatelist.html. That page was opened but our reader returned only the site's welcome heading — the roster content itself could not be rendered. Scored "yes" on the county's own labelling of the link; a human should re-check the page.
The county site does not use the words "county seat"; West Union is recorded because the commissioners, sheriff and courts are all seated there.
No ODRC inspection report for Adams County was supplied with this kit.
Not scored: Only the county's sheriff and county-offices pages (no jail content) were read; the sheriff's own adamscountyso.com would not render, so the jail 'no's mean unread, not unpublished. Marking the rest 'not published' would claim more than was checked. Found published on the pages that did open: roster.
State inspection/oversight: Ohio's Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, through its Bureau of Adult Detention, inspects full-service county jails each year against the Minimum Standards for Jails in Ohio (Ohio Adm. Code 5120:1-8) and publishes the reports on its own website.

These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Adams 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 2026-09-20 · dollars and outcomes still being gathered