The Detention Center
Corrections Center of Northwest Ohio (CCNO)
- Operated byCCNO corrections commission — member jurisdictions Defiance, Fulton, Henry, Lucas and Williams counties (plus the City of Toledo and member municipalities)
- Jail address3151 County Road 2425, Stryker, Ohio 43557
- Funded beds576 (369 member beds and 207 contracted beds)
- Defiance County allocation60 beds
- Defiance County 2025 share$1,590,152.19 (CCNO 2025 annual report)
- CCNO 2026 budget$22,246,147; member per diem $69.93
- Operating sinceCCNO states it was the first regional jail in Ohio and "has maintained successful operations since 1990"
- Average daily population560 (97.2% of funded beds)
Source: Corrections Center of Northwest Ohio — Budget · checked 2026-09-20
Transparency rating
7/10Open- ✓The jail is named
- ✓Who is in custody
- ✓Beds and daily population
- ✓What it costs taxpayers
- ✗Deaths in custody — not published
- ✓PREA audits
- ✗Independent inspection — not published
- ✓Who else it holds, and for how much
- ✗How to post bond — not published
- ✓Phone, video and commissary rates
The Building
You paid for it. Here is what the record says it cost.
- Year builtNot found
- Original costNot found
- Paid for byNot found
- Beds576 funded beds at CCNO; 60 allocated to Defiance County
Since then
- Not found
The Sheriff
Sheriff Douglas J. Engel
- Runs the jailNo — Defiance County is a member of the Corrections Center of Northwest Ohio (CCNO), a multicounty jail at Stryker governed by a corrections commission; the sheriff's own site publishes no jail page
- How the office is filledElected, four-year term (Ohio Rev. Code 311.01)
- Office address113 Biede Ave., Defiance, OH 43512
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Defiance County Sheriff's Office · 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.
Defiance County Circuit Court
- Defiance County Court of Common Pleas
- Defiance County Probate and Juvenile Court
- Defiance Municipal Court
- 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.
- NoteCommissioners named on the county page: Dana Phipps, Mick Pocratsky and Matthew Koester. The page describes the board as the county's "taxing, budgeting, appropriating and purchasing authority" but links no budget document.
- The boardDefiance County Board of Commissioners →
- Where the jail money is decidedAgendas and minutes →
Notes on the record
- Defiance County's elected sheriff does not run a jail. Prisoners go to CCNO at Stryker, run by a corrections commission for the five member counties and member municipalities.
- Every 'yes' here was judged on CCNO's own site, which is first-party for its member counties. Defiance County's own domain (defiance-county.com) publishes no jail or CCNO page at all — the sheriff's site lists divisions but no corrections division.
- CCNO publishes its 2026 budget ($22,246,147), a member per diem of $69.93 and a bed allocation table by member county.
- 'contracts' rests on CCNO's 2025 annual report, which records 207 contracted beds and names the US Marshals Service and the City of Findlay as bed contractors; the contract documents themselves are not posted.
- 'fees' rests on the CCNO inmate phones page, which publishes only one rate — a $25 service fee for attempted three-way calls; call rates themselves are left to the vendor.
- The CCNO first-48-hours page describes arraignment and bond review but gives no guidance on how to post bond, so 'bond_info' is 'no'.
- What was tried: the Defiance County auditor's page states the auditor prepares the annual financial report but links no document; no county budget showing a sheriff or CCNO line was found, and no county page we opened states the county seat.
- 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 Defiance 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