The Detention Center
Geauga County Safety Center
- Operated byGeauga County Sheriff's Office
- Jail address12450 Merritt Road, Chardon, OH 44024
- Rated capacity182 beds - 38 female, 84 general population male, 60 work release male
- Year built2005
- Throughput2,087 people processed in 2024, including 133 arraignments and 319 immigration detainees
Source: Geauga County Sheriff's Office - Corrections · checked 2026-09-20
Transparency rating
6/10Partial- ✓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
- ✗Independent inspection — not published
- ✗Who else it holds, and for how much — not published
- ✓How to post bond
- ✓Phone, video and commissary rates
The Building
You paid for it. Here is what the record says it cost.
- Year built2005
- Original costNot found
- Paid for byNot found
- Beds182
Since then
- Not found
The Sheriff
Sheriff Scott A. Hildenbrand
- Runs the jailYes - the sheriff's Corrections Division operates the Geauga County Safety Center
- How the office is filledElected, four-year term (Ohio Rev. Code 311.01)
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Geauga 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.
Geauga County Circuit Court
- Geauga County Court of Common Pleas
- Chardon Municipal Court
- Geauga County Probate/Juvenile 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.
- NoteThree-member board; meeting minutes posted on the board's own site.
- The boardGeauga County Board of Commissioners →
- Where the jail money is decidedAgendas and minutes →
Notes on the record
- The sheriff's Corrections page names the Geauga County Safety Center, gives the address and the 182-bed breakdown, and publishes a PREA zero-tolerance statement with 2023 sexual-abuse/harassment complaint counts.
- Bond guidance ('Bond can only be posted at the courts. Mon-Fri, except Holidays 8am-4pm.') and fee rates come from the sheriff's own jail information PDF linked from the Corrections page; it is served from the site's CDN host (eadn-wc03-13954982.nxedge.io/wp-content/uploads/sites/33/), not from sheriff.co.geauga.oh.us directly. The same PDF publishes tablet entertainment at $0.05/min plus a $4.00 monthly fee, messaging at $0.10 a text, and a $300 maximum commissary deposit.
- The visitation page says remote video visit rates 'are the same as a phone call' but does not give the call rate.
- Budget: the commissioners' Budgets page links the 2027 Approved Tax Budget; the PDF (same CDN host, sites/12) carries a Sheriff department (013) line totalling $17,385,482, including salaries of $10,661,079.
- No inmate roster, no deaths-in-custody material, no county-posted inspection report and no jail contracts were found on the sheriff's or county's own pages. The Corrections page names service providers (Ravenwood Mental Health Center, On Site Dental, Access Corrections) but publishes no contract.
- No jail administrator distinct from the sheriff is named on the pages opened.
- State inspection/oversight: Ohio's Bureau of Adult Detention inspected the Geauga County Safety Center in 2025 under the Minimum Standards for Jails in Ohio (Ohio Adm. Code 5120:1-8); the report is published on the state's site.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Geauga 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