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

The Detention Center

Multi County Correctional Center

Operated byMarion-Hardin Correction Commission (a joint county correctional centre under Ohio Rev. Code 307.93)
Jail address1514 Victory Road, Marion, OH 43302
Rated capacity220 inmates
Opened1999
Member countiesMarion and Hardin
StaffingUp to 45 corrections officers, 3 sergeants, 4 lieutenants, 2 captains and 13 full-time support staff

Source: Multi County Correctional Center · 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 — 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
✓Phone, video and commissary rates

This rates disclosure, not conduct — what Hardin 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 built1999
Original costNot found
Paid for byNot found
Beds220

Since then

Not found

The Sheriff

Sheriff Keith A. Everhart

Runs the jailNo - Hardin County prisoners go to the Multi County Correctional Center in Marion, run by the Marion-Hardin Correction Commission
How the office is filledElected, four-year term (Ohio Rev. Code 311.01)

Still needed

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

Source: Hardin County Ohio - Elected Officials · 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.

Hardin County Circuit Court

Hardin County Municipal Court
Hardin County Common Pleas Court
Hardin County Common Pleas Court, Juvenile Division

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-member board: Tim L. Striker, Joseph C. Sherman and Fred M. Rush. The board is one of the two county boards behind the Marion-Hardin Correction Commission.
The boardHardin County Board of Commissioners →
Where the jail money is decidedAgendas and minutes →

Notes on the record

Regional jail county: the elected sheriff does not run a jail. Hardin shares the Multi County Correctional Center at 1514 Victory Road, Marion with Marion County, run through the Marion-Hardin Correction Commission under Ohio Rev. Code 307.93. No separate Hardin County holding facility was found on any page we opened.
The checks are judged on the regional jail's own site (multicountyjail.com), which is first-party for its member counties, plus Hardin County's own site. Which is which: named and capacity from the facility's home page; bond_info and fees from its Inmate Info page.
Bond guidance: Hardin County Municipal Court bonds are posted at the Kenton Police Department; Marion Municipal Court bonds at the facility or at multicountybondpayments.com; Marion Common Pleas bonds at that court.
Fees: inmate phone calls are published at '$0.13 a minute for all calls' through Securus; commissary funding runs through TouchPay with convenience fees not stated.
The BSSA start URL http://www.hardinsheriff.com opened but served only a JavaScript-required shell with no readable content or links, so nothing was scored from the sheriff's own site. The sheriff's name was confirmed instead on the county's Elected Officials page.
No roster, no county or commission budget document, no deaths-in-custody material, no PREA material, no posted inspection report and no contracts were found on either the county's or the facility's own pages.
No regional director or jail administrator is named on the facility pages we opened.
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 Hardin 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