The Detention Center
Lake County Adult Detention Facility
- Operated byLake County Sheriff's Office — Corrections Division
- Jail address104 East Erie Street, Painesville, Ohio 44077
- Rated capacity'designed to house a maximum of 353 beds'
- OpenedJanuary 1990
- PopulationHas 'housed at times in excess of 400 inmates, often averaging 95 female inmates per day'; average about 350 a day since 1990
- ReplacementA Lake County Public Safety Center is under construction, 'constructed to replace an outdated facility', with 'increased capacity, medical and mental health care units, and modern security systems'
Source: Lake County Sheriff's Office — Corrections Division · checked 2026-09-20
Transparency rating
5/10Partial- ✓The jail is named
- ✓Who is in custody
- ✓Beds and daily population
- ✗What it costs taxpayers — not published
- ✗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 — not published
The Building
You paid for it. Here is what the record says it cost.
- Year built1990 (opened January 1990)
- Original costNot found
- Paid for byNot found
- Beds353
Since then
- First county jail built 1859 with 8 cells; extensively renovated in 1975
- A separate 78-bed minimum security facility operated 2001–2009 and closed 14 December 2009 for budget reasons
- A new Lake County Public Safety Center was topped out in steel in November 2025 to replace the current facility
The Sheriff
Sheriff Frank Leonbruno
- Runs the jailYes — the Corrections Division runs the Lake County Adult Detention Facility
- How the office is filledElected, four-year term
- Chief DeputyRobert Izzo
- Office address104 E. Erie St., Painesville, OH 44077
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Lake 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.
Lake County Circuit Court
- Not found
- 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 at 105 Main Street, Painesville. Members listed: John Plecnik, Morris Beverage III, Morgan McIntosh.
- The boardLake County Board of Commissioners →
- Where the jail money is decidedAgendas and minutes →
Notes on the record
- The BSSA URL lakecountyohio.org redirects to lakecountyohio.gov; the sheriff's office sits on the county's own domain.
- Roster: the Sheriff's Jail Roster page links a daily file directory on the county's own webapps subdomain. The 20 Sept 2026 file opened and is headed 'Lake County Adult Detention Facility 9/20/2026 5:55 AM Daily In Custody Report w/ Picture', listing each person's booking date, days in custody, charges and bond.
- PREA scored on the Corrections Division page, which links the office's own policy PDF 'PP-200B-PREA' on the county's asset domain. That PDF returned no machine-readable text to our reader, so its contents are not quoted here.
- Bond guidance comes from the sheriff's 2023 Jail FAQ PDF on the county's asset domain: 'You can only bond out an inmate that has been arrested on a fresh charge of a Misdemeanor through Painesville Muni, Willoughby Muni or Timberlake PD if a cash bond has been set by the arresting officer.'
- The commissioners' Public Safety Center updates page publishes press releases and photographs but no construction cost, funding source or bed count, and no jail or corrections budget line was found, so budget scored 'no'.
- No deaths-in-custody record, county-posted inspection report, housing contract or published phone/video/commissary rates found on the county domain.
- Phone and web checks credited to the office.
- 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 Lake 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