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

The Detention Center

Tri County Regional Jail

Operated byTri-County Corrections Commission (Champaign, Madison and Union counties), under Ohio Rev. Code 307.93
Jail address4099 State Route 559, Mechanicsburg, OH 43044
Member countiesChampaign, Madison and Union
Madison County's commission membersCommissioner Tony Xenikis and Sheriff John R. Swaney
County's own jailThe old Madison County jail at 23 W. High St., London closed on 8 December 2000 when deputies moved the inmates to the new regional facility
Old jail capacity26 adults after a 1976 expansion; average daily population about 31 by the mid-1990s
Jail AdministratorScott Springhetti — Executive Director, Tri County Regional Jail

Source: Tri County Regional Jail · checked 2026-09-20

Transparency rating

Not scored. Madison 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 builtThe regional jail in Mechanicsburg took Madison County's inmates on 8 December 2000
Original costNot found
Paid for byNot found
BedsNot found

Since then

The former London jail was expanded in 1976 to hold 26 adults

The Sheriff

Sheriff John R. Swaney

Runs the jailNo — Madison County is one of three member counties of the Tri County Regional Jail, governed by the Tri-County Corrections Commission; the sheriff sits on that commission
How the office is filledElected, four-year term (Ohio Rev. Code 311.01)
Office addressP.O. Box 558, London, OH 43140

Still needed

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

Source: Madison 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.

Madison County Circuit Court

Madison County Common Pleas Court
Madison County Municipal Court

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: Tony Xenikis, Chris Wallace and Brendan Shea; Rob Slane is county administrator. Commissioner Xenikis also sits on the Tri-County Corrections Commission.
The boardMadison County Board of County Commissioners →
Where the jail money is decidedAgendas and minutes →

Notes on the record

Madison County's elected sheriff does not run a jail. The county's prisoners go to the Tri County Regional Jail at Mechanicsburg, shared with Champaign and Union counties and run by the Tri-County Corrections Commission — each county's sheriff plus one commissioner.
Checks were judged on the sheriff's own domain madisonsheriff.org and on tricountyregionaljail.com, which is first-party for its member counties.
The sheriff's own site is built so that our reader could not recover any link URLs from its home page; only a jail-history page on the same domain (w.madisonsheriff.org/madison_county_jail.htm) opened with content. The site plainly carries more than the fetch returned.
The named check rests on that page, which is a history of the county's own jail and its 2000 closure rather than a current jail page.
The regional jail's site publishes its address, staff and board membership but no bed capacity, roster, bond guidance, fee rates, PREA material, inspection copy or contract on the pages opened; its legal-notices page returned a 404.
Madison County, OHIO confirmed — the county seat is London and the county's site is co.madison.oh.us.
Not scored: The sheriff's own site returned no link URLs and only a jail-history page opened, and the regional jail's site was read so incompletely that its roster (found for Union County) was scored absent. Marking the rest 'not published' would claim more than was checked. Found published on the pages that did open: named.
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 Madison 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