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

The Detention Center

Paulding County Jail

Operated byPaulding County Sheriff's Office
Jail address500 East Perry Street, Paulding, OH 45879
CapacityUp to 52 inmates — 8 female and 40 male beds, plus 4 cells for solitary confinement
StaffingCaptain, four sergeants, ten full-time corrections officers plus part-time officers, a nurse and kitchen staff
Closed and reopenedClosed 20 November 2008; voters approved a levy in November 2016 and the jail reopened in June 2017
Jail AdministratorCaptain Chris Dilling — Jail Administrator, Paulding County Jail

Source: Paulding County Sheriff — Corrections · checked 2026-09-20

Transparency rating

3/10Closed

✓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 — not published
✗Independent inspection — not published
✗Who else it holds, and for how much — not published
✗How to post bond — not published
✗Phone, video and commissary rates — not published

This rates disclosure, not conduct — what Paulding 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 builtNot found
Original costNot found
Paid for byNot found for construction; the sheriff's corrections page says voters approved a levy in November 2016 that allowed the closed jail to reopen in June 2017
BedsUp to 52 inmates (8 female, 40 male), plus 4 solitary confinement cells

Since then

Jail closed 20 November 2008 and reopened June 2017 after a November 2016 levy

The Sheriff

Sheriff Jason K. Landers

Runs the jailYes — the sheriff is 'official custodian of the county jail' and runs the Paulding County Jail
How the office is filledElected, four-year term
Office address500 East Perry Street, Paulding, OH 45879

Still needed

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

Source: Paulding 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.

Paulding County Circuit Court

Not found

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 of Commissioners (Mike Weible, chairman; Lisa McClure, vice-chairman; Mark Holtsberry); regular sessions Mondays and Wednesdays.
The boardPaulding County Board of Commissioners →
Where the jail money is decidedAgendas and minutes →

Notes on the record

Sheriff Jason K. Landers is named on the sheriff's own site, matching the state association directory.
Captain Chris Dilling is named as jail administrator on the sheriff's corrections page, so he is recorded separately from the sheriff.
The sheriff publishes the jail's capacity and a 'Current Inmates' roster link to the county's Zuercher portal (paulding-so-oh.zuercherportal.com); that portal is closed to our reader by robots.txt, so the roster is recorded from the sheriff's page rather than scored from the roster's contents.
'Commissary/Bond' and prepaid phone links point to Access Corrections and ICSolutions; no rates and no bond-posting guidance are published on the county's or sheriff's own pages, so fees and bond_info are 'no'.
No PREA material, inspection report, contract, budget document or death-in-custody record was found on the sheriff's site, the county site, the commissioners' site or the auditor's site.
County seat recorded as Paulding; the courthouse and county offices are in Paulding, but no page we opened uses the words 'county seat'.
The most recent state inspection report we could reach is from 2019; it gives the same 52-bed rated capacity the sheriff publishes.
State inspection/oversight: Ohio's Bureau of Adult Detention inspected the Paulding County Jail, 500 E. Perry St., on 4 September 2019 under the Minimum Standards for Jails in Ohio (Ohio Adm. Code 5120:1-8); the report, published on the state's site, says the jail 'was found to be in compliance with the onsite jail inspection for the 2019 calendar year.'

These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Paulding 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