The Detention Center
Pickaway County Jail
- Operated byPickaway County Sheriff's Office (by statute)
- Why no nameNo page we could open on a Pickaway County domain names the jail. The sheriff's own site, pickawaysheriff.gov, refuses our reader under its robots.txt.
- Rated capacityNot found
- Jail address600 Island Rd, Circleville, OH 43113
- Jail AdministratorCaptain Hunter R. Lane — Jail Administrator; named on the sheriff's Corrections page
Source: Pickaway County, Ohio — Sheriff · checked 2026-09-20
Transparency rating
4/10Partial- ✓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 — 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 — not published
The Building
You paid for it. Here is what the record says it cost.
- Year builtNot found
- Original costNot found
- Paid for byNot found
- BedsNot found
Since then
- Not found
The Sheriff
Sheriff Matthew O. Hafey
- Runs the jailYes — Ohio Rev. Code 341.01 puts the sheriff in charge of the county jail; Pickaway County is not in any regional jail arrangement found in this research.
- How the office is filledElected, four-year term (Ohio Rev. Code 311.01)
- Office addressThe sheriff's office is listed at 600 Island Rd., Circleville
Still needed
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Pickaway County, Ohio — Sheriff · 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.
Pickaway County Circuit Court
- Pickaway County Court of Common Pleas
- Pickaway County Juvenile/Probate 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: Gary Scherer, Jay H. Wippel and Harold Henson; 139 West Franklin Street, Circleville. Meeting minutes are published back to 2017.
- The boardPickaway County Board of Commissioners →
- Where the jail money is decidedAgendas and minutes →
Notes on the record
- RESCUE PASS: pickawaysheriff.gov opened here after refusing the group's research, so the earlier 'not examined' reading is superseded.
- The sheriff's Corrections page describes a full-service jail with 110 beds — 94 male, 16 female — plus holding and medical, and names Captain Hunter R. Lane as Jail Administrator.
- The sheriff's own domain publishes a full bond schedule by offence degree, including alcohol-related driving offences, and names the Pickaway County Jail at 600 Island Rd, Circleville.
- An Active Inmates page and a Visitation page are published on the sheriff's own domain.
- Budget, deaths, PREA, the county's own inspection copy, contracts and fee rates were not found.
- IMPORTANT CAVEAT: these ten findings describe only the county's main website, pickawaycountyohio.gov. The sheriff's own site, pickawaysheriff.gov, is closed to our reader by robots.txt — every page we tried there was refused.
- A search listing shows that sheriff's site does carry Corrections, Active Inmates, Jail FAQs and Statistics pages, so the county almost certainly publishes more than these 'no's suggest. We could not open them, so we did not score them either way; they are recorded as not verified rather than as absent.
- What was tried and refused: https://www.pickawaysheriff.gov/, /corrections, /jailFAQs (all ROBOTS_DISALLOWED).
- What opened on the county domain: home page, sheriff page, commissioners page, meeting-minutes index, forms & documents index, bid openings index, and auditor.pickawaycountyohio.gov.
- Sheriff's name confirmed on the county's own sheriff page, matching the Buckeye State Sheriffs' Association directory.
- No county budget or appropriations document was found on the county site or the auditor's site; the auditor's site carries property-tax tools only.
- The county's bid-openings page listed only pavement marking, a Memorial Hall window replacement and an airport fuel system — nothing jail-related.
- 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 Pickaway 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