The Detention Center
Sandusky County Sheriff's Office and Jail
- Operated bySandusky County Sheriff's Office
- Jail address2323 Countryside Drive, Fremont, OH 43420
- Rated capacityNot found
- People in custodyAbout 100 listed on the county's current inmate list dated 20 September 2026
- How it is namedThe county's sheriff page captions its building photo 'Sandusky County Sheriff's Office and Jail Building'; there is no separate jail page.
Source: Sandusky County, Ohio — Sheriff · checked 2026-09-20
Transparency rating
2/10Closed- ✓The jail is named
- ✓Who is in custody
- ✗Beds and daily population — not published
- ✗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
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 Chris Hilton
- Runs the jailYes — the sheriff's office and the jail share the building at 2323 Countryside Drive, Fremont. No regional jail arrangement was found for Sandusky County.
- How the office is filledElected, four-year term (Ohio Rev. Code 311.01)
- Office phone419-332-2613
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Sandusky 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.
Sandusky County Circuit Court
- Sandusky County Court of Common Pleas
- Sandusky County Courts
- Sandusky County Juvenile/Probate Court
- 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: Scott Miller, Russ Zimmerman and Justin Smith, with County Administrator Marc Glotzbecker. Meeting minutes are published by year.
- The boardSandusky County Board of Commissioners →
- Where the jail money is decidedAgendas and minutes →
Notes on the record
- Sandusky County runs one website, sanduskycountyoh.gov (sandusky-county.com and sandusky-county.org both redirect to it). There is no separate sheriff's website and no jail page at all — the sheriff's page is an address, a phone number, the sheriff's name and a short link list.
- NAMED is scored a thin yes: the only place the jail is named on the county's own site is the caption of the building photograph on the sheriff's page, 'Sandusky County Sheriff's Office and Jail Building'. A reader should know that is the whole of it.
- The county's 'Currently Housed Inmates' page failed to render its embedded list ('Error: Embedded data could not be displayed'), but the underlying document at sandusky-county.org/jds/CurrentInmateList.pdf opened: a 44-page 'Current Inmate Offense List, by Name' headed 'Sandusky County Sheriff's Office', dated 20 September 2026, with roughly 100 people, their booking dates, arresting agencies, charges and bail amounts. That is a published in-custody roster on a county domain, so 'roster' is a yes.
- Nothing at all is published about rated capacity, visitation, commissary, phone or video rates, bond posting, PREA, deaths in custody, jail inspections or contracts. Those eight 'no's describe a county site that simply has no jail section.
- Budget: the commissioners' page publishes meeting minutes and resolutions but no budget or appropriations document, and the county auditor's site (sanduskycountyauditor.us) carries budget-commission meeting dates rather than budget documents.
- Sheriff's name confirmed on the county's own sheriff page as Chris Hilton, matching the Buckeye State Sheriffs' Association directory.
- 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 Sandusky 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