The Detention Center
Not found — no jail page could be read on the county's own website
- Operated byJefferson County Sheriff's Office, on the statutory rule of ORS 169.320; no regional or contracted arrangement was found
- Why this entry is thinEvery request to the county's website was refused. www.jeffersoncountyor.gov, and the older jeffco.net and co.jefferson.or.us which both redirect to it, returned HTTP 403 with a Cloudflare interstitial to every user agent and header combination tried, including the site map. Only robots.txt was served
- What was triedhttps://www.jeffersoncountyor.gov/ , https://www.jeffersoncountyor.gov/sheriff , https://www.jeffersoncountyor.gov/sheriff/page/jail , https://www.jeffersoncountyor.gov/sitemap.xml , https://jeffco.net/ , https://www.co.jefferson.or.us/ — all HTTP 403
- Archived copiesThe Internet Archive holds only about 150 URLs for the current county domain and its recent snapshots are captures of the same Cloudflare block page, so they could not be used either
- Former roster hostjailviewer.jcso.us appears in archived county pages as the county's old jail viewer. jcso.us now redirects to a parked domain and serves no county content
- Courthouse, not jailOne capital fact is published, by the state courts rather than the county: Jefferson County's courthouse, completed in July 2016, was the first built with the Oregon Courthouse Capital Construction Improvement Fund, at $6.5 million state funding and $8.5 million county funding, on land donated by the City of Madras. That is the courthouse, not the jail
Source: Oregon Judicial Department — Jefferson County Circuit Court · checked 2026-08-23
Transparency rating
0/10Closed- ✗The jail is named — not published
- ✗Who is in custody — not published
- ✗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 Jason Pollock
- Runs the jailYes in law — ORS 169.320 makes the Oregon sheriff the keeper of the county jail, and no regional or appointed arrangement was found for Jefferson County. This could not be confirmed on the county's own website, which was unreachable throughout this research
- How the office is filledElected countywide in a nonpartisan race; he first reached the office by appointment
- How he came to officeAppointed Sheriff effective 20 June 2022 by the Jefferson County Commissioners after the former sheriff resigned, having won the primary election on 17 May 2022
- BackgroundBegan in law enforcement in 2003 as a reserve for the City of Culver, hired by Madras Police in 2005, moved to the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office in 2011, and has served there as patrol deputy, marine deputy, search and rescue coordinator, detective and corporal. Vice-President of the Jefferson County Law Enforcement Association from 2013 and its President from 2017
- How this was verifiedThe Oregon State Sheriffs' Association biography. The county's own website could not be read — see the notes
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Oregon State Sheriffs' Association — Jefferson County · checked 2026-08-23
The Judges
Oregon Circuit Court judges are elected in nonpartisan statewide-scheduled races and are state judicial officers, not county officials. Justices of the Peace are unusual: a JP is both a state court judge and a county elected official, elected to a six-year term, and the county pays for the court. A judge, not the sheriff, sets security amounts and release conditions; the sheriff's office only receives the money and releases the person. Jefferson County shares the 22nd Judicial District with Crook County and its three judges sit across both. No county justice court could be confirmed for Jefferson County because the county's website was unreachable.
Jefferson County Circuit Court — 22nd Judicial District (Jefferson and Crook counties), Jefferson County Courthouse, 129 SW E Street, Madras
- The Honorable Wade L. Whiting — Presiding Judge
- The Honorable Annette C. Hillman
- The Honorable Daina A. Vitolins
- The county's bond schedule
- Share of the jail population held pretrial
- Median time from booking to first appearance
Source: the state judiciary · checked 2026-08-23
The County Commissioners
They pay for the jail. The sheriff runs it.
- What they controlThe detention budget, the building itself, and the agreements that let other agencies rent its beds.
- What they don'tDay-to-day operations. The sheriff is separately elected and answers to voters, not to the board.
- The boardBoard of County Commissioners
Notes on the record
- Every one of the ten checks is recorded 'no' because nothing could be verified, not because Jefferson County was found to withhold anything. The county's website refused all access during this research and no substitute publication by the county could be read. A reader should treat this row as unmeasured rather than as a poor result.
- The block is on the county's side: www.jeffersoncountyor.gov answered HTTP 403 with a Cloudflare 'Just a moment...' challenge to browser-shaped requests as well as plain ones, while its robots.txt was served normally, showing the site is a live Drupal installation rather than an outage.
- What is recorded here comes from sources outside the county: the Oregon State Sheriffs' Association for the sheriff, and the Oregon Judicial Department for the county seat, the judicial district, the three circuit judges and the 2016 courthouse funding split.
- Jefferson County is a member of Frontier Regional 911 — Gilliam County's budget narrative records that Jefferson joined that consortium as a partner county in about 2012 — but that is dispatch, not detention.
- state_inspection: Oregon has no state jail inspectorate. The Oregon State Sheriffs' Association publishes voluntary jail standards at https://oregonsheriffs.org/jail-standards/ and no per-jail result for Jefferson County appears there.
- Jefferson County is governed by a Board of County Commissioners. The members, the board page and the agendas and minutes page could not be verified: every request to the county's website returned HTTP 403 behind a Cloudflare challenge, and the Internet Archive's recent snapshots of the board and meetings pages are captures of that same block page. The archived page addresses https://www.jeffersoncountyor.gov/administration/page/meetings and https://www.jeffersoncountyor.gov/administration/page/board-commissioners-meeting-139 exist but serve no content to this research. Rather than name commissioners from memory, they are recorded as Not found.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Jefferson 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.
The county clerk runs the election in Jefferson County and prints the ballot the sheriff’s name is on. Links from USA.gov and vote.gov.
Names verified 2026-08-23 · dollars and outcomes still being gathered