The Detention Center
Milwaukee County Jail (Criminal Justice Facility); Milwaukee County Community Reintegration Center (formerly House of Correction)
- Operated byMilwaukee County Sheriff's Office (Milwaukee County Jail / Criminal Justice Facility); Milwaukee County Community Reintegration Center (Superintendent, appointed by the County Executive — executive branch, not the Sheriff)
- Jail addressMilwaukee County Criminal Justice Facility, 949 N. 9th Street, Milwaukee, WI — operated by the Sheriff's Office; described on the Sheriff's site as maintaining the Milwaukee County Jail. Healthcare is provided under a contract with WellPath.
- Jail capacity960 beds ("high-security detention facility with bed space for 960 persons in custody"); 2024 daily-population target of 850, per the Sheriff's Office 2024 budget document
- House of Correction / Community Reintegration Center address8885 South 68th Street, Franklin, WI 53132
- CRC descriptionDescribed on its own site as "Wisconsin's largest county correctional facility" and "the only House of Correction in the state," operating under a military command structure with the Superintendent appointed by the County Executive; serves sentenced adults, including Huber (work-release) and electronic-monitoring populations
- Jail AdministratorChantell Jewell, Superintendent of the Milwaukee County Community Reintegration Center (formerly House of Correction), appointed by the Milwaukee County Executive (appointed Nov. 2020, confirmed Dec. 2020); Assistant Superintendent Shayla Fenceroy
Source: County of Milwaukee - Detention Services / Community Reintegration Center · checked 2026-09-19
Transparency rating
7/10Open- ✓The jail is named
- ✓Who is in custody
- ✓Beds and daily population
- ✓What it costs taxpayers
- ✗Deaths in custody — not published
- ✓PREA audits
- ✗Independent inspection — not published
- ✓Who else it holds, and for how much
- ✓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
- BedsMilwaukee County Jail (Criminal Justice Facility): 960 beds, per the Sheriff's Office 2024 budget document. Community Reintegration Center: bed capacity not found on its own site or its 2025 budget document.
Since then
- Not found
The Sheriff
Sheriff Denita R. Ball, PhD
- Runs the jailRuns the Milwaukee County Jail (Criminal Justice Facility) only — the House of Correction, now called the Community Reintegration Center, is a separate facility run by a Superintendent under the Milwaukee County Executive, not the Sheriff
- How the office is filledElected, four-year term, Wis. Stat. ch. 59
- Statutory basisWis. Stat. ch. 59 (county sheriff)
Still needed
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: County of Milwaukee - Sheriff's Office · checked 2026-09-19
The Judges
Wisconsin circuit court judges are elected on a nonpartisan ballot to six-year terms under Wis. Const. art. VII — state judicial officers, not county officials.
Milwaukee 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 2026-09-19
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 boardMilwaukee County Board of Supervisors (Chairwoman: Marcelia Nicholson-Bovell, 10th District; 1st Vice-Chair: Steven Shea, 8th District) →
- Where the jail money is decidedAgendas and minutes →
Notes on the record
- Milwaukee County has a genuine structural split: the Sheriff's Office runs the Milwaukee County Jail (Criminal Justice Facility, 949 N. 9th St.), while the separate Community Reintegration Center (formerly House of Correction, 8885 S. 68th St., Franklin) is run by a civilian Superintendent (Chantell Jewell) appointed by the County Executive, not the Sheriff. Both are reported separately above.
- PREA: both facilities publish their own PREA pages on county.milwaukee.gov. The Sheriff's Office PREA page (county.milwaukee.gov/EN/Sheriff/PREA) states a zero-tolerance policy and complaint channels but no statistics. The Community Reintegration Center's PREA page (county.milwaukee.gov/EN/Community-Reintegration-Center/PREA) additionally publishes annual PREA reports for 2020, 2023, and 2025 with case-disposition data — the stronger of the two disclosures, cited above for the 'prea' check.
- Capacity, budget, and contracts figures are from the Sheriff's Office 2024 budget PDF, itself published on the county's own domain; it lists major contracts including Allied Universal (secured transportation), Axon (body cameras/tasers), State Process Inc. (service of legal papers), and ICS Solutions (occupant communications), and describes the jail's daily-population target (850) against 960-bed capacity.
- The Community Reintegration Center's own 2025 budget document (also on county.milwaukee.gov) gives a $65.5 million adopted budget and 363 FTE staff but no bed-capacity or average-daily-population figure.
- 'Inspections' marked no: the 2024 Sheriff's budget mentions that the office's own Investigative Services Bureau 'conducts inspections of agency field and detention operations,' but no published inspection reports or results were found on the county's own site.
- 'Deaths' marked no: no page on county.milwaukee.gov discloses in-custody death data; in-custody deaths at the jail have been reported by outside news organizations (e.g., Wisconsin Watch, Urban Milwaukee) but are not disclosed on the Sheriff's Office's or CRC's own site as of this research pass.
- 'Fees' marked no: the Sheriff's 'Pay Bail' page mentions that credit-card bail payments incur unspecified additional processing fees, but no dedicated, itemized fee schedule was found on either facility's own site.
- Bond info is specific to the pretrial jail (Criminal Justice Facility); the Community Reintegration Center primarily holds sentenced/Huber populations and its own site does not present bond-posting information.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Milwaukee 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 2026-09-19 · dollars and outcomes still being gathered