The State Line
Three questions decide how much of this record a resident can get without a lawyer: does anybody inspect the jail, does the law require a death in custody to be reported, and is the result published. We have not yet established the answers for Georgia.
Not yet researched. When it is, the answer goes here and nowhere else — one law layer per state, so the county pages stay about the county.
Compare all fifty states →That is the one thing every county in America has in common. The jail belongs to the people of the county and is paid for out of their taxes. The sheriff who runs it is elected. The judge who decides who sits in it is elected or appointed. Three offices, enormous power, and almost nobody watching.
How much is your sheriff — and your judge — costing you?
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. The Justice Department is required to count deaths in custody and does not do it properly — a Senate investigation found it failed to identify more than 990 such deaths in a single year. MoBetta is building the county-by-county record instead.
Your VOTE is POWERFUL.
The sheriffs who run these jails are elected. So are the commissioners who pay for them.
Deadlines, ID rules and Georgia’s own election office, from vote.gov — the official U.S. government voter site. Where you vote on the day is set by your county election office.
Georgia — all 159 counties open. Click any county on the map, or see the transparency scoreboard below.
This is our jail
Every county in Georgia was checked against the same ten questions on 2026-09-29. This measures disclosure, not conduct — what a county publishes about a building its taxpayers own. A county can raise its score in an afternoon by posting a document.
Not scored: Not examined (46) — the county's and sheriff's own sites could not be read, a gap in the research rather than a finding: Appling County, Bacon County, Bleckley County, Bryan County, Carroll County, Chattahoochee County, Chattooga County, Cherokee County, Clarke County, Clay County, Clayton County, Clinch County, Coffee County, Cook County, Dooly County, Elbert County, Forsyth County, Franklin County, Glascock County, Greene County, Harris County, Hart County, Jackson County, Jenkins County, Jones County, Laurens County, Lincoln County, Madison County, Marion County, Mitchell County, Newton County, Oconee County, Pulaski County, Putnam County, Rockdale County, Schley County, Taliaferro County, Tattnall County, Telfair County, Troup County, Turner County, Upson County, Wayne County, Webster County, Wheeler County, White County.
Georgia has no state agency that inspects county jails. By law the sheriff is the jailer of the county (O.C.G.A. § 42-4-1). The Georgia Sheriffs' Association, an association of the state's sheriffs rather than a state agency, publishes jail standards and a statewide monthly jail report. A county earns the inspections or deaths mark here only when it posts that material on its own site; a sheriff's Facebook page is not counted. Counties shown as not examined are ones whose own pages could not be read in this research, not ones found to publish nothing.