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 Illinois.
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 Illinois’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.
Illinois — all 102 counties open. Click any county on the map, or see the transparency scoreboard below.
This is our jail
Every county in Illinois was checked against the same ten questions on 2026-09-20. 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: No county jail (8): Alexander County, Brown County, Calhoun County, Cass County, Edwards County, Gallatin County, Pope County, Scott County. Not examined (11) — the county's and sheriff's own sites could not be read, a gap in the research rather than a finding: Clay County, Cumberland County, DuPage County, Hardin County, Henderson County, Jefferson County, Johnson County, Richland County, Saline County, Schuyler County, White County.
Illinois does what most states don't: the Department of Corrections' Jail and Detention Standards Unit inspects every county jail each year (730 ILCS 5/3-15-2) and posts every report online, so each county page here quotes its 2025 inspection. That is the state's disclosure, not the county's — only a handful of counties post their own copy. Illinois ended cash bail on 18 September 2023, so the bond question here asks whether the county explains how release works now. Several small southern counties run no jail at all.