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 Michigan.
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 Michigan’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.
Michigan — all 83 counties open. Click any county on the map, or see the transparency scoreboard below.
This is our jail
Every county in Michigan was checked against the same ten questions on 2026-09-19. 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.
Michigan's Department of Corrections sets minimum jail standards under its Administrative Rules for county jails — a state framework, not the county's own disclosure. That still leaves the ten questions above for the county itself to answer, and most do not.