The State Line
Before you click a county, here are the rules that county is playing by. Three questions, asked the same way of every state.
Montana has 56 counties; sources reviewed give differing county-jail counts (Montana's official federal DCRA implementation plan cites 37 jails statewide, while an MBCC biennial report references monitoring 42 adult jails for juvenile-compliance purposes), reflecting that some rural counties are too small to operate a jail and either contract with a neighboring county or have no local jail. No source reviewed indicates county jails receive federal operating funding; some hold federal or state contract detainees on a per-diem basis (e.g., ICE, U.S. Marshals, or state DOC contracts), which is different from being federally funded. The Montana Department of Corrections publishes a Deaths In Custody page (https://cor.mt.gov/DataStatsContractsPoliciesProcedures/DataPages/DeathsInCustody), but it is oriented to state facilities rather than county jails.
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 Montana’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.
Montana — all 56 counties open. Click any county on the map, or see the transparency scoreboard below.
This is our jail
Every county in Montana was checked against the same ten questions on 2026-08-24. 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.
Two state agencies do what these counties don't. The State Department of Health inspects every county jail each year under state law and publishes the report — Wyoming has no such agency at all — and the State Auditor and Inspector audits every county's books. Both are the state's disclosure, not the county's. Not one Oklahoma county posts its own inspection result, so every county page here links the state report instead. And on the number that matters most, no state agency stands in: not one of the 77 publishes a death in custody.