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 South Carolina.
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 South Carolina’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.
South Carolina — all 46 counties open. Click any county on the map, or see the transparency scoreboard below.
This is our jail
Every county in South Carolina 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 (16) — the county's and sheriff's own sites could not be read, a gap in the research rather than a finding: Allendale County, Barnwell County, Beaufort County, Berkeley County, Charleston County, Darlington County, Dillon County, Dorchester County, Florence County, Hampton County, Kershaw County, Lee County, Oconee County, Orangeburg County, Spartanburg County, Sumter County.
By law the sheriff has custody of the county jail (S.C. Code § 24-5-10), but a sheriff may hand it to the county government (§ 24-5-12), and in many South Carolina counties the detention center is a county department. The state Department of Corrections must inspect every county detention center each year and send written reports to county officials (§ 24-9-20). 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.