City & County Jails in Alaska
Alaska - Inmate Search - All County Jail Rosters
Clicking on any of the Alaska Counties or Cities below will direct you to a list of all the City Jails, County Jails and Juvenile Detention Centers in that specific County.
Search for any jail in Alaska
How Alaska cities, towns, and villages hold people
Alaska has no county sheriffs and no county jail network. Boroughs, cities, and unincorporated villages do not each run a lockup the way a Lower 48 county does. The Alaska Department of Corrections runs a unified system, so the same agency holds people before trial and people serving a sentence. A booking in Anchorage, Fairbanks, Juneau, or Bethel usually goes straight into a state correctional center. Those centers function as the local jail and, for longer sentences, as the state prison.
Jails in Alaska are those state centers plus a thin ring of contract lockups. A village or small city without a contract jail does not keep someone for days. A village public safety officer or local police department holds the person only long enough for a trooper transport, often by plane, to the regional hub. That hub may be a community jail or a DOC correctional center. Federal defendants are usually held in those same state facilities under agreement. Alaska has no Federal Bureau of Prisons institution inside the state.
The one-year split used in many states does not sort people here. Misdemeanor time, pretrial detention, and felony sentences can all be served inside DOC. Classification and the court order decide the building, not a county-versus-state line.
How many jails and prisons are there in Alaska?
DOC operates 13 correctional institutions. The roster includes the Anchorage Correctional Complex, Anvil Mountain Correctional Center in Nome, Fairbanks Correctional Center, Goose Creek Correctional Center, Hiland Mountain Correctional Center, Ketchikan Correctional Center, Lemon Creek Correctional Center in Juneau, Mat-Su Pretrial, Palmer Correctional Center, Point MacKenzie Correctional Farm, Spring Creek Correctional Center in Seward, Wildwood Correctional Complex in Kenai, and Yukon-Kuskokwim Correctional Center in Bethel. Goose Creek, at Point MacKenzie, is the largest. On July 1, 2025, it held 1,164 people. Ketchikan is among the smallest.
Beside those institutions, DOC contracts 14 community jails. A February 2026 report to the House Finance subcommittee listed Bristol Bay Borough, Cordova, Craig, Dillingham, Haines, Homer, Kodiak, Kotzebue, North Slope Borough, Petersburg, Sitka, Unalaska, Valdez, and Wrangell. Together they provide 141 beds. In fiscal year 2025 they recorded 3,055 bookings and 11,244 bed days. The Seward community jail closed in fiscal year 2024. These lockups are city or borough operations paid by the state. They book people, hold them for a first court date, and transfer anyone who will stay longer to a DOC institution. They are not prisons, and most cannot separate people the way Anchorage or Goose Creek can.
How many juvenile detention centers are there in Alaska?
The Division of Juvenile Justice, inside the Department of Family and Community Services, runs six secure youth facilities: McLaughlin Youth Center in Anchorage, Fairbanks Youth Facility, Johnson Youth Center in Juneau, Kenai Peninsula Youth Facility, Mat-Su Youth Facility in Palmer, and Bethel Youth Facility. The Nome Youth Facility closed in 2019, so youth from the northwest who need a secure bed are flown to another region. Each of the six can hold a youth in detention while a case is pending and can also house youth placed in a treatment unit after adjudication. Detention and treatment are different wings of the same system, not two different agencies.
A youth is not booked into an adult correctional center as a matter of course. Short processing in an adult lockup is tightly limited, and sight-and-sound separation from adults is required. DJJ also keeps probation offices across the state, six of them on the same grounds as a youth facility. School and clinical staff work inside the secure facilities. Family contact is scheduled by the facility, and the trip from a village to Anchorage or Bethel is often the hardest part of a visit.
To find the lockup tied to an arrest, search the city, town, or village where the person was picked up. The listing shows the community jail or the DOC center that hub uses, and the youth facility that serves that region.
What custody is like in an Alaska institution or community jail
The first shock is often distance, not the cell. A person arrested in a village may be in a different town by the next day, with the family still waiting on a flight. Community jails are small, staffed locally, and short on programs. The regional centers are larger, louder, and hold a mix of pretrial detainees and sentenced prisoners.
Staff set the tone. A shift that enforces the rules the same way for everyone runs quieter. Uneven enforcement leaves room for contraband and fights. Someone new to custody is usually dealing with a delayed court date, a recorded phone call, no personal phone, a strip search, plain food, and worry about a job, a child, a house, or a dog left in the village. Withdrawal from alcohol or drugs can start in the first hours. Mail and visits follow the facility calendar, and winter weather cancels both.
Larger DOC centers offer tablets, video visits, messaging, and deposit systems that the 14 community jails often do not. Those services are a privilege and can be cut off. Each Alaska facility page on this site lists the phone vendor, the visit rules, and the way to send money for that building.