City & County Jails in Delaware
Delaware - Inmate Search - All County Jail Rosters
Clicking on any of the Delaware 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 Delaware
Delaware has no county jails
Delaware has three counties: New Castle, Kent, and Sussex. None of them runs a jail. Sheriffs here serve civil papers. Adult custody belongs to the Department of Correction, which holds people before trial and people serving a sentence in the same system. A city police lockup is measured in hours. The next stop is a DOC institution.
Four institutions do the secure work. Howard R. Young Correctional Institution in Wilmington, still called Gander Hill, is the main pretrial jail for New Castle County. James T. Vaughn Correctional Center in Smyrna is the largest prison. Sussex Correctional Institution in Georgetown holds men from the southern courts, and the Sussex boot camp sits on the same grounds. Delores J. Baylor Women’s Correctional Institution in New Castle is the women’s prison. Community corrections centers, including Plummer in Wilmington and work-release sites in each county, are a step down from those four. They are not county jails. A published total of 14 mixes those work-release beds with the prisons. A federal sentence leaves the state system. Delaware has no Federal Bureau of Prisons institution.
Jails in Delaware are those DOC buildings. A misdemeanor and a felony both stay inside the department. There is no handoff at one year, because there is no county jail to hand off to.
How many jails are there in Delaware?
Use the court, not the county line. An arrest in Wilmington or Newark goes to Howard R. Young. An arrest in Dover goes toward Vaughn. An arrest in Georgetown, Seaford, or Lewes goes to Sussex Correctional Institution. Women go to Baylor. DOC does not bill a sheriff a daily rate for an in-state hold. Federal and out-of-state holds are arranged by the department. Search the city or town of the arrest. The listing names the institution that court uses.
How many juvenile detention centers are there in Delaware?
Youth custody is a different agency. The Division of Youth Rehabilitative Services, inside the Department of Services for Children, Youth and Their Families, runs the secure beds. New Castle County Detention Center, on the Wilmington campus, holds youth before a hearing in the north. Stevenson House Detention Center in Milford does that job for Kent and Sussex. Ferris School, next to the New Castle detention center, is the secure treatment facility for committed boys, generally ages 13 to 18, with stays measured in months. Mowlds Cottage and Snowden Cottage are the other secure-care programs on that campus. That is not six separate youth prisons, and it is not a county system.
A youth at New Castle or Stevenson House is usually waiting on Family Court. A youth at Ferris has been committed. The secure programs run school and use the same behavior-management system. Search the city or town of the arrest to see which detention center that county uses.
What the first days in a Delaware institution are like
Intake at Howard R. Young or Sussex is a queue: identity, prints, a medical screen, a search, property bagged, one call. The person has not been convicted. The tier still runs on counts. Food is plain, the uniform does not fit, and the first night is noisy. Withdrawal from alcohol or opioids can start before the first court date.
Officers who apply the rules the same way to everyone run a quieter tier. Uneven enforcement is how contraband moves. These buildings can separate by risk in a way a small-town lockup cannot, because the small-town lockup does not exist here.
DOC uses a statewide phone, visit, and deposit system, so the vendor does not change from town to town. Accounts can still be shut off. Each Delaware facility page on this site lists the institution that serves that court, the visit rules, and the way to send money.