City & County Jails in New Jersey
New Jersey - Inmate Search - All County Jail Rosters
Clicking on any of the New Jersey 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.
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New Jersey county jails and state prisons
New Jersey has 21 counties. A county corrections department or the sheriff runs the jail. Essex, Hudson, Bergen, Middlesex, and Camden have the beds. A few smaller counties have closed their own jail and contract with a neighbor. City police departments have holding rooms. They are not county jails.
Cash bail is not the usual path out. Since 2017, a judge decides release or detention under the Criminal Justice Reform Act. A person can still sit in a county jail for months if the court orders detention. A sentence of a year or less stays in the county jail. A longer felony sentence goes to the Department of Corrections. A federal sentence goes to the Bureau of Prisons. FCI Fairton is the federal prison in the state.
Jails in New Jersey are the pretrial and short-sentence buildings. The 2025 department count put 12,856 people in state prisons, county jails, and reentry programs together. About 90 percent of them were in nine state prisons, spread across six counties. Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women, in Union County, is the women’s prison. Some women have been held at a former youth campus because of the age of Edna Mahan and the abuse cases tied to it. South Woods and Bayside, both in Cumberland County, hold a large share of the men. New Jersey State Prison is in Trenton.
How many county jails are there in New Jersey?
Not all 21 counties still run a jail. The ones that closed contract. When a jail holds someone for another county, for the state, or for the U.S. Marshals, it bills a daily rate. Essex is the county that sends the most people on to state prison. A family in Cape May can be looking at a jail in their own county or a state prison two hours north.
How many juvenile detention centers are there in New Jersey?
County detention and state commitment are different stops. Counties run the detention centers that hold a youth before a hearing. Essex, Camden, Bergen, Atlantic, and Ocean keep their own. Burlington contracts with Middlesex. Cumberland contracts with Burlington. Gloucester uses Camden and Middlesex. A youth in one of those centers is usually waiting on court.
The Youth Justice Commission runs the commitment side. It has three secure facilities: the New Jersey Training School in Monroe Township, the Juvenile Medium Security Facility in Bordentown, and the Juvenile Female Secure Care and Intake Facility, also in Bordentown. It also runs ten residential community homes around the state. Those homes are not jails. Search the county of the arrest. The listing shows the detention center that county uses, and a commission facility only if the youth has been committed.
What the first days in a New Jersey county jail are like
A detention hearing can come fast. The night before it does not. Booking is identity, prints, a medical screen, a strip search, property bagged, and one call if the phones are up. The person has not been convicted. There is still no way to check on a shift at work, a PATH train pass left in a car, or who has the kids after school in Newark or Paterson. Glasses stay in property until someone signs for them. The cell has no phone.
The hard part is the ordinary part. The uniform itches and does not fit. The bunk is a mat on steel, and the person in the next bed is awake. Meals come on a tray, on a clock, with nothing that tastes like home. Mail takes days. A visit has to be scheduled, and it may not happen. Withdrawal from alcohol, opioids, or methamphetamine can start before the judge sees the case, and that is when the unit gets loud. Officers who apply the rules the same way to everyone keep the floor quieter. Uneven rules are how contraband moves. Essex and Hudson can separate by risk. A smaller county jail often cannot, and a closed county jail means the person is already in another county.
Tablets, video visits, and deposits take some of the isolation out of the larger jails. A message home does not fix the bed or the case, and the account can be shut off. Each county page on this site lists the jail phone, the vendor, and the way to send money for that county.