Clicking on any of the Massachusetts 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.
Massachusetts has 14 counties. The sheriff runs the house of correction. That is the county jail. Suffolk, Middlesex, Worcester, Essex, Hampden, Plymouth, Bristol, and Norfolk run the large buildings. Barnstable covers the Cape. Dukes and Nantucket are the small island jails. Berkshire, Franklin, and Hampshire cover the west. City police departments have holding rooms, not county jails.
Jails in Massachusetts hold people before trial and people serving a house-of-correction sentence. A misdemeanor, and a felony sentence of 2.5 years or less, stays with the sheriff. A state prison sentence, more than 2.5 years, goes to the Department of Correction. A federal sentence goes to the Bureau of Prisons. FMC Devens is the federal medical center in the state.
The Department of Correction’s weekly count on August 10, 2026, put the jurisdiction population at 6,264. About 6,105 were in department facilities. Another 95 were in county houses of correction. The state prisons include Souza-Baranowski, the maximum-security prison in Shirley, MCI-Norfolk, MCI-Shirley, NCCI Gardner, Old Colony Correctional Center in Bridgewater, and the Massachusetts Treatment Center. MCI-Framingham holds women. MCI-Cedar Junction in Walpole was at zero occupancy in that count.
Fourteen sheriffs, one system each. Some sheriffs run a jail and a house of correction on the same campus. Suffolk uses Nashua Street Jail for pretrial men and the South Bay House of Correction for sentences. When a house of correction holds someone for another county, for the state, or for the U.S. Marshals, it bills a contract rate. On August 10, 2026, Hampden held 58 of the 95 state inmates still in county facilities.
The Department of Youth Services runs youth custody. Counties do not. A detained youth has been arrested and is held until the next court date. A committed youth has been adjudicated and placed in DYS custody. DYS uses small residential programs, from staff-secure homes to locked hardware-secure units, plus district offices for youth living at home or in a foster placement. It is not a set of 14 county juvenile halls. An audit covering fiscal 2023 and 2024 found DYS serving about 2,186 youth ages 12 to 22. Education in the residential programs is provided with the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.
Search the county of the arrest. The adult listing is that sheriff’s house of correction. The youth listing is the DYS detention or commitment program that region uses.
Booking is a queue: identity, prints, a medical screen, a search, property bagged, one call. The person has not been convicted. The unit still runs on counts. Food is plain, the uniform does not fit, and sleep is broken. Withdrawal from alcohol, opioids, or methamphetamine can start before arraignment.
Officers who apply the rules the same way to everyone run a quieter unit. Uneven enforcement is how contraband moves. Suffolk, Middlesex, and Worcester can separate by risk. A smaller western or island jail often cannot.
Most houses of correction sell tablet time, video visits, and deposits through a vendor. Those accounts can be shut off. Each county page on this site lists the jail phone, the vendor, and the way to send money for that sheriff’s office.