Hold Your own sheriff accountable

Do You Know Who Is Helping To Put Your Sheriff In Office?

Millions of dollars in campaign contributions to sheriffs across the country come from corporations that profit off of mass incarceration. Rather than making decisions for community safety, many sheriffs reward their donors with new jails and new contracts. This leads to thousands of people dying in jail, and increases the incentive to put more people behind bars.

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In the United States, more than 3,000 elected sheriffs possess unchecked authority over arrests, incarceration, and civil enforcement. They warehouse people in jails, tear apart immigrant families, and destroy communities with their violence:

  • More than 1,000 people die in county jails each year, and many of those deaths are preventable with proper medical and mental health care.
  • Sheriffs serve as the bridge to mass deportation: In 2018, 47 percent of internal deportations came through sheriffs.
  • Sheriff’s deputies kill people at a disproportionate rate, accounting for more than 400 shooting deaths per year.

Conflicts of interest are a feature, not a bug, of the sheriff’s office. Campaign contributions and contract money incentivizes arrests, incarceration, and a host of related practices that too often prioritize profit over human lives. In six years’ worth of public information and campaign finance reports in just 11 states, the Paid Jailer report identified upwards of $6 million in campaign contributions that create potential conflicts of interest, with construction companies and real estate businesses, legal firms, transportation companies, and medical businesses and professionals making up the largest offenders.

Our law enforcement officers should not be up for sale to the highest bidder. Who’s funding your sheriff, and what are they getting in return?

Find Out

First, find out who is financially supporting your sheriff’s election campaign, and look for names of businesses or individuals who are affiliated with industries that might want to do business with the sheriff.  

Search sheriff’s office spending 

Then, examine how your sheriff spends money, and see if any resources are spent on companies owned or managed by campaign donors. 

  • Use your preferred search engine to find the fiscal year end report or adopted budget for your jurisdiction

  • Locate the sheriff’s department budget 

  • Things to look for: what are the major expenditures of the office? What companies hold the largest contracts? Are there any new, big projects such as a jail expansion which might require contracts for construction, architecture, etc.? If you can’t find any, don’t worry, many sheriff’s offices do not list these contracts publicly. You can contact your sheriff or county manager to ask for the list of biggest contracts, or file a public records request 

    • Cross-reference major contracts and spending with the campaign finance report. Is there overlap? 

      1. Examples:

        1. Did a construction company who backed the sheriff receive a contract to build a new jail?

        2. Did a health care company fund the campaign and receive a contract?

        3. Did a telecommunications firm donate, and do they control the payphones in the jail?

        4. Do the legal firms or lawyers who donated represent the sheriff's office in wrongful death and misconduct cases?

        5. Do the transportation companies supply or repair the sheriff’s office with vehicles?

Search campaign finance reports

  • Use your preferred search engine to find the campaign finance reports in your state (this is most commonly found on the state board of elections, the secretary of state, the state ethics board website, or at a county web site)

  • Search for reports by candidate, elected official, office, or year 

  • Download the report 

  • Things to look for: Names, occupations, dates, and amounts of donors

    • What kinds of people or companies are donating to your sheriff’s campaign? Investigate why they might be investing in this election.

      1. Our report found the following common sources of conflict: construction companies, healthcare companies, employed deputies, bail bonds companies, weapons dealers, gun ranges, etc

Take Action

1. Add your name to the petition to get jail money out of sheriff elections

2. Tell your community about the conflicts of interest in our nation’s jails by using our template to write a letter to the editor

3. Organize your community and state: 

  1. Use this toolkit to find out what’s going on in your sheriff’s office.

  2. Educate friends and neighbors through one-on-one conversations and small house meetings.

  3. Form a clear set of demands (we recommend county or state legislation that would reform the campaign financing, prohibit conflicted contributions, and make contracting more transparent).

  4. Begin with research meetings with allied elected officials, and use those meetings to build your power analysis and overall strategy.

  5. Let us know what you’re doing and how we can help.