Orange County Jails
& Detention Centers

Three Orange County Sheriff's Department facilities carry nearly all long-term custody. The OC Central Men's & Women's Jail complex at 550 N Flower Street in Santa Ana is the county's main intake and release center — the single address most Orange County bookings pass through. The Theo Lacy Facility at 501 The City Drive South in Orange is the maximum-security male housing facility. The James A. Musick Facility on Musick in Irvine handles a lower-custody, largely south-county population.

Layered underneath that are the independent city police departments. Anaheim, Santa Ana, Irvine, Huntington Beach, Newport Beach, Costa Mesa, Fullerton, Garden Grove and others run their own Type I jails — short-term holding measured in hours, before a transfer into county custody creates the booking record a bond attaches to.

That two-layer structure produces the single most common mistake families make here: driving to Santa Ana while the defendant is still sitting in a city jail eight miles away, or driving to a city station after the transfer already happened. The building matters, and it changes within hours.

Two cities hold two separate jails apiece. Santa Ana has its own police jail at 62 Civic Center Plaza and the county complex on Flower Street. Irvine has its own police jail at the civic center and the county's Musick facility inside the same city limits. Those are genuinely different facilities with different phone numbers and different release desks.

Give us a full legal name and date of birth before anyone gets in a car. We confirm which building actually has the person, verify the amount against the 2026 Uniform Bail Schedule, and post at any hour.