Cobb County GA Police Department Jail

The database record for Cobb County, Georgia at 140 North Marietta Parkway (Marietta Police Department) is a short-term city police holding facility. Actual longer-term county detention in Cobb County — the large metro Atlanta county that includes Marietta, Smyrna, Kennesaw, and Powder Springs — is handled at the Cobb County Adult Detention Center at 1825 County Services Parkway, Marietta, GA 30008, operated by the Cobb County Sheriff's Office under Sheriff Craig D. Owens Sr. This guide covers both: the short-term Marietta PD holding at 140 North Marietta Parkway, and (more importantly for families) the Cobb County Adult Detention Center where most detainees are transferred and held. The Adult Detention Center allows visits any day except Wednesday from 9:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., limits each inmate to ONE visit per week with a maximum of TWO visitors per visit, and requires a call to the Visitation Center at (770) 499-4359 to schedule.

Two different Cobb County addresses: Marietta PD vs. Sheriff's Adult Detention Center

Cobb County's law-enforcement geography includes multiple facilities that families sometimes confuse. The Marietta Police Department at 140 North Marietta Parkway handles Marietta-city arrests and short-term booking; people arrested by Marietta PD are typically transferred to the Cobb County Adult Detention Center for anything beyond initial processing. The Cobb County Adult Detention Center at 1825 County Services Parkway is where most Cobb County detainees actually spend time in custody, and it is where family members will visit, send mail, and fund commissary. Under Sheriff Craig D. Owens Sr., the Sheriff's Office runs the Adult Detention Center as a large-scale county jail serving one of Georgia's most populous counties.

Every inmate at the Adult Detention Center has a SOID (Sheriff's Office Identification) number assigned at intake. That number, plus the full legal name used at booking, is required on every letter, deposit, and visit registration. Confirm current custody status by calling the 24-hour inmate information line at (770) 499-4200 or by searching AllRecentArrests.us or the county's inmate lookup.

Visitation at the Cobb County Adult Detention Center

Visitation at the Adult Detention Center is structured as follows:

• Days: Any day of the week EXCEPT Wednesday
• Hours: Beginning at 9:00 a.m. until 7:00 p.m.
• Limit per inmate: ONE visit per week
• Maximum visitors per visit: TWO

To schedule an in-person visit, call the Visitation Center at (770) 499-4359. Advance scheduling is required — the once-per-week limit and the two-visitor cap mean spontaneous walk-ins are not accommodated. Coordinate with other family members ahead of time to decide who will attend which weekly visit, since the limit is per inmate rather than per visitor. Visitors typically must be pre-registered and approved before scheduling; expect a background check as part of that process. Bring a valid government-issued photo ID and follow the sheriff's dress-code and behavior rules.

Mail to a Cobb County Adult Detention Center inmate: two separate addresses

Cobb County uses different mail addresses for different types of correspondence, and this is one of the more important operational details for families to get right:

Personal letters and money orders: send to the off-site scanning address with the inmate's name and SOID number:
PO Box 247
Phoenix, MD 21131

Legal mail and book shipments: use the Marietta post office box:
PO Box 100110
Marietta, GA 30061

Personal mail sent to the wrong address (particularly to the Marietta PD physical address at 140 North Marietta Parkway or the Sheriff's Office direct) will typically be returned or delayed. Because personal mail is scanned at the Phoenix, MD off-site facility, use single-sided white paper with pen or clear print for best after-scan readability. Legal mail from an attorney or court, clearly marked as legal correspondence, goes to the Marietta post office box and is opened in the inmate's presence.

Follow standard prohibited-items rules: no cash (money orders only for the personal-mail address), personal checks, stamps, stickers, glitter, glue, tape, staples, paperclips, Polaroids, hardcover books, musical or embellished cards, or anything with electronics. Our how to send mail to an inmate covers the format.

How to send money to a Cobb County ADC inmate

Cobb County allows money orders sent to the personal-mail scanning address at PO Box 247, Phoenix, MD 21131 (with the inmate's name and SOID number). The sheriff's office typically also offers various communication services and electronic deposit options through contracted vendors. Confirm the current online, phone, and lobby-kiosk deposit options on the Cobb County Sheriff's Office Adult Detention Center page before sending. Standard per-transaction fees apply for electronic deposits.

Phone service, court, and your first steps

Inmate phone service at the Adult Detention Center runs through the sheriff's contracted phone vendor. Family members set up prepaid accounts through the vendor's site and register the phone numbers the inmate will call. Georgia county jail rates apply.

Georgia criminal cases in Cobb County are handled through the Cobb County Superior Court (felonies) and Cobb County State Court (misdemeanors and preliminary matters), with case records searchable through the Cobb County Clerk of Court website. Bond decisions in Georgia can be handled through commercial surety with a licensed Georgia bail bondsman (typically for a 10-15 percent non-refundable premium), through cash bond, or, in some cases, on personal recognizance.

If someone you love has just been booked in Cobb County, focus first on the essentials: call the 24-hour information line at (770) 499-4200 to confirm current custody and get the SOID number, note whether they are at Marietta PD (short-term) or the Adult Detention Center at 1825 County Services Parkway (longer-term), call (770) 499-4359 to schedule your weekly one-visit-per-week slot (any day except Wednesday, 9 a.m.-7 p.m.), send personal mail and money orders to PO Box 247, Phoenix, MD 21131 with the SOID number, and send legal mail to PO Box 100110, Marietta, GA 30061. Look up the case number on the Cobb County Clerk of Court and, if bond is set, contact a licensed Georgia bail bondsman.

Managing the one-visit-per-week cap across an extended family

Cobb County's one-visit-per-week-per-inmate cap is significant: if your loved one has multiple people who would like to visit, you cannot simply have different family members visit on different days — the cap is per inmate, not per visitor. The two-visitor-per-visit limit means each weekly visit can include up to two people (typically two adults, or one adult plus one minor with appropriate consent). Coordinate with other approved family members ahead of each week to decide who will attend the single weekly visit and to alternate across weeks so that different family members can see the inmate over time. Written or phone communication (letters, calls) supplements the visits but the once-per-week cap is a real constraint on in-person contact.

Cobb County pretrial detention population and diversion

Cobb County has been active in exploring pretrial diversion and lower-cost alternatives to jail detention for lower-risk defendants, and the Adult Detention Center is not the only option for people arrested in the county — some defendants are released with pretrial monitoring conditions after initial court appearance. Working with an assigned defense attorney or the Cobb County Public Defender to explore bond reduction, pretrial diversion, or ROR options is often the fastest path to release for people held only because of inability to pay bail. Cobb County's court records at the Clerk of Superior Court will show whether pretrial services are involved in your loved one's case.

Sheriff Owens's operational approach

Sheriff Craig D. Owens Sr. was elected in 2020 as Cobb County's first Black sheriff and has focused publicly on modernizing the Adult Detention Center's operations, expanding programming for inmates, and improving jail conditions. The visitation and communications policies described here reflect that operational context, and the sheriff's office publishes regular updates on the cobbsheriff.org website with current information on any policy changes.

A police department lockup is not the county jail

Cobb County has two separate law enforcement agencies that hold people, and this record is the smaller one. The Cobb County Police Department operates from North Marietta Parkway; the Cobb County Sheriff's Office runs the county jail, a far larger facility. A police department lockup normally holds people for a short period immediately after arrest before they are transferred to the sheriff's jail, so if someone was arrested more than a day ago they have almost certainly been moved.

If you are trying to reach someone in custody, these are the facilities that actually hold people:

• Cobb County Sheriff's Office Jail and Prison Unit, Marietta

Someone taken to hospital from one of those facilities remains in custody the whole time, and remains booked there. So the place to ask about them is the facility holding them, not the hospital — the hospital will not confirm a patient in custody, and the custody record does not move when the person does.

Where people held in Cobb County actually end up

Because this record is not itself a custody facility, the numbers worth knowing belong to the two that are. The most recent federal jail census, covering 2019, counted them separately:

• Cobb County Sheriff's Office Jail and Prison Unit, Marietta — a rated and design capacity of 3,543, a peak population of 2,094
• Smyrna City Jail — a rated and design capacity of 69, a peak population of 73
• City of Acworth Detention Center — a rated and design capacity of 44, a peak population of 35

The federal jail census counted three custody facilities in Cobb County and none of them is a Cobb County Police Department jail — the county's detention capacity sits almost entirely with the Sheriff's Office. Note that the small city lockups at Smyrna and Acworth exist too, and a municipal arrest can land someone in one of those instead.

Those are census figures for a single reporting year and are now several years old, so treat them as the scale of each facility rather than a current count. Neither figure describes this record — this address is the hospital, and it holds no one on its own authority.

What records still exist for the Cobb County Police Department Jail

Closing a prison does not erase its statistical record. The department continues to publish pre-closure reports for this institution, including an online detainee search giving criminal charges and bond amounts, when it is in service, custodial information covering how the Adult Detention Center operates and published contact numbers for jail administration and for bonding.

These are worth knowing about if you are reconstructing a timeline — confirming when someone was held here, what the conditions and population were at the time, or supporting a claim that depends on how the institution was operating. They are statistical rather than individual, so they will not contain a named person's file; for that you need a records request to the department rather than a published report.

How the Cobb County Police Department Jail is inspected

Georgia county jails operate against the Georgia Jail Standards, maintained by the Georgia Sheriffs' Association Jail Services Division and developed with staff expertise from the Georgia Department of Community Affairs.

• The facility administrator is required to request in writing that the jail be inspected by a certified local or state fire safety inspector twice a year.

Georgia's arrangement differs from states like Illinois or Florida, where a state agency inspects every county jail on a fixed annual cycle and publishes the report. Here the standards are association-maintained and the fire inspection is requested by the facility itself, so there is less routinely published material to point to.

This matters more than most oversight machinery, because an inspection report is a document you can ask for. If you have a concern about conditions that the jail itself will not address — sanitation, medical access, overcrowding, safety — asking whether the facility's most recent inspection raised it, and requesting that report, is a concrete step that carries more weight than a phone complaint. Reports are generally public records.

How to find someone in this department's custody

The department's official search tool is the Cobb County Sheriff's Office inmate search, at www.cobbsheriff.org/inmates/adult-detention-center. The Sheriff's Office has warned that its online detainee search is periodically unavailable for system maintenance, and directs the public to call instead when that happens. The Cobb County Jail Complex is at 1825 County Services Parkway in Marietta, with a separate Visitor Center at 1877 County Services Parkway — worth noting, because the visitor entrance is not the jail address.

If the search does not find the person you are looking for, the department's Identification Unit can be reached on (770) 499-4200, bonding information and the main switchboard; jail administration is (770) 499-4221, Monday to Friday 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. A date of birth is required if the name is a common one — having it ready, along with any spelling variations, is usually the difference between a useful call and being told there is no record.

Cobb County Public Defender and bond alternatives

The Cobb County Public Defender's Office represents defendants who cannot afford private counsel in Cobb County criminal cases. For pretrial detainees at the Adult Detention Center, working with the Public Defender or private counsel early on bond-reduction motions or pretrial diversion applications is often the fastest path to release. Cobb County has explored various pretrial-services approaches and diversion programs; your loved one's assigned attorney will know what options apply to the specific case.

Personal-mail scanning and photograph rules

Because Cobb County processes personal mail at the off-site Phoenix, MD scanning address, personal correspondence effectively becomes digital content on the inmate's tablet or a kiosk. Family photos sent as printed images (not Polaroids) can typically be included with letters and will be scanned in color; check the current photo size and format rules with the sheriff's office before sending. Money orders sent to the same PO Box 247 Phoenix MD address need the inmate's name and SOID number on the memo line to route correctly.