Essex County NJ Sheriff's Jail

The Essex County Correctional Facility (ECCF) at 354 Doremus Avenue in Newark, New Jersey (with older listings citing 60 Nelson Place), is the main county jail for Essex County. For many years, ECCF was one of the largest ICE detention contractors in the Northeast, holding federal immigration detainees under an intergovernmental service agreement (IGSA) alongside its county pretrial and sentenced population. In 2021 — following sustained advocacy, litigation, and political pressure — Essex County ended its ICE contract, and the last immigration detainees were transferred out. Today ECCF operates as a county-and-state jail without ICE detainees, and family-contact infrastructure runs through kiosk-based scanned mail, Securus and ConnectNetwork for phone and deposits, and video visitation. Visitation hours run seven days a week from 7:30 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. This guide covers what families need to know about the post-ICE ECCF.

About ECCF and the end of ICE detention in Essex County

Essex County Correctional Facility opened in the early 2000s as a consolidated county jail replacing older Essex County detention buildings, and for much of its history it operated under both a county-corrections mission and a long-standing ICE detention contract. That ICE role made ECCF one of the largest federal-immigration detention sites in the Northeast, generating tens of millions of dollars in per-diem revenue for the county but also drawing sustained scrutiny over conditions and the growing political opposition to state and local participation in federal immigration enforcement.

In 2021, after years of advocacy from immigrant-rights organizations, legal challenges, and political pressure from state officials and Essex County residents, the Essex County government voted to end the ICE contract. The county announced that there would be "zero" ICE detainees at the county's prison starting August 23, 2021, and the ICE population was transferred out to other facilities. Today ECCF operates as a county-and-state jail without ICE detainees, holding pretrial detainees on state and county charges, people serving county sentences, and various U.S. Marshals Service holds for federal criminal (not immigration) cases.

Every inmate at ECCF has a booking 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 through the Essex County DOC inmate lookup or on AllRecentArrests.us before mailing or planning a visit.

Visitation at ECCF: seven days a week, 7:30 a.m. to 9:00 p.m.

ECCF conducts visitation Monday through Sunday from 7:30 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. That seven-day, extended-hours schedule is more accommodating than at many county jails and gives working families flexibility to schedule visits around workdays. Visitation is typically conducted through video (both on-site at kiosks in the jail lobby and, at some facilities, remote from home) rather than through traditional in-person contact visits. Confirm the current visitation format (video, in-person, or hybrid) and any pre-scheduling requirements on the Essex County DOC website before you travel.

Visitors typically must be pre-registered and approved before scheduling any visit; expect a background review. Bring a valid government-issued photo ID for on-site visits and follow the facility's rules on dress and behavior.

Kiosk-based scanned mail at ECCF

Mail sent to inmates at ECCF is processed through a kiosk-based scanning system: family and friends send correspondence to the facility (or to a designated scanning vendor's PO Box, depending on current arrangements), and inmates view the scanned images on a tablet or kiosk rather than receiving the paper letter. Confirm the current mailing address for personal mail on the Essex County DOC's inmate-info page before sending; if the county uses a scanning-vendor PO Box separate from the jail's physical address, mail to the jail address may be rejected. Legal mail from an attorney or court, clearly marked as legal correspondence, still typically goes to the jail's physical address and is opened in the inmate's presence.

Because personal mail is scanned, use single-sided white paper with pen or clear print for best after-scan readability, avoid stamps and decorations, and skip Polaroids (photocopied or printed photos are typically fine). Our how to send mail to an inmate explains the scanned-mail model in more depth.

How to send money to an ECCF inmate

Deposits for ECCF inmates go through ConnectNetwork (Access Corrections' family-facing brand). You have three practical options: deposit online at connectnetwork.com, deposit by phone through ConnectNetwork's toll-free line, or deposit at a lobby kiosk at the facility. When prompted for the facility, use Site ID 13 to route the deposit to the Essex County NJ Correctional Facility. Standard per-transaction fees apply and scale with deposit amount. Our overview of how to send money to an inmate compares options.

Phone service at ECCF

Inmate phone service at ECCF runs through the county's contracted vendor (ConnectNetwork or Securus per current contract). Family members set up prepaid accounts through the vendor's site and register the phone numbers the inmate will call. New Jersey has taken some legislative action to reduce inmate phone call costs in recent years, but per-minute rates at county jails remain higher than the federal BOP or California free-call model. Our guide to calling an inmate covers setup.

Court dates, bond, and release in Essex County

Essex County criminal cases are handled through the Superior Court of New Jersey Law Division in Newark, with case records searchable through the New Jersey Courts public records portal. New Jersey largely eliminated cash bail in 2017 through the New Jersey Criminal Justice Reform Act, moving instead to a risk-assessment-based pretrial release system administered by the Judiciary. That means most people arrested in Essex County are either released with pretrial monitoring conditions or held without bail based on a public-safety and flight-risk assessment; commercial bail bondsmen play a much smaller role than in most other states.

Emergencies, safety concerns, and advocacy resources

For urgent family emergencies such as a death, serious illness, or birth, call ECCF at (973) 621-2132 with the inmate's name and booking number and ask that a chaplain or unit staff relay the message. If you are worried about a loved one's medical care, mental health, or safety inside, contact the Essex County DOC directly, keep a written record of who you spoke with and when, and follow up in writing.

Advocacy organizations that were active in the campaign to end ICE detention at ECCF and remain active on New Jersey jail-conditions issues include the ACLU of New Jersey, Make the Road New Jersey, and Salvation and Social Justice. For legal representation, the New Jersey Office of the Public Defender is the primary source for court-appointed counsel in Essex County criminal cases.

The Sheriff and the County Correctional Facility are different bodies

Essex County has both a Sheriff's Office and a separately run county correctional facility, and they are not the same operation. The federal jail census counted the Essex County Correctional Facility in Newark at 2,434 beds, operated as its own entity rather than by the Sheriff. If your family member was arrested in Essex County, that facility is where they are most likely held — a sheriff's lockup normally holds people only briefly around court appearances and transport.

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

• Essex County Correctional Facility, Newark

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.

How New Jersey county detention is organised

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:

• Essex County Correctional Facility, Newark — a rated and design capacity of 2,434, a peak population of 2,125

New Jersey concentrates county detention in a small number of large facilities — just 16 were counted statewide — and Essex County's was the largest of them. The census recorded 1,939 men and 82 women there. That imbalance almost always means women from the county are held elsewhere, so if you are looking for a woman arrested in Essex County, ask specifically where women are housed rather than assuming the main facility.

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 Essex County Sheriff's jail

Closing a prison does not erase its statistical record. The department continues to publish pre-closure reports for this institution, including the federal jail census, which counts and measures county-level facilities every few years and per-facility capacity, population and function data published from that census.

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.

What the Essex County Sheriff's jail is set up to do

The federal jail census records each facility's designated functions — the roles it is set up and authorised to perform. In its 2019 count, the Essex County Sheriff's jail was recorded as holding adults awaiting trial or serving a sentence, holding people awaiting return to probation or parole custody, acting as a reception or intake centre for other facilities, operating as a dedicated medical facility, operating as a dedicated mental health facility and holding people in protective custody.

Equally useful is what it is not designated as: running a work release program and holding juveniles. That is a statement about the facility's formal role, not about the services inside it — a jail without a dedicated medical or treatment designation can still provide on-site care, but specialised needs are more likely to be met by transporting someone out to a hospital or a specialist facility. If that applies to your family member, ask early who provides the care and where.

These designations come from the 2019 census, so treat them as the facility's established role rather than a current service list.

How the Essex County Sheriff's jail is inspected

New Jersey's county-level detention was counted in the most recent federal jail census as just 16 facilities statewide — one of the smallest counts in the country, because New Jersey concentrates county detention in a small number of large facilities rather than spreading it across many small ones.

• The Essex County Correctional Facility was the largest of those 16, at 2,434 beds.
• Because there are so few facilities, someone arrested in one county is sometimes held in another under a shared-services arrangement.

The practical consequence is that "which county arrested them" and "which county holds them" are different questions in New Jersey more often than in most states. Confirm the facility rather than assuming the county.

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.

Avoiding scams and your first steps

Third-party sites sometimes claim to offer inmate locate services, cheaper phone calls, or expedited deposits for a fee. The Essex County DOC inmate lookup, ConnectNetwork (Site ID 13 for deposits), and the county's contracted phone and video vendors are the authoritative and only fully reliable channels.

If someone you love has just been booked into ECCF, focus first on the essentials: confirm booking through the Essex County DOC inmate lookup and note the booking number, register with the video-visit vendor for scheduling (the seven-day 7:30-to-9 schedule gives flexibility), fund an initial deposit through ConnectNetwork with Site ID 13, register your phone number with the phone vendor for calls, and send personal mail through the current scanning-vendor PO Box (verify on the DOC's inmate-info page). Look up the case number on the NJ Courts records portal and note that New Jersey's post-2017 pretrial reform means most releases are through the risk-assessment system rather than through cash bail. If your loved one is transferred to NJ DOC state prison after sentencing, our overviews of life after prison, finding work after prison, and applying for SNAP, Medicaid, and TANF after release cover what comes next.

Legacy ICE-detention records at ECCF

Because ECCF held ICE detainees for many years, older search results, immigrant-detention databases, and third-party sites may still show "Essex County Correctional Facility" as an ICE detention location or list detainee records from the pre-2021 period. If you are searching for someone in ICE custody today, the ICE Online Detainee Locator at locator.ice.gov is the authoritative source, and it will show current placement at whichever facility ICE has moved someone to. If a family member was detained by ICE at ECCF prior to August 2021 and is still in ICE custody, they are now held at a different facility — likely in New Jersey (Elizabeth Detention Center), Pennsylvania (Moshannon Valley), Louisiana (multiple), or Texas.

New Jersey's inmate calling rate reforms

New Jersey passed legislation in recent years aimed at reducing the cost of inmate phone calls at state and county correctional facilities, part of a national wave of state-level action following the FCC's earlier work on inmate-calling-service rate caps. At ECCF, that means per-minute phone rates should be lower than the historic norms, though rates remain higher than the federal BOP standard or California's post-SB 1008 free-call model. Confirm current rates with the phone vendor before setting up a prepaid account; if you notice rates that seem out of line with New Jersey's regulated caps, contact the NJ Board of Public Utilities.