Susanville Jail

The Susanville Jail at 1801 Main Street in Susanville, California is the small city holding facility operated by the Susanville Police Department in Lassen County. Susanville is best known nationally as the corrections-town host to two CDCR state prisons — High Desert State Prison (HDSP, still active) and the California Correctional Center (CCC, permanently closed by court-mandated deadline of June 26, 2023). The Susanville Jail on Main Street is entirely separate from those state institutions: it is a small municipal facility used by the Susanville PD for short-term booking, safety holds, and brief stays while officers complete reports, confirm warrants, or arrange transport. Most people who need to stay in custody longer are transferred to the Lassen County Adult Detention Facility. This guide clarifies the distinction and covers what to expect.

Susanville Jail is NOT the CDCR state prisons

Susanville is a small town in Lassen County that has been dominated by state prison operations for decades. The California Correctional Center (CCC) operated on the Rice Canyon Road corridor for many years alongside High Desert State Prison (HDSP), and the two together made the state prison system Susanville's largest employer. In 2023, following extended litigation over the state's decision to consolidate prison facilities, CCC was permanently deactivated by a court-mandated deadline of June 26, 2023, and its remaining functions were absorbed by HDSP and other CDCR facilities. HDSP remains active as CDCR's Level IV maximum-security men's prison in the Susanville area.

The Susanville Jail at 1801 Main Street is entirely separate from those state institutions. It is a small municipal holding facility operated by the Susanville Police Department for city-level detention functions — nowhere near the scale of CCC or HDSP. If you have been directed to the Susanville Jail or told someone is at Susanville, clarify: the state prison HDSP is at 475-750 Rice Canyon Road (a completely different address), and if your loved one is a state inmate at HDSP, our separate CDCR HDSP guide covers procedures. This guide covers only the city PD holding on Main Street.

What the Susanville Jail is used for

The Susanville Jail is used for short-term custody: booking arrestees, holding people briefly while officers complete arrest reports, confirming outstanding warrants before deciding on release or transport, and arranging transport to the Lassen County Adult Detention Facility for those who need to stay in custody longer. Most stays at the Susanville Jail are hours rather than days, and the facility is not designed for long-term holding. Standard county-jail family-contact procedures (scheduled visits, mail routing, deposit vendors, phone service) don't really apply here the way they do at county or state facilities — the operational scale of the Susanville PD holding doesn't support that infrastructure.

When someone is arrested in Susanville by the SPD or another law-enforcement agency in the county judicial district, they are typically brought to the Susanville Jail for booking (fingerprints, photo, personal information collected, search for weapons or contraband, belongings inventoried). From there, disposition depends on the charges and the person's situation: cite-and-release for minor infractions, bail-out for bondable cases, transfer to Lassen County Adult Detention Facility for longer holds, or transfer to a state or federal facility if applicable.

Contacting a loved one and confirming custody

To confirm whether someone is at the Susanville Jail, call the Susanville Police Department's 24-hour dispatch at (530) 257-2171 with the person's full name and date of birth. Business-hours administrative questions can be directed to (530) 257-5603. Because the Susanville Jail is a small facility, dispatch staff can typically tell you whether the person is still there, has been transferred to the Lassen County Adult Detention Facility, has been released, or has been moved elsewhere. Given the short-hold nature of this facility, don't drive to Main Street expecting a scheduled visit — that model applies at the county sheriff's jail after transfer, not at the city PD facility.

If bail has been set and you plan to post it, work with a licensed California bail bondsman (typically for a 10 percent non-refundable premium of the total bail amount) or arrange cash bail through the appropriate court. If your loved one is transferred to the Lassen County Adult Detention Facility, that facility's rules and procedures apply for visitation, mail, deposits, and phone contact from that point forward.

Lassen County Adult Detention Facility after transfer

The Lassen County Sheriff's Office operates the main adult detention facility for Lassen County. Once your loved one is transferred there, they become subject to the sheriff's rules and vendor arrangements — typically including scheduled visitation, a mail routing address, phone service through the sheriff's contracted vendor, and deposit options through the sheriff's contracted deposit vendor. Contact the Lassen County Sheriff's Office directly or search on AllRecentArrests.us for the current inmate lookup. Because the CCC closure in 2023 significantly reshaped the local corrections economy in Susanville, the sheriff's office remains one of the primary local law-enforcement employers in the area.

HDSP state prison context: separate procedures entirely

If your loved one is at High Desert State Prison (HDSP) — the still-active CDCR state prison at 475-750 Rice Canyon Road, roughly 8 miles from downtown Susanville — they are in state custody under completely different rules from any local jail. Statewide CDCR numbers, CIRIS inmate search at ciris.mt.cdcr.ca.gov, VSA visitation scheduling at cdcr.gtlvisitme.com/app, Connect Network and JPay deposits with California's 50 percent restitution garnishment rule, ViaPath free phone service since January 1, 2023 under SB 1008, and mail routing to HDSP's specific inmate PO Box (PO Box 3030, Susanville, CA 96127-3030) all apply. Our separate CDCR HDSP guide covers those procedures.

Post-CCC-closure Susanville context

The 2023 closure of the California Correctional Center marked a major shift for Susanville. CCC had operated for decades as one of Susanville's largest employers and had shaped the town's economy, housing market, and civic identity around the presence of two state prisons on the Rice Canyon Road corridor. Following extended local litigation to halt or delay the closure, CCC was deactivated by the court-mandated deadline of June 26, 2023, and the town has been adjusting to the economic impact ever since. HDSP remains active but represents a single-institution footprint rather than the paired complex that Susanville hosted for years. For families of state inmates who were formerly at CCC, transfers went to other CDCR facilities statewide — find the current placement through CIRIS.

A city jail is a short-term lockup, not a place people serve time

The susanville jail is a municipal facility, and municipal lockups work quite differently from county jails. California classifies a facility of this kind as Type I — holding people for not more than 96 hours after booking. In practice that means hours or a couple of days between arrest and either release or transfer to the county. These facilities are usually small, often publish no roster, and generally have no visiting programme, commissary or mail arrangement worth setting up. If someone was arrested more than a day or two ago, they have almost certainly been moved on.

The services provided here are short-term holding immediately after arrest, transfer to county custody or release and no long-term housing. That is a clinical remit rather than a custodial one — people are here because of a medical or behavioural health need, not because this is where they are held.

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

• Lassen County Sheriff's Office

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.

What records still exist for the Susanville Jail

Closing a prison does not erase its statistical record. The department continues to publish pre-closure reports for this institution, including local detention facility inspection reports, published for public access, the Title 15 minimum standards for local detention facilities and biennial reviews of those standards required by statute.

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.

Why there are no published statistics for this facility

If you go looking for federal jail statistics on Susanville, you will not find any. The Bureau of Justice Statistics Census of Jails for 2019 counted jails in 46 states — and Susanville is not among them. That is not a gap in the data. It is a direct consequence of the unified system: a jail census counts locally-run jails, and Susanville has none to count.

The practical effect is that the comparisons available in other states — this county jail against that one, rated capacity against peak population — simply do not apply here. There is one operator, and its own reporting is the only source. When you see a directory listing a "county jail" in Susanville, it is almost always mislabelling a state facility.

It also means the agency itself is the single point of contact for everything: locating someone, visiting, mail, deposits and complaints all run through the same department rather than being split between a sheriff and a state corrections office.

How the Susanville Jail is inspected

California inspects its local detention facilities through the Board of State and Community Corrections, which sets minimum standards under Title 15 covering the administration and operation of facilities, medical and mental health care, the nutritional quality of food, and environmental standards including cleanliness. The requirement comes from Penal Code section 6031.1, with the standards reviewed under section 6030.

• The Board inspects local adult and juvenile detention facilities and has published those inspection reports publicly since 1 July 2017.
• A Type I facility holds people for not more than 96 hours after booking, excluding holidays, and may take short sentences depending on local policy.
• A Type II facility is what most people mean by a county jail, holding people pending arraignment, during trial and after sentence. A Type III facility holds only convicted and sentenced people.

A municipal jail generally sits at the Type I end of that scale — a place people pass through in hours or days rather than stay. Inspection reports are public documents, so if you have a concern about conditions the Board's published report for the facility is something you can ask for by name.

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 Board's published inspection reports, at www.bscc.ca.gov/s_fsolocaldetentionfacilityinspectionreports. For finding a person rather than a report, a municipal lockup is the wrong place to look after the first day or two. Lassen County Sheriff's Office is the body that holds people beyond that point and that publishes a searchable roster.

Your first steps if a loved one is at the Susanville Jail

If someone you love has been booked at the Susanville Jail on Main Street, focus first on the essentials: call the Susanville PD's 24-hour dispatch at (530) 257-2171 with the person's full name and date of birth to confirm current custody, ask whether they've been released, transferred to the Lassen County Adult Detention Facility, or are still in Susanville Jail custody, and if bail has been set, contact a licensed California bail bondsman or arrange cash bail through the appropriate court. If they are transferred to the Lassen County Adult Detention Facility, follow that facility's rules for visitation, mail, and deposits. If they are sent to state prison after conviction, our CDCR guides cover the state system's rules.

Local corrections economy shift after CCC closure

Beyond the specific custody logistics, the CCC closure has meaningfully affected Susanville's broader economy and civic character. For over 50 years the town's identity was intertwined with the state prison presence — corrections officers, medical staff, food service workers, and administrators formed a significant portion of the local workforce, and CCC's payroll was part of the town's economic backbone alongside HDSP. The 2023 deactivation eliminated hundreds of jobs and reshaped local businesses that had served the prison workforce. HDSP remains the town's principal state prison but represents a smaller institutional footprint than the paired CCC+HDSP complex that Susanville hosted for decades. For families visiting HDSP or dealing with Susanville-area logistics, understanding this economic context helps make sense of the town's current character — more retail and hospitality vacancies than in past years, changed traffic patterns, and evolving housing markets as the state-employee population shifts.

Weather and I-395/Highway 44 travel considerations

Susanville sits at 4,100+ feet elevation in northeastern California, and winter weather closures along US Highway 395 and California State Route 44 are routine from November through April. Snowstorms, ice, and reduced visibility can close mountain passes with little warning, affecting travel to and from Susanville from both directions. If you're planning any trip to the area — whether to the Susanville Jail, HDSP, or the Lassen County Adult Detention Facility — check road conditions through Caltrans QuickMap and the California Highway Patrol before departing during winter months. A wasted trip through a mountain pass in an active snowstorm is easily avoided with a 10-minute weather check.