The Florida Department of Corrections has now posted its county detention reports for both August and September of this year. The average daily population it records for the St. Johns County Jail reads 432 in the August edition and 461 in the September one. That September figure is the highest of the nine monthly counts the department has published for this county in 2026. The department collects the count under F.S. s. 951.23(2), which obliges every county in Florida to transmit it to Tallahassee each month, and the front of the report says it provides approximated data for the counties that cannot submit on the standardized instrument.
The same row of Table 1 gives this county’s incarceration rate as 1.4 people in jail for every 1,000 residents of it. The state total line immediately beneath the county list on that same page of the report reads 2.5. The summary page at the front puts the statewide figure at an estimated 56,551 inmates in Florida’s county detention facilities during September. The Table 1 line for St. Johns gives this county’s share of that statewide total as 0.82 percent.
Nine months, each quoted from its own report
| Month | Average daily population | Rate per 1,000 | Share of state |
|---|---|---|---|
| January | 377 | 1.1 | 0.70% |
| February | 367 | 1.1 | 0.67% |
| March | 382 | 1.2 | 0.72% |
| April | 389 | 1.2 | 0.70% |
| May | 399 | 1.2 | 0.72% |
| June | 396 | 1.2 | 0.70% |
| July | 414 | 1.2 | 0.75% |
| August | 432 | 1.3 | 0.77% |
| September | 461 | 1.4 | 0.82% |
Every figure in the table above appears in the St. Johns row of the edition the department published for that month alone. February is the lowest of the nine months and September is the highest, with the other seven falling between them, and the only month-to-month fall in the series is June. The distance between February and September is 94 and the distance between January and September is 84 people. Both of those differences are this paper’s subtraction of the department’s printed figures rather than anything the department itself prints.
All nine of the 2026 editions carry an identical county population figure for St. Johns, which is 331,479 residents. The note printed beneath Table 1 describes that figure as an estimate of the population on May 1, 2025. It credits the calculation of the estimate to the University of Florida’s Bureau of Economic and Business Research. Because the denominator has not changed across any of the nine reports, the rate column moves only with the jail count beside it.
Two earlier Septembers, and why one of them does not compare
The September 2024 edition of the report gives this county an average daily population of 409 at an incarceration rate of 1.3. That edition carries a county population of 315,317, which is a different denominator from the one the last two years both use. The September 2025 edition gives this county an average daily population of 399 at an incarceration rate of 1.2. That 2025 entry is not a count of the jail’s population in September of that year, which matters because a year-over-year comparison drawn straight off the two rows would be reading a July figure against a September one.
Its row carries the notation 07/2025 in the Date Reported column of Table 1, and the footnote on that page explains it. A date appears in that column when a facility’s population for the report’s own month was not transmitted by the time of publication. The footnote states that figures from another month are then used in the place of the missing data. In the same edition the Table 2 line for this jail reads 399 with a single asterisk and a dash in each of the three pretrial columns.
That edition also names this county in its footnote list of facilities which did not report on the instrument the statute requires. It says the counts of those facilities are left out of the Table 2 total but are kept in the grand total beneath it. The September 2026 edition carries no entry in the Date Reported column for this county and names it in neither of its footnote lists. On the report’s own terms that means the county reported on time and to the standard, as did every other 2026 edition read here.
How much of the jail is waiting
Table 2 of each edition counts the people held in a facility before their cases have been decided one way or the other. The September edition gives 221 felony pretrial and 63 misdemeanor pretrial at the St. Johns County Jail, and prints the total as 61.6 percent. The state line on the same page of the same table prints that figure for Florida’s jails together as 72.2 percent. A smaller share of this jail is therefore held pretrial than of the state’s detention facilities taken as a whole, on the two percentages the department prints side by side in the same table.
That state line totals 51,167 people rather than the 56,551 the report gives as a grand total immediately beneath it. The footnote removes from the smaller total the eleven counties the report names as having sent their populations outside the instrument. The department prints the difference between the two totals separately on page 5 of the September edition as 5,384. St. Johns is not one of those eleven counties in the September edition or in any other 2026 edition.
The same row in the January edition reads 161 felony pretrial and 49 misdemeanor pretrial at a printed total of 55.7 percent. That puts the felony pretrial count higher in September than it was in January on the department’s own two figures. The percentage has moved less than the count has, because the jail as a whole grew alongside the pretrial population inside it. The report publishes no length of stay anywhere in it, so none of these figures describes how long any one person waits, and what they describe instead is how many people are in the building on an average day and what stage each case has reached.
Two things the report does not explain
The line for St. Johns County Work Release carries a dash in all four columns of Table 2 in every one of the 2026 editions. A dash in that table is the same mark the report uses for a facility that transmitted nothing at all for the month. The report does not say which of those two readings applies on that particular line in this county’s case. The facility listed immediately above it appears as “St. Johns County Jail” followed by two asterisks rather than one.
The report defines a single asterisk in the footnote printed under Table 2 of each edition. It defines no double asterisk anywhere in the document, in the footnotes or in the notes on either table. No other double asterisk appears beside any facility in any of the eleven editions read for this story. The October edition is the next one due on the index the department publishes these on, and the September edition directs questions about its statistics to the Bureau of Research and Data Analysis at co.dcresearch@FDC.MyFlorida.com.
Loading comments…