The Knox County Sheriff's Office provides correctional services to all of Knox County and operates three detention facilities – each offering a secure and well-maintained environment for the inmate population, while providing for the safety of departmental personnel and the surrounding community.  The department currently houses an average daily inmate population of approximately 1,000 inmates.  New jail officers attend an eight-week Training Academy, one of the longest and most comprehensive in the southeastern United States.

The Knox County Jail is housed on the L-2 level of the City-County Building in downtown Knoxville.  It is designed to house approximately 215 medium and maximum-security inmates as they await trial within Knox County or transport to state or federal prisons.

The Sheriff’s Detention Facility is located on 52 acres of county-owned property on Maloneyville Road in east Knox County, with the building itself covering thirteen acres.  The facility is approximately 340,000 square feet and consists of corridors joining concrete housing units that contain pre-fabricated pods.  The ground breaking for the facility was in June 1992, and the first inmates were moved inside two-and-a-half years later. An additional pod was opened in September, 2007, and added 288 beds to the existing facility. 

The Detention Facility includes the Knox County Intake Center, which serves the entire local, state and federal law enforcement community.  The Center is the gateway into the Knox County penal system, and processed over 26,000 arrestees during calendar year 2007.

The Sheriff’s Detention Facility utilizes a direct supervision concept where inmates live in one of seven pods, with a total capacity of 964 beds.  The facility employs workers divided into three shifts of Correctional Officers and support staff.  The facility houses minimum and medium security inmates, serving state and county sentences not exceeding seven years.

The Sheriff’s Office strives to reduce the rate of recidivism through a variety of programs which allow inmates to prepare themselves to again become productive citizens.  The Detention Facility is also designed to allow inmates proper exercise and access to medical services, with physicians and registered nurses seeing more than 20,000 patients in the past year between all the facilities.  It is also a goal of the facility to reduce inmate idleness and to minimize operational costs through inmate industry programs.

The Detention Facility was awarded a prestigious accreditation from the American Correctional Association in August 1996.  A team of three experts spent several days inspecting the facility, checking more than five hundred items and areas.  When the inspection was completed, the ACA gave the department its highest marks ever for a correctional facility anywhere in the country.  The facility received 100% compliance rating on mandatory standards, and a 98.7% rating on non-mandatory.  The non-mandatory items were soon upgraded to a 100% rating.  The leader of the ACA Team said, “This is the most impressive facility I have ever inspected.”