Beaufort County spokesperson Hannah Nichols said the detention center’s inmate inquiry system was experiencing technical difficulties while the county upgraded its Spillman Flex system, a records management software designed to share information across police agencies, dispatch units and jail staff. The data from that program is fed into the mug shots website for near-hourly updates on inmates being booked and released from the jail.
The most recent updates to the jail roster were made the morning of June 17. Since then, no new arrests had appeared on the website.
Nichols did not have an estimate for when the mug shot service would resume its regular updates, saying the timeline was unpredictable because Spillman is a third-party company. She added that none of the county’s emergency response systems or dispatch services were affected by the software transition.
A limited selection of recent Beaufort County mug shots can still be accessed via Busted Newspaper, one of many third-party websites that shares publicly accessible arrest data from jails throughout the country and asks suspects to pay to have their information removed.
The jail rosters website suffered another two-week outage as recently as 2021. That issue was also explained as a “glitch caused by a software update.”
Part of Beaufort County’s north-end government campus off Boundary Street, the detention center has a maximum capacity of 255 and typically houses between 150 and 225 pretrial inmates at any given time. Jail staff usually handle between 15 to 20 new bookings per day, primarily from sheriff’s office cases but also including arrests from other agencies like the South Carolina Highway Patrol and municipal police departments in Bluffton, Beaufort and Port Royal.
For more than a decade, the mug shots site has given the public access to a wealth of information on inmates at the Beaufort County Detention Center, including their date of birth, home address, bond information and a list of criminal charges. Users have the option to toggle between more recent arrests or view the jail’s total current inmate population.
For many in the Hilton Head Island area, checking the county’s jail rosters has become a daily routine, a way to stay informed on high-profile arrests. Some jokingly call the page their “digital yearbook.”
Others see the mugshot log as an essential tool for police transparency and public safety, useful for both everyday residents and those tangibly affected by local crime. If the victim of an alleged offense clicks a link next to an inmate’s mugshot, for instance, they can sign up to receive notifications when that inmate is released or changes status within the jail system.
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