Day room in the McHenry County Jail. There's no internet way to find out who is incarcerated.

A couple of weeks ago I praised the McHenry County Sheriff’s Department for enabling people like me to copy press releases from that page on the Sheriff’s Department web site for the first time.

I wish the Sheriff’s Department would put McHenry County Blog on its press release list, as the Crystal Lake Police Department has, but that’s in the Sheriff’s Department’s discretion and, while a potential lost to readers here, no big deal, except for what it says about the Department’s willingness to share public information.

Most readers of McHenry County Blog come to its front page to read the most recent articles.

A number of readers, however, are looking for something that happened in the past, however.

I have found it is not unusual to have two percent of the hits on an article entitled,

“Finding Someone in County Jail“

My guess is that people are trying to find out if a friend or relative is in the McHenry County Jail.

Alas, the article, written a year and a half ago, has no link to a resource that would provide that information.

It does show such links for virtually all big counties in Illinois. Take a look at what I found in May of 2010:

Major Illinois counties with search engines for those incarcerated in their jails.

I speculated that new Undersheriff Andy Zinke had taken the step to make it possible to copy press releases.

Now I wonder if he might see if he could get some software from another big Illinois county so people trying to find folks in jail might do so without a phone call.