Every hold in Skyrim has its laws, and where there are laws there are guards, and where there are guards there is consequence. Bounties accumulate per hold. They follow you across the road. They are paid, served, or escaped, but they do not forget themselves.
How it works
Every hold has its own guard agency, its own facilities and its own bounty ledger. A bounty is owed to the hold where the crime happened, and it does not become another Jarl's business because you crossed a border. It also does not fade on its own.
Guard authority is faction authority. An agency is a faction, its officers hold ranks in it, and its jails and gatehouses are properties owned by the agency, so the keys to them are forged and taken back on the one property surface (see Keys, Locks, and Locksmithing).
Custody is a case rather than a moment. A guard detains a suspect with a stated reason, which binds the prisoner and writes the first watch note. From there the case is processed, the prisoner is jailed for a set number of minutes or released, and the whole case can be read back afterwards. The reason a guard gives is shown to the person they take, so a wrongful arrest is a matter of record rather than a matter of opinion.
A guard with authority may also search a person rather than ask permission first (see Trade, Pay, and Frisk), and carries the bind and blindfold tools under the same authority (see Bound & Blindfold).
Staff seed the hold guard agencies and appoint their first leaders. After that an agency runs itself through its own ranks.
Commands (/help guard bounty)
Anyone can read what they owe.
/bounty shows your per-hold bounty totals.
Custody and enforcement (/help guard custody)
These are for appointed guards.
/guard detain <target> <reason> begins custody, binds the prisoner, and writes the first watch note./guard process <case-id> [reason] processes a detained character./guard jail <case-id> <minutes> [reason] jails a prisoner./guard release <case-id> [reason] releases a prisoner./guard prisoner <custody-case-id> inspects a custody case./guard bounty add <target> <amount> <reason> adds a bounty from the active agency./guard bounty list [active|all] [limit] lists the bounty entries for the active agency./guard facility list [hold-id] lists facility ids, for guard leaders./jarldom bounty set <name or #id> <hold-id> <amount> sets a hold bounty from the seat.
Facility keys are no longer their own command tree. A guard facility is a property owned by a guard faction, so its keys live on /help property.
