The Detention Center
Not scored. The county's own website was not reachable in the session that produced this record, so its disclosures were never examined. This is a gap in the research, not a finding about the county.
- Operated byPrairie County Sheriff's Office
- Jail address200 W. Courthouse Sq., Des Arc, AR 72040 (location confirmed 18 September 2026)
- Custody rosterThe sheriff's office roster, hosted on the jail-software vendor Relativity Inc.'s myr2m.com, showed '54 total' inmates when read on 18 September 2026, including arrests by the Hazen Police Department and State Police Troop D
- What was triedprairiecountysheriff.org home page and /roster.php appeared in search but both fetches failed at robots.txt (host did not resolve) and were not retried. myr2m.com/PrairieCoRoster/ was opened. No Prairie County, Arkansas government domain was returned. Commercial lookup sites in the results (prairiejailroster.org, arkansasprisons.org, prairiecountyjailar.org, jailexchange.com, arkansassheriffsassociation.com, arkansasinmates.org) were not opened or cited.
- Arkansas Sheriffs' Association directoryHolds: Male & Female; capacity 64; jail phone (870) 256-4138; jail administrator Brook Cole. Checked 18 September 2026; an association directory, not a county source - https://arsheriffs.org/sheriffs/prairie-county-sheriff/
Source: Prairie County Sheriffs Office Jail Roster (hosted by Relativity Inc.) · checked 2026-09-18
The Building
You paid for it. Here is what the record says it cost.
- Year builtNot found
- Original costNot found
- Paid for byNot found
- BedsNot found
Since then
- Not found
The Sheriff
Sheriff Rick Parson
- Runs the jailA vendor-hosted roster headed 'Prairie County Sheriffs Office Jail Roster' shows the sheriff's office holding people in custody; the sheriff is not named on it
- How the office is filledElected county sheriff, four-year term (Ark. Const. art. 7, § 46; Amendment 95)
- Statutory basisA.C.A. § 12-41-502: the county sheriff shall have the custody, rule, and charge of the jail within the county and all prisoners committed in the county
- Two-seat countyPrairie is one of Arkansas's two-seat counties (Des Arc and DeValls Bluff). No page opened says which seat holds the jail.
- Source of the nameName from the Association of Arkansas Counties directory, not a county page; checked 18 September 2026
- Office phone (directory)(870) 256-4137
- Also checkedPrairie County Sheriffs Office Jail Roster (hosted by Relativity Inc.) — https://www.myr2m.com/PrairieCoRoster/ (did not print the sheriff's name)
- Arkansas Sheriffs' Association directoryLists Rick Parson ('Elected in 2023'); office 200 Court House Sq. #101, Des Arc, AR 72040, phone (870) 256-4137. Checked 18 September 2026; an association directory, not a county source - https://arsheriffs.org/sheriffs/prairie-county-sheriff/
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Association of Arkansas Counties — Prairie County page (statewide directory, checked 18 September 2026) · checked 2026-09-18
The Judges
Arkansas circuit judges are elected on a nonpartisan ballot to six-year terms; the governor fills a mid-term vacancy by appointment until the next general election. They are state judicial officers, not county officials. Under Ark. R. Crim. P. 8.1 an arrested person goes before a judicial officer without unnecessary delay; depending on the court, that may be a circuit judge or a magistrate. Arkansas's "county judge" is the county's chief executive, not a judicial officer, and does not set bail. No circuit number or judge was confirmed from a page that could be opened.
- The county's bond schedule
- Share of the jail population held pretrial
- Median time from booking to first appearance
Source: the state judiciary · checked 2026-09-18
The County Judge and Quorum Court
They pay for the jail. The sheriff runs it.
- County judgeLawrence Holloway — the county’s chief executive, not a judicial officer; named in the Association of Arkansas Counties directory, checked 2026-09-18
- What they controlThe county judge and quorum court fund and build the jail: the detention budget, the building itself, and any dedicated jail sales tax.
- What they don'tCustody of the jail. Under A.C.A. § 12-41-502 the elected sheriff has “the custody, rule, and charge” of the jail and its prisoners.
- The quorum courtNo quorum court page was found on the county's own site
Notes on the record
- Unexamined county for scoring purposes: the sheriff's own domain, prairiecountysheriff.org, refused both fetch attempts, and no county government domain was returned by search. audit.checks is left empty rather than scored as ten no entries.
- The only first-hand page read was the sheriff's office roster hosted by its jail-software vendor on myr2m.com. It is a live custody list attributed to the Prairie County Sheriffs Office (54 people in custody on 18 September 2026), but it is not on the county's or sheriff's own domain, so it is recorded as a fact and not scored.
- Seat: Prairie County's two seats, Des Arc and DeValls Bluff, come from the state research layer (CCCarto), not from a county page opened this session, so seat_source is blank. Which seat holds the jail was not established.
- Search results were dominated by commercial inmate-lookup farms; none is cited or counted.
- Arkansas law requires each county jail to be inspected at least annually by a governor-appointed district criminal detention facility review committee (A.C.A. § 12-26-107), against mandatory state minimum standards. The written report goes to the district's administrative judge and to the county judge; state law does not require it to be published, and no public state repository of the reports was located.
- A.C.A. § 12-12-315 requires anyone with knowledge of a death in jail custody to notify the county coroner, the prosecuting attorney and the sheriff; it is a notification duty to officials, not a public-reporting law, and no public Arkansas list or dataset of jail deaths was located.
- Two county seats. The Association of Arkansas Counties page for this county lists the Des Arc courthouse first, as the main seat, and the DeValls Bluff courthouse second (checked 18 September 2026).
- Arkansas form: an elected County Judge (chief executive) and a Quorum Court (legislative body). No Prairie County government page was returned by search or opened, so no names are recorded.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Prairie County and what it costs the people who live here. Nationally, almost 77% of the people who died in local jails in 2019 had not been convicted of anything, and suicide was the leading single cause of those deaths (Bureau of Justice Statistics, Mortality in Local Jails, 2000–2019).
How much is your sheriff — and your judge — costing you?
Your VOTE is POWERFUL.
The sheriff who runs this jail is elected. So are the justices of the peace on the quorum court who pay for it.
Names verified 2026-09-18 · dollars and outcomes still being gathered