The Detention Center
Douglas County Correctional Facility
- Operated byDouglas County Sheriff's Office
- Address3601 E 25th Street, Lawrence, KS 66046-5616, per the Sheriff's Office's own inmate-reports page
- Booking recapThe Sheriff's Office publishes a rolling 14-day booking recap, updated every 4 hours (currently offline per a site notice), at https://dgso.org/index.php/dgso-booking-recap-warp-edition/
- In-custody rosterThe Sheriff's Office publishes a report of everyone currently in Douglas County custody at https://dgso.org/index.php/dgso-in-custody-warp-edition/
- Bond amountsA separate report of individuals with outstanding bonds is published at https://dgso.org/index.php/dgso-bond-amounts-warp-edition/
- FeesVideo visitation from home is $3.00 for a 30-minute visit; phone calls are handled through Inmate Calling Solutions (prepaid/collect); commissary deposits are handled through jailatm.com — all per the Sheriff's Office's own inmate-services page.
- Vendor contracts (not other-agency prisoner contracts)Medical care is contracted to TurnKey Health; telephone service to Inmate Calling Solutions; visitation/commissary systems to ICSolutions — per the Sheriff's Office's own inmate-services page. No contract to hold other agencies' prisoners, with rates, was found published.
- Capacity (KSA figure, not the county's own site)186 beds, per the Kansas Sheriffs' Association profile — not confirmed as published on the county's or Sheriff's Office's own site.
- What was trieddgso.org (the Sheriff's Office's own domain) and douglascountyks.org were both opened; douglascountyks.org's pages now redirect to the county's new domain, dgcoks.gov, which was reachable for the one page reached via that redirect but refused further direct fetches this session (PROVENANCE_REQUIRED) since the migration meant most old paths were not themselves returned by search. No published capacity figure, budget line, death-in-custody disclosure, PREA audit result, or independent inspection result was found on any page actually opened.
Source: Douglas County Sheriff's Office — Inmate Reports · checked 2026-09-17
Transparency rating
4/10Partial- ✓The jail is named
- ✓Who is in custody
- ✗Beds and daily population — not published
- ✗What it costs taxpayers — not published
- ✗Deaths in custody — not published
- ✗PREA audits — not published
- ✗Independent inspection — not published
- ✗Who else it holds, and for how much — not published
- ✓How to post bond
- ✓Phone, video and commissary rates
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 Jay Armbrister
- Runs the jailYes — K.S.A. 19-811 gives the sheriff charge and custody of the county jail and its prisoners; K.S.A. 19-1903 makes the sheriff responsible for the manner in which it is kept.
- How the office is filledElected countywide for a four-year term (K.S.A. 19-801a). This is Douglas County, KANSAS (Lawrence, home of the University of Kansas) — a separate jurisdiction from the much larger Douglas County, Nebraska.
- Office / jail addressNew Public Safety Building, 3605 E. 25th St., Lawrence, KS 66046; the jail itself is listed at 3601 E 25th Street, Lawrence, KS 66046-5616.
- PhoneMain (785) 841-0007; Administration (785) 832-5202; Jail Administration (785) 830-1000; Fax 785-841-5168
- Internal jail administration (KSA figure, not the county's own site)The Kansas Sheriffs' Association profile lists a Jail Administrator, Kenneth Massey, and a bed capacity of 186 — an internal title inside the Sheriff's Office, not an appointed director who replaces the sheriff as statutory jailer.
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Douglas County Sheriff's Office — DGSO.org · checked 2026-09-17
The Judges
Kansas decides judicial selection district by district under Kan. Const. Art. 3 §6 and K.S.A. 20-2901. In most rural Kansas counties the district magistrate judge sets bail (K.S.A. 20-302b); Douglas County, with a full District Court docket, was not confirmed either way this session. Douglas County's own court-docket link (https://apps.douglascountyks.org/CourtHearings) was found on the Sheriff's Office site but not opened, so no judges are named. The 7th Judicial District has adopted the nonpartisan method: a local nominating commission of lawyers and non-lawyers sends the Governor a list of names, the Governor appoints, and the judge then faces retention votes. Kansas districts choose this by ballot under K.S.A. 20-2901; partisan election is the default they opted out of.
District Court — 7th Judicial District
- Not found
- The county's bond schedule
- Share of the jail population held pretrial
- Median time from booking to first appearance
Source: the state judiciary · checked 2026-09-17
The County Commissioners
They pay for the jail. The sheriff runs it.
- What they controlThe detention budget, the building itself, and the agreements that let other agencies rent its beds.
- What they don'tDay-to-day operations. The sheriff is separately elected and answers to voters, not to the board.
- The boardBoard of County Commissioners
Notes on the record
- Douglas County, Kansas (Lawrence) was verified as distinct from Douglas County, Nebraska on every page opened; all sources above are on dgso.org, the Douglas County KS Sheriff's Office's own domain.
- The Sheriff's Office publishes a jail name, a live in-custody roster (though a site notice said updates were offline at the time of this research), bond/bonding-company guidance, and a fee schedule for video visitation, phone, and commissary — a substantially more transparent baseline than most counties in this group.
- No published capacity figure, budget line, death-in-custody disclosure, PREA audit result, independent inspection result, or other-agency prisoner contract was found on any page actually opened this session; the site's ongoing migration to dgcoks.gov limited how far this could be checked.
- State-layer finding applies: K.S.A. 75-5228, the 1973 Kansas jail inspection statute, was repealed effective 11 April 1996 (its companion 75-5227 followed 1 July 1996), and nothing replaced it.
- Douglas County is governed by a Board of County Commissioners. The county's website migrated from douglascountyks.org to dgcoks.gov during this research, and pages for the commission and its budget could not be reached this session (see jail notes), so the current roster, meeting schedule, and minutes URLs were not confirmed.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Douglas 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 commissioners who pay for it.
Names verified 2026-09-17 · dollars and outcomes still being gathered