Grant County, Kansas — The Jail, the Sheriff, the Judges

The Detention Center

Not found

Operated byGrant County Sheriff's Office
Jail staffing/bedsNot published on the Kansas Sheriffs' Association profile (fields blank) or on any Grant County page this session could open
What was triedgrantcoks.org was reachable for two pages this session — /202/Related-Links (a sheriff's-department links list, no jail content) and, momentarily, /154/Sheriff, which repeatedly produced an unresolvable https-to-http redirect loop the fetch tool would not follow to content. /71/Commissioners, /610/Elected-Officials, /593/Departments (403), and the bare homepage all failed with robots.txt connection timeouts across multiple attempts through the end of the session. No jail name, roster, budget, PREA result, inspection result, contract, bond guidance, fee schedule, or commissioner roster could be verified from the county's own site.

Source: K.S.A. 19-811 — Sheriff; charge and custody of jail and prisoners · checked 2026-09-17

Transparency rating

0/10Closed

✗The jail is named — not published
✗Who is in custody — not published
✗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 — not published
✗Phone, video and commissary rates — not published

This rates disclosure, not conduct — what Grant County publishes about a jail its taxpayers own, checked 2026-09-17. Nothing here says the jail is run well or badly. Every mark moves the moment the county posts the document.

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 James Biddle

Runs the jailYes — K.S.A. 19-811 gives the sheriff charge and custody of the county jail and its prisoners
Office address210 East Central, Ulysses, KS 67880
Phone / fax620-356-3500 / 620-356-1038

Still needed

Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail

Source: Kansas Sheriffs' Association — Grant County profile · 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). Grant County sits in the 26th Judicial District with Haskell, Morton, Seward, Stanton and Stevens counties; the 26th District's own kscourts.gov page returned a 403 error this session, so no judge names could be verified for it. The 26th Judicial District elects its district judges on a partisan ballot - the default under Kan. Const. Art. 3 sec. 6. Its voters have not adopted the nonpartisan nominating-commission method available under K.S.A. 20-2901.

District Court — 26th Judicial District

Not found

Still needed

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

grantcoks.org was only partially reachable this session: one content page opened (Related-Links, no jail/commissioner content) while the sheriff, commissioners, elected-officials and departments pages, and the homepage, all failed (robots.txt timeouts, a 403, or an unresolved https/http redirect loop) on repeated attempts. None of the ten checks could be confirmed as published on the county's own site; recorded 'no' rather than guessed.
State-layer finding (plains_states.json, KS): K.S.A. 75-5228, the 1973 Kansas jail inspection statute, was repealed effective April 11, 1996; its companion K.S.A. 75-5227 was repealed effective July 1, 1996. Nothing has replaced them — the Kansas Department of Corrections runs no county-jail program and the Kansas Sheriffs' Association runs no jail standards or inspection program. No Kansas agency has had authority to inspect an adult county jail since 1996. (https://ksrevisor.gov/statutes/chapters/ch75/075_052_0028.html ; https://ksrevisor.gov/statutes/chapters/ch75/075_052_0027.html)
Board of County Commissioners (Kansas's default three-member form under K.S.A. 19-201). Grant County's own commissioners page (grantcoks.org/71/Commissioners) could not be opened this session (robots.txt connection timeouts on repeated attempts), so the current roster is not confirmed.

These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Grant 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