The Detention Center
Not found
- Operated byHarper County Sheriff's Office
- Jail staffing/bedsNot published on the Kansas Sheriffs' Association profile (fields blank)
- What was triedharpercountyks.gov/sheriff was opened and names the sheriff and undersheriff but gives no jail facility detail. index.aspx?NID=25 (an alternate Sheriff's Office link surfaced by search) returned a 400 error. No dedicated detention/jail page was found on the county's own site this session.
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
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 Tracy Chance
- Runs the jailYes — K.S.A. 19-811 gives the sheriff charge and custody of the county jail and its prisoners
- Office address115 E. Steadman, Anthony, KS 67003 (rendered on the county's own sheriff page as "115 . Steadman", an apparent typo in the source, not corrected here)
- Phone620-842-5135
- UndersheriffKenny Hodson Jr. (per harpercountyks.gov/sheriff)
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Kansas Sheriffs' Association — Harper 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). Harper County sits in the 30th Judicial District with Barber, Kingman, Pratt and Sumner counties; the 30th District's own kscourts.gov page could not be reached this session (no provenance for a direct URL, and the district-courts index page returned a 403), so no judge names could be verified for it. The 30th 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 — 30th 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 →
- Where the jail money is decidedAgendas and minutes →
Notes on the record
- harpercountyks.gov was opened successfully for the sheriff, commissioners and file-share pages, and named the sheriff, undersheriff and full commission — but none of the ten jail-specific checks were found published anywhere on the site this session; the file-share document center's contents could not be enumerated. 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, confirmed on the county's own site: District 1 Brian Waldschmidt, District 2 Melinda McCurley (Chairperson, 2026), District 3 Darrin Struble.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Harper 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