The Detention Center
Not found
- Operated byHaskell County Sheriff's Office (elected sheriff is statutory jailer, K.S.A. 19-811)
- Jail staff / bed capacityNot published — the Kansas Sheriffs' Association profile for Haskell County lists only sheriff contact information (address, phone, fax) and does not show sworn/support/jail staff counts or bed capacity, unlike neighboring counties' profiles
- Whether Haskell operates its own jailNot established from sources reviewed. The absence of staff/bed fields on the association profile is consistent with either an unreported small jail or a county that contracts out under K.S.A. 19-1929, but neither could be confirmed
- What was triedhttps://www.haskellcounty.org/ (403 error), https://www.haskellcounty.org/about/pages/history (no jail/seat info), https://www.haskellcounty.org/sheriff and https://www.haskellcounty.org/county-commission (blocked — not returned by search, so not fetchable under the provenance rule)
Source: Kansas Sheriffs' Association — Haskell County profile · 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 Troy Briggs
- TitleHaskell County Sheriff
- Office addressP.O. Box 853, Sublette, KS 67877
- Phone(620) 675-2289
- Runs the jailYes, as statutory jailer under K.S.A. 19-811; Haskell is not the Riley County exception
- How the office is filledElected countywide for a four-year term under K.S.A. 19-801a
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Kansas Sheriffs' Association — Haskell County profile · checked 2026-09-17
The Judges
Kansas Constitution Art. 3 §6 makes partisan election of district judges the default; a judicial district may instead adopt nonpartisan (merit) selection under K.S.A. 20-2901. In most rural Kansas counties, including presumptively Haskell, bail at first appearance is set by a district magistrate judge under K.S.A. 20-302b. Haskell County's judicial district number and selection method were not established from sources reviewed in this pass. Which method this county's judicial district uses was not established for this record.
District Court (judicial district not independently confirmed) — Clerk of the District Court
- 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
- Haskell County's own website (haskellcounty.org) returned a 403 error when fetched directly at its homepage, and no sheriff, jail, or commissioners subpage was returned by WebSearch queries restricted to that domain, so none of the ten transparency checks could be verified against the county's own site. The Kansas Sheriffs' Association profile (a private association, not the county) was used only for the sheriff's name and contact information, never to satisfy a check.
- State inspection: repealed. K.S.A. 75-5228, Kansas's 1973 adult jail inspection statute, was repealed effective April 11, 1996 (companion K.S.A. 75-5227 repealed effective July 1, 1996); nothing replaced it, and the Kansas Department of Corrections runs no county-jail inspection program.
- Board of County Commissioners, per the general Kansas structure under K.S.A. 19-201 (three, five or seven commissioner districts). Specific commissioner names, board page and minutes URL were not reachable — the county's own site (haskellcounty.org) returned a 403 error on repeated fetch attempts.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Haskell 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