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 byKingman County Sheriff's Office, per K.S.A. 19-811
- Address on record120 Spruce St., Kingman, KS 67068 (Sheriff's Office address)
- Capacity22 beds, per the Kansas Sheriffs' Association profile (not the county's own site; no male/female split given)
- Jail contact(620) 532-5133, option 1
- What was triedportal.kansas.gov lists Kingman County's own site as http://www.kingmancoks.com, but every attempt to fetch it (including the exact href confirmed on the portal page) was refused by WebFetch as outside the trusted provenance set. A Kingman-domain page found through WebSearch, http://kingmancoks.com/2155/News, returned an HTTP 403 error. No page on the county's own domain could be opened, so jail specifics beyond the Sheriffs' Association profile could not be confirmed.
- RETRYThe county's own site has actually moved to a different domain than previously recorded: kingmancoks.org (not kingmancoks.com, which is stale per portal.kansas.gov). The new domain's homepage opened successfully, showing only a News/Calendar module with no sheriff or jail content. Its Sheriff page (kingmancoks.org/2182/Sheriff) and a staff directory page (Directory.aspx?did=37) were each attempted twice and failed every time with a robots.txt fetch error, even though the homepage on the same domain loaded. No jail-specific content was reached.
Source: Kansas Sheriffs' Association — Kingman County profile · checked 2026-09-17
The Building
You paid for it. Here is what the record says it cost.
- Year builtNot found
- Original costNot found
- Paid for byNot found
- Beds22 (Kansas Sheriffs' Association profile; not the county's own site)
Since then
- Not found
The Sheriff
Sheriff Brent Wood
- TitleKingman County Sheriff
- Runs the jailYes, as statutory jailer under K.S.A. 19-811
- Office address120 Spruce St., Kingman, KS 67068
- Office phone(620) 532-5133
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Kansas Sheriffs' Association — Kingman 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). 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.
Kansas 30th Judicial District — District Court (Barber, Harper, Kingman, Pratt, Sumner counties)
- 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
- Kingman County's own website (kingmancoks.com, per portal.kansas.gov) could not be opened by WebFetch on any attempt — the tool's provenance filter refused it even after the exact URL was confirmed as a link on an already-fetched page, and the one Kingman-domain page surfaced through WebSearch returned HTTP 403. Per the assignment's absolute rule, these URLs are treated as closed rather than retried with another tool. audit.checks is left empty because the county's own site could not genuinely be examined — this is not a finding that the county discloses nothing.
- RETRY (this session): found that Kingman County's real current domain is kingmancoks.org, not kingmancoks.com as previously recorded — a WebSearch restricted to the .com domain returned zero results, while an unrestricted search surfaced the .org domain with real, indexed subpages (Sheriff, staff directory). The .org homepage opened cleanly but held no sheriff/jail content; the Sheriff page and staff directory both failed on repeated attempts with a robots.txt fetch error. audit.checks remains empty because no jail-transparency content was actually read this session, on either domain.
- Board of County Commissioners, per K.S.A. 19-201. Commissioner names could not be confirmed — the county's own website (kingmancoks.com) could not be opened. RETRY: the county's current domain (kingmancoks.org) was found and its homepage opened, but it surfaced no commissioner names or minutes links, and deeper pages on the same domain failed with robots.txt errors.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Kingman 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