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 byKiowa County Sheriff's Office, per K.S.A. 19-811
- What was triedThe Kansas Sheriffs' Association profile for Kiowa County lists no jail capacity, staff or budget fields (unlike Kingman and Labette). The county's own site, kiowacountyks.org, was located via WebSearch (allowed_domains restricted to that domain), returning real links including a homepage, commissioner minutes, resolutions and a jobs page. The homepage produced a repeated https-to-http redirect loop that WebFetch could not resolve, and two subpages (commissioner-minutes, a 2022 resolution) failed with a robots.txt connection timeout. No page on kiowacountyks.org could actually be opened.
- RETRYkiowacountyks.org was searched again this session and returned the same real subpages as before (commissioner-minutes, agendas, resolutions, a Sheriff's Office employment PDF). Both the homepage (kiowacountyks.org/) and the commissioner-minutes page were fetched again and each hit the identical https-to-http-to-https redirect loop recorded on the first pass. The loop did not resolve on retry.
Source: Kansas Sheriffs' Association — Kiowa 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
- BedsNot found
Since then
- Not found
The Sheriff
Sheriff Kendal Lothman
- TitleKiowa County Sheriff
- Runs the jailYes, as statutory jailer under K.S.A. 19-811
- Office address200 East Wisconsin St., Greensburg, KS 67054
- Office phone620-723-2182
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Kansas Sheriffs' Association — Kiowa 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 16th 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.
Kansas 16th Judicial District — District Court (Clark, Comanche, Ford, Gray, Kiowa, Meade 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
- kiowacountyks.org is a real, WebSearch-confirmed domain, but every fetch attempt failed — a redirect loop on the homepage and connection timeouts on subpages. audit.checks is left empty because the site could not genuinely be examined, not because the county discloses nothing.
- RETRY (this session): re-fetched both kiowacountyks.org/ and kiowacountyks.org/commissioner-minutes/; both again produced an unresolvable redirect loop (302 to the http version, which itself redirects back). This does not look like a transient failure — the same loop reproduced on a second, independent attempt. audit.checks remains empty.
- Board of County Commissioners, per K.S.A. 19-201. A commissioner-minutes page exists at kiowacountyks.org/commissioner-minutes/ but could not be opened (connection timeout).
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Kiowa 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