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 byNot found
- What was triedhttps://www.mtcoks.com/ (opened — homepage news: election results, board leadership changes, job postings; no jail information); https://www.mtcoks.com/266/Elected-Officials (opened — names Thad Earls as Sheriff, no jail specifics); https://www.mtcoks.com/163/Departments (opened — references a Public Safety/Sheriff link but gives no jail name, capacity, or budget); https://mtcoks.com/233/Sheriff and https://www.mtcoks.com/233/Sheriff (both attempts failed — WebFetch could not retrieve robots.txt for this specific page, so it was never opened)
- RETRYhttps://mtcoks.com/233, https://www.mtcoks.com/233/Sheriff and https://mtcoks.com/233/Sheriff were each fetched again this session; all failed with a robots.txt fetch error (ConnectTimeout or parse failure), the same failure mode as the first pass. The homepage (www.mtcoks.com/) and County Commission page (mtcoks.com/237/County-Commission) both opened this time, but neither carries jail content, and the Commission page names no members.
Source: Morton County, KS — Departments · 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 Thad Earls
- TitleMorton County Sheriff
- Source conflictThe Kansas Sheriffs' Association profile (accessed this session) lists 'Tom Thrall' as sheriff, but Morton County's own Elected Officials page names Thad Earls as the current Sheriff. This record treats the county's own site as controlling and records Thad Earls, while preserving the KSA name here for the record.
- Statutory jail dutyK.S.A. 19-811 makes the elected sheriff the charge and custody officer of the county jail and all prisoners in it
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Morton County, KS — Elected Officials · 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 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.
- 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
- Not scored. The county's own Sheriff page (mtcoks.com/233/Sheriff), which most likely carries jail-specific information, could not be opened in this session despite repeated attempts — WebFetch failed to retrieve that page's robots.txt each time. The homepage, Elected Officials, and Departments pages were opened and examined, but they carry no jail transparency information, so the ten checks are left unscored rather than marked 'no' for a page that was never actually reached.
- K.S.A. 75-5228, the 1973 jail inspection statute, was repealed effective 11 April 1996; the companion statute, K.S.A. 75-5227, was repealed effective 1 July 1996. Nothing replaced them, and the Kansas Department of Corrections runs no county-jail inspection program.
- RETRY (this session): the Sheriff page (mtcoks.com/233 and /233/Sheriff, both with and without www) still fails every attempt with a robots.txt fetch error — three more tries, same result as the first pass. The homepage and County Commission page did open this time, confirming the domain itself is reachable, but neither holds jail-transparency content. audit.checks remains empty because the one page most likely to carry it (Sheriff) has never actually loaded.
- Board of County Commissioners exists (mtcoks.com/237/County-Commission opened this session and describes the board's statutory legislative/administrative powers — budget approval, tax levying, road maintenance — under Kansas law), but the page names no current commissioners and gives no minutes link. The homepage references 'county board leadership changes' but no roster was retrieved.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Morton 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