Osage County, Kansas — The Jail, the Sheriff, the Judges

The Detention Center

Osage County Law Enforcement Center (new facility under construction as of the page reviewed); previously described on the county's site as the Osage County jail

Operated byOsage County Sheriff's Office
New facility"Osage County Law Enforcement Center": groundbreaking April 17, 2023; designed for a 120-bed corrections facility plus 16 mental health beds, with 24 additional beds ready for future installation; also houses the Sheriff's Office, communications center, mental health services and ambulance bay.
Funding for new facilityA half-cent sales tax increase over a 4-year period, set to sunset automatically, approved by Osage County voters in February 2022; the facility was designed to be revenue-generating through housing inmates.
Design changeThe design shifted from a two-story to a single-story layout by late 2022 to manage rising material costs while keeping all originally proposed elements.
Existing/prior jail (county's Corrections page)"The jail can house 32 inmates." Staffing described as one jail sergeant, 11 full-time jailers, one part-time jailer, and a cook. "All bonds will be set within 48 hours." Inmate visitation Sundays 1–4pm, 20 minutes per visit. Kansas VINE victim notification: 866-574-8463.
Current operational statusNot established from the pages reachable this session whether the new Law Enforcement Center has opened and replaced the 32-inmate jail described on the Corrections page, or whether that page simply has not been updated since construction began.
What was triedOpened: https://www.osageco.org/333/New-Law-Enforcement-Center and https://www.osageco.org/235/Corrections . Repeatedly blocked (robots.txt fetch failures / 403) this session: https://www.osageco.org/233/Sheriff , https://www.osageco.org/243/Sheriff-Undersheriff , https://www.osageco.org/31/Departments , https://www.osageco.org/ (home page).

Source: Osage County government website — New Law Enforcement Center page · checked 2026-09-17

Transparency rating

2/10Closed

✓The jail is named
✗Who is in custody — not published
✓Beds and daily population
✗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

This rates disclosure, not conduct — what Osage County publishes about a jail its taxpayers own, checked 2026-09-17. Nothing here says the jail is run well or badly. Every mark moves the moment the county posts the document.

The Building

You paid for it. Here is what the record says it cost.

Year builtExisting jail: Not found. New Law Enforcement Center: groundbreaking April 17, 2023 (completion date not stated on the page reviewed)
Original costNot found
Paid for byNew Law Enforcement Center funded by a voter-approved half-cent sales tax increase over 4 years, approved February 2022, designed to sunset automatically — https://www.osageco.org/333/New-Law-Enforcement-Center
BedsExisting jail: 32 (per Corrections page). New Law Enforcement Center (under construction as of the page reviewed): 120 corrections beds + 16 mental health beds + 24 additional expansion-ready beds

Since then

New Law Enforcement Center under construction as of the page reviewed (groundbreaking April 17, 2023); design changed from two-story to single-story by late 2022 to manage rising material costs while retaining all planned elements

The Sheriff

Sheriff Chris Wells

Title (KSA profile)Osage County Sheriff
Runs the jailThe elected sheriff is the statutory jailer under K.S.A. 19-811 and K.S.A. 19-1903.
Office contact (KSA profile)131 West 14th, Lyndon, KS 66451; phone 785-828-3121, fax 785-828-3662
Jail administrator / undersheriffNot found — the county's own Sheriff and Sheriff/Undersheriff pages could not be opened this session (see jail facts, "What was tried")

Still needed

Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail

Source: Kansas Sheriffs' Association — 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). Osage County sits in the 4th Judicial District together with Anderson, Coffey and Franklin counties (per Wikipedia's Kansas District Courts article); no county-site page for the District Court was located this session. The 4th 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.

4th Judicial District — District Court

Not found

Still needed

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

The county's own site named and gave capacity figures for both the existing 32-inmate jail and the new Osage County Law Enforcement Center, and described its sales-tax funding, but the site's Sheriff, Sheriff/Undersheriff, Departments and home pages could not be opened this session (repeated robots.txt fetch failures / a 403 on the home page), so budget dollar figures, roster, deaths, PREA, inspections, contracts, bond-posting guidance and fee schedules could not be checked further.
State-layer finding applies: K.S.A. 75-5228, the 1973 Kansas jail inspection statute, was repealed effective 11 April 1996, and its companion K.S.A. 75-5227 followed 1 July 1996; nothing replaced them. The Kansas Department of Corrections runs no county-jail inspection or standards program.
Sheriff's office contact figures also appear on the Kansas Sheriffs' Association's own per-county profile page (a private association's directory), recorded honestly as such alongside the county's own figures.
Not found — no Board of County Commissioners page for Osage County appeared among the pages reachable this session; the county's Sheriff, Sheriff/Undersheriff, and Departments index pages were all blocked by repeated robots.txt fetch failures.

These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Osage 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