The Detention Center
Osborne (County) Jail
- Operated byOsborne County Sheriff's Office
- Year built and capacity (county's own site — verified against literal page text)"The Osborne jail was built in 1955 with a holding capacity of 12."
- Address128 South 5th Street, PO Box 235, Osborne, KS 67473
- Budget / PREA / inspections / contracts / roster / fees / bond infoNot published on the county's own Sheriff page reviewed this session
- What was triedOpened: https://www.osbornecounty.org/departments/sheriff/index.html and https://www.osbornecounty.org/departments/county_commissioners/ . No separate jail or corrections page was found in this session's search results for the county's domain.
Source: Osborne County government website — Sheriff 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
The Building
You paid for it. Here is what the record says it cost.
- Year built1955 (per county's own Sheriff page: "The Osborne jail was built in 1955")
- Original costNot found
- Paid for byNot found
- Beds12 (per county's own Sheriff page: "holding capacity of 12")
Since then
- Not found
The Sheriff
Sheriff Scottie Becker
- Title (county's own site)"Scottie Becker, Sheriff"
- Runs the jailThe elected sheriff is the statutory jailer under K.S.A. 19-811 and K.S.A. 19-1903.
- Office address (county's own site — verified against literal page text)"128 South 5th Street, PO Box 235, Osborne, KS 67473"; phone "785-346-2001"; fax "785-346-2345"
- Staffing (county's own site)"The Osborne County Sheriff employs 7 full time officers."
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Osborne County government website — Sheriff page · 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). Osborne County sits in the 17th Judicial District together with Decatur, Graham, Norton, Phillips and Smith counties (per Wikipedia's Kansas District Courts article); no county-site page for the District Court was located this session. The 17th 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.
17th Judicial District — 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
- The county's own site (osbornecounty.org) was opened this session and confirmed the jail's 1955 build year and 12-bed capacity, verified against the literal page text rather than a summary. Budget, roster, PREA, inspections, contracts, bond-posting guidance and fee schedules were not found on the pages reviewed.
- 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.
- First District: Craig Pottberg (term 2021–2025). Second District: Troy Schaefer (term 2023–2027). Third District: Rex Johnston (term 2026–2029). The board meets in the Commissioner's room (west of the Clerk's office) on Mondays starting 9:00 a.m. until business concludes, with a lunch break 12–1 p.m. Agenda-placement requests: 785-346-2431. No direct agenda/minutes links were found on the page.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Osborne 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