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 byPawnee County Sheriff's Office
- Jail capacityNot published on the Kansas Sheriffs' Association profile page for this county
- What was triedThe county's own site (pawneecountykansas.com) has a "Jail Information" page per search results, but every fetch attempt this session failed: https://www.pawneecountykansas.com/242/Jail-Information (robots.txt fetch failure, retried twice), https://www.pawneecountykansas.com/175/Elected-Officials (robots.txt fetch failure), https://www.pawneecountykansas.com/149/Departments (robots.txt fetch failure), https://www.pawneecountykansas.com/185/Sheriff (redirect loop between http/https), https://www.pawneecountykansas.com/ (403 client error). None of the county's own pages were successfully opened.
- Retry session (2026-09-17)A fresh WebSearch (allowed_domains: pawneecountykansas.com) confirmed the same URLs are indexed (Sheriff, Jail-Information, Departments, Directory.aspx?DID=20, Quick-Links, AgendaCenter minutes). WebFetch was retried on /185/Sheriff (302 redirect loop, http<->https, never resolved), /242/Jail-Information (robots.txt fetch ConnectTimeout), /149/Departments (robots.txt fetch ConnectTimeout), and /Directory.aspx?DID=20 (robots.txt fetch ConnectTimeout). Still zero pages opened this session either. No curl/wget workaround was used.
Source: Kansas Sheriffs' Association — 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 Larry Atteberry
- Title (KSA profile)Pawnee 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)116 West Eighth, Larned, KS 67550; phone 620-285-2211, fax 620-285-7073
- StaffingNot published on the Kansas Sheriffs' Association profile page for this county
- 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). Pawnee County sits in the 24th Judicial District together with Edwards, Hodgeman, Lane, Ness and Rush counties (per Wikipedia's Kansas District Courts article). The 24th 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.
24th 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
- Not scored. The county's own site (pawneecountykansas.com) could not be opened this session despite five separate fetch attempts across different pages (robots.txt fetch failures, a redirect loop, and a 403 on the home page). This is a gap in the research, not a finding about the county.
- Retry pass (2026-09-17): tried again via a fresh domain-scoped WebSearch and four more WebFetch attempts (Sheriff page — persistent 302 redirect loop; Jail-Information, Departments, and the Sheriff staff directory — all robots.txt ConnectTimeout). Still unreachable this session; audit.checks remains {} rather than ten invented "no" entries.
- 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 name and office contact come from the Kansas Sheriffs' Association's own per-county profile page, a private association's directory, not the county publishing on its own site, and are recorded honestly as such.
- Not found — the county's own commissioners/agenda pages could not be opened this session (see jail facts, "What was tried"), despite the site's own Agenda Center and commissioners' minutes appearing in search results.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Pawnee 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