The Detention Center
Not found
- Operated byRiley County Police Department (a consolidated agency under K.S.A. 19-4401 et seq., not the Sheriff's Office — Riley County has no sheriff)
- Who runs itBrian Peete — Riley County Police Director
- Answers tothe seven-member Riley County Law Enforcement Agency Board
- Why this is differentThe elected county sheriff does not run this jail.
- Jail capacity (per Kansas Sheriffs' Association directory)147 beds total — 129 male, 18 female
- Out-of-county inmatesNone, per the Kansas Sheriffs' Association profile
- Annual budget$15,955,400, per the Kansas Sheriffs' Association profile
- What was triedThe county's own domain (rileycountyks.gov) was opened extensively and successfully this session: the Law Enforcement Agency Board page, the County Commissioners directory, the Judicial Nominating Commission page, and full link listings of several pages. The police department's own domain (rileycountypolice.org), which hosts the jail-specific pages such as /342/Riley-County-Jail, its FAQ pages, and its Corrections Division staff directory, returned a robots.txt fetch failure on every attempt this session except one bare homepage fetch that returned only a mailing address and phone number. A link to https://www.rileycountypolice.org/law-board found in a fetched page's text was refused by the fetch tool as out of provenance when tried directly. Nothing beyond the Kansas Sheriffs' Association profile was established on the jail's own name, year built, cost, or expansions.
Source: Kansas Sheriffs' Association — county profile (Riley County) · checked 2026-09-17
Transparency rating
0/10Closed- ✗The jail is named — not published
- ✗Who is in custody — not published
- ✗Beds and daily population — not published
- ✗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 builtNot found
- Original costNot found
- Paid for byNot found
- Beds147 (129 male, 18 female) — per Kansas Sheriffs' Association directory; not confirmed on the county's own site
Since then
- Not found
The Sheriff
Sheriff None
- No sheriffRiley County elects no sheriff. The office was abolished in 1974 under the consolidated law enforcement act; the exception is written into K.S.A. 19-801a itself, which begins "Except in those counties operating under the provisions of any consolidated law enforcement act..." The Riley County Police Department, run by an appointed Director under a seven-member Law Enforcement Agency Board, operates the jail.
- No sheriffRiley County has no elected sheriff. The Riley County Sheriff's Office, along with the Manhattan Police Department and the Ogden Police Department, was abolished in 1974 under the Kansas consolidated law enforcement act (K.S.A. 19-4401 et seq.), and K.S.A. 19-801a itself carves this out: a sheriff shall be elected in each county "[e]xcept in those counties operating under the provisions of any consolidated law enforcement act." The Riley County Police Department, run by an appointed Director under a seven-member Law Enforcement Agency Board, operates the county jail instead.
- Confirmed on the county's own siterileycountyks.gov's own Law Enforcement Agency Board page describes the board's composition and authority over the police department (which includes the jail), consistent with the Kansas Sheriffs' Association's listing of this office under "Riley County Police Director" rather than Sheriff
- Title on the Kansas Sheriffs' Association page"Riley County Police Director" — the association's own directory lists Riley County this way rather than with a sheriff
- Office address1001 South Seth Childs Rd, Manhattan, KS 66502
- Office phone(785) 537-2112; fax 785-565-6559
- Department websitewww.rileycountypolice.org — reached only at its homepage this session (contact information only); every specific subpage tried returned a fetch error
- Staffing (per Kansas Sheriffs' Association directory)105 sworn staff, 43 support staff, 46 jail staff
- 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 (Riley County) · 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). This county sits in the 21st Judicial District together with Clay County (per Wikipedia's Kansas District Courts article). Riley County's own site confirms the 21st Judicial District uses the nonpartisan nominating-commission method: a District Judicial Nominating Commission of four lawyer members (elected by district attorneys) and non-lawyer members (two appointed by each of Riley and Clay counties' commissioners), chaired by Kansas Supreme Court Justice Caleb Stegall, interviews candidates on a vacancy and submits two or three names to the Governor, who appoints the district judge; the commission itself selects district magistrate judges directly. No sitting district judges were named on the page. The 21st 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.
21st 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 →
- Where the jail money is decidedAgendas and minutes →
Notes on the record
- Genuinely examined this session, and scored "no" rather than left empty because the examination was real and thorough, not absent: rileycountyks.gov (the county government's own domain) was opened across many pages — governance, commissioners, and the Law Enforcement Agency Board that oversees the jail — and none of the ten items appeared there. The jail's operational pages live on a separate domain, rileycountypolice.org (the Riley County Police Department's own site), which returned robots.txt fetch failures on every specific page attempted this session — /342/Riley-County-Jail, /faq.aspx?TID=25, /m/faq?cat=25, and /Directory.aspx?did=14 — so none of the ten items could be confirmed there either, positively or negatively, beyond a single homepage fetch that carried only a mailing address.
- The jail administrator's name (Brian Peete) and the jail's capacity and budget figures come from the Kansas Sheriffs' Association's own per-county profile page — a private association, not the county publishing on its own site — and are recorded honestly as such. The Law Enforcement Agency Board's structure and membership, and the 21st Judicial District's nominating-commission method, ARE confirmed on Riley County's own site (rileycountyks.gov) and are recorded as such above.
- State-layer finding applies: K.S.A. 75-5228, the 1973 Kansas jail inspection statute, was repealed effective April 11, 1996 (its companion 75-5227 followed July 1, 1996) and nothing replaced it — no Kansas agency has statutory authority to inspect this or any county jail. The Kansas Department of Corrections runs no county-jail program.
- Riley County's governing body is a three-member Board of County Commissioners — John Ford (District 1, Vice-Chair, R), Greg McKinley (District 2, R), and Kathryn Focke (District 3, Chairwoman, D) as of this session, per the county's own site — separate from the Law Enforcement Agency Board that oversees the police department and jail. K.S.A. 19-201 requires each Kansas county to have three, five, or seven commissioner districts; Riley uses three.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Riley 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