The Detention Center
Not found
- Operated byRush County Sheriff's Office
- What was triedRush County's own site was opened this session: the homepage (https://www.rushcounty.org/) and its contact page (https://www.rushcounty.org/contact.html) were fetched. Neither names a jail, a sheriff contact, or a county commission; the homepage points to a 'Courthouse Directory' whose content was not reachable. A second candidate domain, rushcountykansas.org, redirects to a near-empty directory listing (only a 'cgi-bin/' entry) and does not appear to be a maintained site. No jail name, capacity, budget, contracts, deaths, PREA, inspections, bond, or fee information was found on Rush County's own site this session.
Source: Kansas Sheriffs' Association — county profile (Rush 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
- BedsNot found
Since then
- Not found
The Sheriff
Sheriff Mark Knowles
- TitleRush County Sheriff
- Office contact715 Elm, LaCrosse, KS 67548; (785) 222-2578
- Runs the jailStatutory jailer under K.S.A. 19-811; the Kansas Sheriffs' Association profile for Rush County lists no staffing, capacity, or budget fields
- 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 (Rush 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). 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
- Rush County's own site (rushcounty.org) was opened and examined this session (homepage and contact page); it publishes no jail, sheriff, or detention information — a real finding, not an unexamined gap. A second candidate domain, rushcountykansas.org, redirects to a bare, near-empty directory listing.
- Beds, budget, and staffing for the jail remain unconfirmed; the Kansas Sheriffs' Association profile also lists no staffing, capacity, or budget fields for Rush County (a private association, not the county's own site, so it cannot satisfy any transparency check).
- State-layer finding: 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. The Kansas Department of Corrections runs no county-jail program.
- Not found — Rush County's own commissioners page was not opened this session. K.S.A. 19-201 requires each Kansas county to have three, five, or seven commissioner districts.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Rush 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