Beauregard Parish, Louisiana — The Jail, the Sheriff, the Judges

The Detention Center

Beauregard Parish Jail

Operated byBeauregard Parish Sheriff's Office
Jail address412 Bolivar Bishop Dr., DeRidder, LA 70634
Beds161, housing pre-trial and a limited number of adjudicated offenders
WardenFreddie Doyle (Assistant Warden: Luke Gaspard) — staff of the sheriff's office
Population shownThe sheriff's roster was headed "Inmate Roster (159)" when read on 18 September 2026
Jail phone337-460-5520
PREAThe sheriff's PREA page states the facility completed the PREA audit process and obtained certification, and posts a 2022 annual PREA data report; no audit report is linked
What was triedSheriff's home, message, corrections, PREA and roster pages (read). No bond, fee, visitation or contract information found. No parish police jury page was returned by search or opened.

Source: Beauregard Parish Sheriff's Office — Corrections · checked 2026-09-18

Transparency rating

3/10Closed

✓The jail is named
✓Who is in custody
✓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 Beauregard Parish publishes about a jail its taxpayers own, checked 2026-09-18. Nothing here says the jail is run well or badly. Every mark moves the moment the parish posts the document.

The Building

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

Year built1984 (corrections page: the original 1914 jail operated until 1984, when the current facility opened on Mayeaux Drive, now Bolivar Bishop Drive)
Original costNot found
Paid for byNot found
Beds161 (corrections page: "a capacity of 161 beds")

Since then

Not found

The Sheriff

Sheriff Mark Herford

Runs the jailYes — the Beauregard Parish Sheriff's Office operates the Beauregard Parish Jail
How the office is filledElected parish sheriff
Statutory basisLa. R.S. 15:704 makes each sheriff the keeper of the public jail of his parish; under R.S. 15:702 and 15:703 the parish governing authority maintains the jail building and provides the jail physician
Name as publishedThe sheriff's "Message From Sheriff" page is signed "Sheriff Mark Herford" (undated; site copyright 2016–2026)
OfficesCivil Division, 120 South Stewart St., DeRidder, LA 70634; Criminal Division/Jail, 412 Bolivar Bishop Dr., DeRidder, LA 70634

Still needed

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

Source: Beauregard Parish Sheriff's Office — Message From Sheriff · checked 2026-09-18

The Judges

Louisiana district judges are elected in partisan elections to six-year terms. They are state judicial officers, not parish officials. Who sets bail at first appearance varies by parish — a district judge on rotation, a magistrate or commissioner, or in some parishes a justice of the peace — and Louisiana's bail statutes do not require that first appearance to happen in open court.

Still needed

The parish's bond schedule
Share of the jail population held pretrial
Median time from booking to first appearance

Source: the state judiciary · checked 2026-09-18

The Parish Governing Authority

They maintain the jail building. The sheriff runs it.

What they controlThe physical maintenance of the parish jail and the jail physician (La. R.S. 15:702, 15:703).
What they don'tCustody of the jail. Under La. R.S. 15:704 the elected sheriff is “the keeper of the public jail of his parish.”
The governing bodyNo governing-body page was found on the parish's own site

Notes on the record

Louisiana has no general parish-jail inspection law. The Department of Public Safety and Corrections monitors compliance with its Basic Jail Guidelines at least annually, but only for jails that house state inmates for the state per diem; no public repository of those compliance reports was located.
Capacity passes on the sheriff's own pages: 161 beds on the corrections page and a live count of current inmates (159 on 18 September 2026) at the head of the roster.
PREA is recorded no: the sheriff says the audit was completed and certification obtained and posts a 2022 annual data report, but publishes no audit report.
Wikipedia and commercial inmate-lookup sites returned by search were ignored.
Parish seat from CCCarto's Louisiana parish-seat list (https://www.cccarto.com/countyseats/louisiana/), checked 18 September 2026.
Not found — no page of the Beauregard Parish governing authority was opened, so its form and members are not recorded.

These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Beauregard Parish 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 is the parish governing body that pays for it.

Names verified 2026-09-18 · dollars and outcomes still being gathered