The Detention Center
Not scored. The parish's and sheriff's own websites could not be reached or read in the session that produced this record, so their disclosures were never examined. This is a gap in the research, not a finding about the parish.
- Operated byNot found
- What was triedTwo searches: the standard parish query returned only commercial inmate-lookup sites; a second query returned the sheriff's domain (bienvillesheriff.org), which refused every fetch under its robots.txt. Aggregator, directory and social-media results (discoverpolicing.org, usacops.com, countyoffice.org, manta.com, Facebook, jailrosters.org) were not used. No parish police jury page was returned or opened.
Source: · checked 2026-09-18
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 John E Ballance
- Runs the jailPresumed by law, not confirmed from a page: under La. R.S. 15:704 the parish sheriff keeps the 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
- What was triedThe sheriff's domain bienvillesheriff.org was returned by search but refused both fetch attempts (robots.txt rate-limited, then all paths disallowed by robots.txt). No current sheriff's name could be read from a first-party page.
- Source of the nameName from the Louisiana Sheriffs' Association directory, not a parish or sheriff's-office page; checked 18 September 2026
- Office phone (directory)318.263.2215
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Louisiana Sheriffs' Association — Sheriffs Directory (statewide directory, checked 18 September 2026) · 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.
- 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.
- Checks left empty: the sheriff's own site refused every fetch attempt (robots.txt), and no parish government site was returned by search, so nothing first-party was examined. This is not a finding that Bienville Parish publishes nothing.
- 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 Bienville Parish governing authority was opened, so its form and members are not recorded.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Bienville 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