Audrain County, Missouri — The Jail, the Sheriff, the Judges

The Detention Center

Audrain County Jail

Operated byAudrain County Sheriff's Office
Jail addressCo-located with the Sheriff's Office at 1100 Littleby Road, Mexico, MO 65265
Bookings per yearAbout 1,500 persons booked in an average year
Average daily populationAbout 70 inmates per day
Jail staffA combination of civilians and state-certified sheriff's deputies
Corrections division contact namedCaptain Tanner, 573-473-5801 ext. 1528

Source: Audrain County Sheriff — Departmental Divisions · checked 2026-09-18

Transparency rating

2/10Closed

✓The jail is named
✗Who is in custody — not published
✓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 Audrain County 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 county posts the document.

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 — no bed count published; the sheriff's office publishes an average daily population of about 70

Since then

Not found

The Sheriff

Sheriff Matt Oller

Runs the jailYes — the Audrain County Jail is a division of the Sheriff's Office (RSMo 221.020)
Office and jail address1100 Littleby Road, Mexico, MO 65265
Separate sheriff domainaudrainsheriff.com, run by the office itself (first-party)

Still needed

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

Source: Audrain County Missouri — County Sheriff · checked 2026-09-18

The Judges

Audrain County is not one of the six Missouri jurisdictions (Clay, Greene, Jackson, Platte, St. Louis County, St. Louis City) where the 1940 Missouri Nonpartisan Court Plan reaches the trial bench, so its circuit and associate circuit judges are elected on a partisan ballot. They are state judicial officers, not county officials. No court page was opened, so no judge is named here.

Still needed

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

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

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

The sheriff's office runs its own first-party site, audrainsheriff.com. Its divisions page names the Audrain County Jail and publishes operating figures: about 1,500 bookings in an average year and about 70 inmates housed per day. That daily-population figure is why the capacity check passes; no bed count is published.
The roster check is 'no': the sheriff's inmate-lookup page does not publish a list, it directs the public to the third-party MobilePatrol smartphone app, so the county itself is not publishing who is in custody.
No budget, fee schedule, bond guidance, PREA result, inspection report or prisoner-housing contract was found on either audrainsheriff.com or audraincounty.org.
No Missouri state agency inspects county jails. The Department of Corrections inspects state prisons under RSMo chapter 217; that authority does not reach chapter 221 county jails. The only statutory mechanisms are local and lay — grand jury visits under RSMo 221.300 and a county board of visitors under RSMo 221.320–221.350, which 221.350 requires to report yearly. No such report was found published by Audrain County.
Missouri has no death-in-custody reporting law and no public dataset; RSMo 58.451 requires only that the coroner be notified. Nothing opened records a death in Audrain County custody.
Missouri county jails are funded by the county — RSMo 221.080 puts jail expense on the county commission.
Audrain County is governed by a County Commission. No commissioner was named on any page that could be opened: the county home page does not list them, and the county's offices directory at audraincounty.org/directory-offices could not be fetched (robots.txt). No commission agenda, minutes or budget document was found, and no board-of-visitors or grand jury jail report was found.

These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Audrain 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 2026-09-18 · dollars and outcomes still being gathered