The Detention Center
Bates County Jail
- Operated byBates County Sheriff's Office
- Jail address6 West Fort Scott Street, Butler, MO 64730
- Jail phone660-679-5880
- Division leadershipThe jail division page lists one captain leading it; no name is published
- Inmate rosterPublished by the sheriff's office at batescountysheriff.gov
- What was triedOpened the sheriff's home, jail-division and links/resources pages and the county's commission-news page; no capacity, budget, bond or fee figures were found
Source: Bates County Sheriff's Office — Jail · checked 2026-09-18
Transparency rating
2/10Closed- ✓The jail is named
- ✓Who is in custody
- ✗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 Chad Anderson
- Runs the jailYes — the jail is a division of the Sheriff's Office (RSMo 221.020)
- Office and jail address6 West Fort Scott Street, Butler, MO 64730
- Separate sheriff domainbatescountysheriff.gov, run by the office itself (first-party)
- Jurisdiction described837 square miles, 16,500+ residents
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Bates County Sheriff's Office · checked 2026-09-18
The Judges
Bates 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.
- 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, batescountysheriff.gov, which names the Bates County Jail, gives its address and publishes an inmate roster — the two checks that pass. The county's own site, batescounty.net, carries the commission and county-offices pages.
- No bed count or daily population, no corrections budget figure, no bond-posting guidance, no commissary, phone or video visit rates, no PREA result, no inspection report and no prisoner-housing contract were found on either county domain.
- A site styled batescountyjailmo.org appeared in search results; it is not a county domain and was not used.
- 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 Bates 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 Bates County custody.
- Missouri county jails are funded by the county — RSMo 221.080 puts jail expense on the county commission.
- Three-member County Commission: Jim Wheatley, Presiding Commissioner; John Gray, Northern Commissioner; Trent Nelson, Southern Commissioner. The commission is in regular session Mondays and Wednesdays, 9:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., with appointments through the county clerk. The commission page publishes no minutes, agendas or budget documents and no board-of-visitors or grand jury jail report.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Bates 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