The Detention Center
Benton County Detention Center
- Operated byBenton County Sheriff's Office
- Address1620 E Main Street, Warsaw, MO 65355
- Beds / rated capacityNot found - no bed count and no population figure is published on the sheriff's own site
- Bond / bail guidanceNot found on any page opened
- Inmate phone, video visit and commissary ratesNot found on any page opened
- Holds for other agenciesNot found - no contract or per-diem boarding rate published
- What was triedOpened https://www.bentoncountysheriffmo.org/ . The sheriff's own navigation advertises an Inmate Roster (https://www.bentoncountysheriffmo.org/inmate-roster/disclaim) and a Detention Facility page (https://www.bentoncountysheriffmo.org/detention-facility); https://www.bentoncountysheriffmo.org/roster.php?released=1 returned 404 and both of the other two were refused to this agent, so neither was actually opened and neither is scored as passing. The county's own site, http://bentoncomo.com/offices/sheriff.html, could not be read at all - it answers every https request with a 302 back to the same http URL, which loops.
Source: Benton County MO Sheriff - home · checked 2026-09-18
Transparency rating
1/10Closed- ✓The jail is named
- ✗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 Eric Knox
- Runs the jailYes - RSMo 221.020 gives the sheriff of each Missouri county 'the custody, rule, keeping and charge of the jail within his county, and of all the prisoners in such jail'; RSMo 221.080 puts the expense of the jail on the county commission
- How the office is filledElected county-wide. Benton County is not one of the six Missouri jurisdictions carved out of the elected-sheriff rule
- Office / jail address1620 E Main Street, Warsaw, MO 65355
- Phone660-438-5252 (24-hour non-emergency)
- Office motto published'Honor, Integrity & Transparency... Always'
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Benton County MO Sheriff - home · checked 2026-09-18
The Judges
Missouri invented merit selection - the 1940 Missouri Nonpartisan Court Plan - but at circuit level the Plan reaches only six jurisdictions: Clay, Greene, Jackson, Platte, St. Louis County and the City of St. Louis. Benton County is not one of them, so its circuit and associate circuit judges are elected on a partisan ballot. The associate circuit judge is normally the officer who sets bail at first appearance. No circuit number and no judge's name could be sourced from a county or court page opened here, so none is named. Judges are state judicial officers, not county officials, and are not added to the vote line.
Missouri Circuit Court - circuit judge
- Not found
Missouri Circuit Court - associate circuit judge (sets bail at first appearance)
- 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 2026-09-18
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 domain, bentoncountysheriffmo.org, separate from the county. That counts as first-party. The county's own domain, bentoncomo.com, is effectively unreadable to an automated fetch: it 302-redirects https to http for the same path and loops, so nothing on the county side - commission, minutes, budget - could be examined.
- The roster check is marked 'no' because no roster page was ever opened, not because none exists. The sheriff's home page links an Inmate Roster behind a disclaimer gate at /inmate-roster/disclaim, and a search engine returned a released-inmates roster page title on this same domain, but /roster.php?released=1 returns 404 and the disclaimer page was refused to this agent. This is a limit of what could be verified, and the check is scored conservatively rather than assumed.
- Missouri has no state jail inspection. No Missouri state agency inspects county jails: the Department of Corrections operates and inspects state prisons under RSMo chapter 217, and that authority does not reach chapter 221 county and city jails. The Missouri Sheriffs' Association publishes non-binding guidance and runs jail-administrator training, but it is a private association of sheriffs, not a regulator. The only statutory mechanisms are local and lay - a grand jury visit under RSMo 221.300, and a county board of visitors under RSMo 221.320 to 221.350, which RSMo 221.350 requires to report yearly to the county. No board-of-visitors report and no grand jury jail report was found for Benton County.
- Missouri has no death-in-custody reporting law. RSMo 58.451(1)(5) requires notice to the coroner of a death believed to have resulted from any injury or illness while in the custody of the law or while an inmate in a public institution, but that is a coroner notification, not a public dataset. Nothing on the sheriff's own site reports a death in custody.
- Open records: Missouri's Sunshine Law, RSMo 610.023, requires a request to be acted on as soon as possible and no later than the end of the third business day after it is received; a delay must be explained with the earliest time and place the record will be available, and a denial must cite the specific statutory exemption within the same window.
- The jail runs on county money. RSMo 221.080 puts jail expense on the county commission, funded from county property and sales taxes. Federal money reaches a Missouri county jail only through per-diem boarding, SCAAP and grants.
- County Commission - the ordinary Missouri form, a presiding commissioner and two associate commissioners. No commissioner could be named: the county's own site at bentoncomo.com answers every https request with a 302 redirect to the identical http URL and loops, so no county page was readable from here. No dedicated jail tax or detention sales-tax levy was found.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Benton 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