The Detention Center
Not scored. The county's own website was not reachable in the session that produced this record, so its disclosures were never examined. This is a gap in the research, not a finding about the county.
- Operated byNot found
- Jail nameNot found - nothing first-party was reachable, so it is not established here whether Bollinger County operates a jail of its own or boards its prisoners elsewhere
- What was triedA full county search returned no county-government domain and no sheriff's-office domain. Wikipedia's infobox for Bollinger County gives the county's 'official website' as the Missouri Association of Counties directory entry, https://www.mocounties.com/bollinger-county, which is the clearest sign the county publishes nothing of its own. That MAC page was attempted and failed with a robots.txt connect timeout, and MAC would in any case be a state association, not the county publishing. Everything else the search surfaced was either the sheriff's Facebook page or commercial inmate-lookup farms (bollingercountyjailmo.org, bollingercountyjail.org, countyoffice.org, staterecords.org), which are never cited here.
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 Stanley Petton
- Runs the jailBy statute yes - RSMo 221.020 gives the sheriff of each Missouri county the custody, rule, keeping and charge of the jail and of all prisoners in it. Bollinger County is not one of the three Missouri exceptions (Clay County's optional transfer under RSMo 221.020, the City of St. Louis, St. Louis County)
- How the office is filledElected county-wide
- County pagesDid not name the sheriff: no first-party page naming the sheriff could be opened
- Source of the nameName from the Missouri Law Enforcement Agencies list kept by the Missouri Department of Public Safety (POST program), a state list, not a county page; checked 18 September 2026
- Office (state list)Bollinger County Sheriff's Office, 202 High Street, Marble Hill, MO 63764; phone (573) 238-2633
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Missouri Law Enforcement Agencies list (Missouri Department of Public Safety, POST program; shown on the Attorney General's Police and Sheriffs Contacts page) - statewide list, checked 18 September 2026 · checked 2026-09-18
The Judges
At circuit level Missouri's 1940 Nonpartisan Court Plan reaches only Clay, Greene, Jackson, Platte, St. Louis County and the City of St. Louis. Bollinger County is not among them, so its circuit and associate circuit judges are elected on a partisan ballot; the associate circuit judge normally sets bail at first appearance. No circuit number and no judge could be sourced from a county or court page opened here. Judges are state judicial officers, not county officials.
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
- UNEXAMINED - checks is deliberately an empty object. No Bollinger County first-party web presence was reachable: no county-government domain and no sheriff's-office domain was returned by search, the Missouri Association of Counties directory entry that Wikipedia lists as the county's official website failed with a robots.txt connect timeout, and the only other results were the sheriff's Facebook page and commercial inmate-lookup sites. Because nothing of the county's own was opened, the ten transparency checks were not run. This county must not be read as a county that publishes nothing - it is a county that could not be examined from here.
- Missouri has no state jail inspection. No Missouri state agency inspects county jails: the Department of Corrections' authority under RSMo chapter 217 covers state prisons and does not reach chapter 221 county and city jails, and the Missouri Sheriffs' Association 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, whose yearly report RSMo 221.350 requires.
- Missouri has no death-in-custody reporting law and no public dataset; the state's own federal DCRA plan says so. RSMo 58.451(1)(5) requires only notice to the coroner of a death believed to have resulted from an injury or illness while in the custody of the law or while an inmate in a public institution.
- Open records: RSMo 610.023 requires a Sunshine Law request to be acted on no later than the end of the third business day after receipt, with any delay explained and any denial citing the specific statutory exemption in the same window.
- A Missouri county jail runs on county money - RSMo 221.080 puts the expense on the county commission. Federal money enters 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 and no board, agenda or minutes page exists to record: no Bollinger County government website was found at all.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Bollinger 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