The Detention Center
Clay County Detention Center
- Operated byClay County Sheriff's Office — Detention Division
- Named on a first-party page"Clay County Detention Center" in the County Commission's own budget-adoption newsflash on claycountymo.gov, and "Detention Center" on the Sheriff's detention pages
- Address14 S. Water Street, Liberty, Missouri 64068 — (816) 407-3800
- RosterThe Sheriff's Office publishes a full alphabetical detention listing with booking dates on its own domain
- Capital studyThe county's adopted 2024 budget included funding "for studies to determine needed improvements at the Clay County Detention Center"; no construction or operating figure is given
- What was triedhttps://www.sheriffclayco.org/, https://www.sheriffclayco.org/divisions/detention/detention-listings/, https://www.claycountymo.gov/, https://www.claycountymo.gov/205/Clay-County-Commission, https://www.claycountymo.gov/m/newsflash/Home/Detail/43 and the 2025 county ACFR were all opened. The Sheriff's "Bond Someone Out", inmate-accounts and detention-division subpages, and the county's agendas/minutes centre, were refused (PROVENANCE_REQUIRED)
Source: Clay County Sheriff's Office — Detention Listings · 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
- The adopted 2024 county budget funded studies of needed improvements at the Clay County Detention Center; no expansion, cost or bed figure is published
The Sheriff
Sheriff Will Akin
- Runs the jailYes — Detention is a division of the Clay County Sheriff's Office on the Sheriff's own site, and the county's own site shows detention staff (a Detention Administration Sergeant) as Sheriff's Office employees. No county page records a transfer of jail control to the commission
- How the office is filledElected county officer; took office January 1, 2021
- Statutory carve-outRSMo 221.020 lets the sheriff and commission of a first-classification non-charter county containing a city of 300,000+ transfer jail control to the commission by mutual agreement. Clay County fits that description. No such agreement was found in force on any Clay County page opened
Still needed
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Clay County Missouri Sheriff's Office · checked 2026-09-18
The Judges
Clay County is one of only six Missouri jurisdictions — with Greene, Jackson, Platte, St. Louis County and St. Louis City — where the 1940 Missouri Nonpartisan Court Plan reaches the trial bench: both circuit and associate circuit judges are merit-selected from a commission panel sent to the governor and then stand in yes/no retention elections rather than on a partisan ballot. They are state judicial officers, not county officials. No Clay County court page naming individual judges could be opened, so none is named here.
Circuit Court and Associate Circuit Court — judges
- Not found
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 NAMED STATUTORY EXCEPTION. RSMo 221.020 contains a carve-out for "each county of the first classification without a charter form of government which contains a city with a population of at least three hundred thousand inhabitants", where the sheriff and the county commission may by mutual agreement transfer control of the jail to the commission. Clay County is the county that description fits — part of Kansas City lies within it.
- What Clay County's own pages establish: the Sheriff's Office presents Detention as one of its divisions, publishes the detention roster and gives the Detention Center address as its own; the county's own website has no detention or corrections department separate from the Sheriff's Office, and its only detention reference is to a Detention Administration Sergeant among Sheriff's Office staff. The 2025 county ACFR carries no separate detention fund — the Sheriff's operations sit inside the Law Enforcement Tax Fund — and makes no mention of a jail-control agreement.
- Conclusion on control: on the county's and Sheriff's own pages, the elected Sheriff (Will Akin) runs the Clay County Detention Center. No transfer agreement to the County Commission was found in force. This is a negative finding from first-party pages, not a positive published statement — no Clay County page that was opened affirmatively addresses the RSMo 221.020 carve-out either way, and the commission minutes that would record such an agreement could not be opened.
- `budget` is recorded as no on a strict reading: Clay County does publish a 2025 Annual Comprehensive Financial Report on its own domain, and it shows roughly $31.1 million of public safety expenditure consolidated in the Law Enforcement Tax Fund, but no corrections or detention line is broken out anywhere in it, and the 2024 budget newsflash gives only the $121.8 million county total.
- The Sheriff's site links a "Bond Someone Out" page, which would satisfy bond_info, but it could not be opened, so it is not credited.
- Clay County publishes no bed capacity, no daily population, no PREA audit, no death in custody, no boarding contract or rate, and no phone, video-visit or commissary rates on any page that could be opened.
- 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 Missouri Sheriffs' Association publishes non-binding jail guidance and runs 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 221.320–221.350 whose yearly report RSMo 221.350 requires. No board-of-visitors report or grand jury jail report was found for Clay County; the county's agendas and minutes centre could not be opened.
- Missouri has no death-in-custody reporting law and no public statewide dataset; RSMo 58.451(1)(5) requires notice to the coroner of a death in custody.
- Missouri's Sunshine Law, RSMo 610.023, sets a three-business-day deadline to act on a records request.
- Clay County has an unusually large seven-member County Commission: Jerry Nolte, Presiding Commissioner (term to Dec 31, 2026); Jon Carpenter, Western (2028); Jay Johnson, Eastern (2026); JoAnn Lawson, Eastern At-Large (2028); Megan Thompson, Eastern (2028); Scott Wagner, Western (2026); Jason Withington, Western At-Large (2028). The same seven are listed as elected officials in the county's 2025 ACFR. RSMo 221.080 puts jail expense on the commission.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Clay 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