The Detention Center
Cole County Detention Center
- Operated byCole County Sheriff's Office — Jail Division
- Named on a first-party page"Cole County Detention Center" on the county's own jail page at colecounty.org
- Address350 E High Street, Jefferson City, MO 65101 — 573-635-7070
- CapacityPublished by the county: the facility can accommodate 207 inmates, with room to roughly double that on expansion
- Daily populationPublished by the county: "holds an average of 140 - 150 inmates a day"
- State capitalCole County's seat, Jefferson City, is the Missouri state capital. The Detention Center is the county jail run by the elected county sheriff; it is not a state Department of Corrections facility and DOC's chapter 217 prison inspection authority does not reach it
- What was triedhttps://www.colecounty.org/245/Jail and https://www.colecounty.org/220/Sheriffs-Office were opened. The county's linked FCC telephone-rate documents, commissary page, PREA pamphlet, inmate handbook, video-visitation page and agenda centre were all refused (PROVENANCE_REQUIRED) and are therefore not credited
Source: Cole County, MO — Jail · 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
The Building
You paid for it. Here is what the record says it cost.
- Year builtNot found
- Original costNot found
- Paid for byNot found
- Beds207 — published by the county as the number the Detention Center can currently accommodate, against an average daily population of 140–150
Since then
- The county states the facility has the potential to expand to roughly double its current capacity; no date, cost or approved project is published
The Sheriff
Sheriff John P. Wheeler
- Runs the jailYes — the county's own jail page names the operator as the Cole County Sheriff's Office Jail Division. RSMo 221.020 makes the sheriff the jailer and Cole County is not one of the statutory exceptions
- How the office is filledElected county officer
- Sheriff's Office address350 E High Street, Jefferson City, MO 65101 — 573-634-9160
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Cole County, MO — Sheriff's Office · checked 2026-09-18
The Judges
Cole 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 — the state capital county elects the judges who set bail there. They are state judicial officers, not county officials. The Sheriff's Office page gives the Circuit Court's address as 301 E High Street, Jefferson City, but names no judge and no circuit number, and no court page could be opened, so no judge is named here.
Circuit Court — judges
- 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
- Cole County is the strongest county in this group on capacity: it is one of the few Missouri counties to publish both a bed figure (207) and an average daily population (140–150) on its own site. No statewide Missouri county-jail population dataset exists, so a county that publishes its own numbers is the only source there is.
- `roster` is recorded as no. The county links an inmate search, but it runs on a third-party vendor host (colecounty.enterpol.com / inmate.colecounty.org) rather than on a page that was opened, and no roster is published on the county domain itself.
- `fees` is recorded as no. The jail page links FCC telephone calling-rate documents in English and Spanish and a commissary page, which would likely satisfy the check, but every one of those links was refused and could not be read. A link that could not be opened is not a published rate.
- `prea` is recorded as no. The county links a "Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) Pamphlet" — an informational pamphlet is not an audit result, and in any case it could not be opened.
- No corrections or detention budget line was found on any Cole County page that could be opened.
- 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 — a distinction that matters in Cole County, where state correctional administration sits in the same city as a county jail it has no inspection power over. The Missouri Sheriffs' Association publishes non-binding jail guidance across seven categories 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 221.320–221.350 whose yearly report RSMo 221.350 requires. No board-of-visitors report or grand jury jail report was found for Cole County; the county's agenda centre and commission minutes could not be opened.
- Missouri has no death-in-custody reporting law and no public statewide dataset — the state's own federal DCRA plan concedes it cannot ensure all agencies participate. RSMo 58.451(1)(5) requires notice to the coroner of a death in custody. Nothing published by Cole County was found.
- Missouri's Sunshine Law, RSMo 610.023, requires a records request to be acted on no later than the end of the third business day after receipt, with a specific statutory exemption cited for any denial.
- Cole County is governed by a County Commission (presiding commissioner and two associate commissioners) in the ordinary Missouri form; RSMo 221.080 puts jail expense on it. The Sheriff's Office page gives the Commission's address as 311 E High Street, Jefferson City, MO 65101, 573-634-9100, but names no commissioner. The county's agenda centre and commission-video pages could not be opened, so no commissioner is named and no minutes URL is cited.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Cole 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