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
- What was triedhttp://dcsosheriff.com/ — the Douglas County Sheriff's Office domain. Every attempt ended in a redirect loop: the https address answers 302 to the http address, and the http address redirects back, so no content was ever served
- What was triedhttp://www.dcsosheriff.com — the www form, same loop
- What was triedhttps://dcsheriff.net/sheriffs-office/ — checked and discarded; it is Douglas County, Colorado, not Missouri
- What was triedhttps://dps.mo.gov/dir/programs/cvsu/counties/douglas.php — a state page giving the sheriff's office address, with no jail entry and no officials named
- No county government domain foundThe search returned no Douglas County, Missouri county-government website; the sheriff's domain appears to be the county's only first-party web presence
Source: Missouri Department of Public Safety — Douglas County · 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 Christopher Degase
- Runs the jailNot established — no first-party Douglas County page could be opened
- How the office is filledElected county sheriff
- Office address209 SE 2nd Ave., Ava, MO 65608; 417-683-1020 (listed on a Missouri Department of Public Safety county page, not a county page)
- County page searchThe sheriff's own site, dcsosheriff.com, could not be opened at all; the only names offered were on third-party directories
- 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)Douglas County Sheriff's Office, Po Box 907, Ava, MO 65608; phone (417) 683-1020
- 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
Missouri's 1940 Nonpartisan Court Plan covers the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals statewide, but at circuit level it reaches only Clay, Greene, Jackson, Platte, St. Louis County and St. Louis City. Douglas County is not among them, so its circuit and associate circuit judges are elected on a partisan ballot. They are state judicial officers, not county officials. No judge name and no circuit number could be sourced.
Circuit and Associate Circuit Court
- 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
- audit.checks is deliberately left as an empty object. Douglas County's only first-party web presence found is the sheriff's own domain, dcsosheriff.com, and it refused every automated attempt: the https address answers with a 302 redirect to the http address, the fetcher upgrades http back to https, and the loop never resolves. Both the bare and the www forms behave the same way. No Douglas County page was ever read, so the county has not been examined and must not be scored as though it had been. An unexamined county is not a closed one.
- No Douglas County, Missouri county-government website surfaced in searching at all. The sheriff's domain appears to be the county's only first-party site.
- A third-party law-enforcement directory prints a sheriff's name for this county, but it is a community-editable listing on a commercial domain and could be stale. The sheriff is therefore recorded as Not found rather than copied from it. A sheriff who has left office would be worse than Not found.
- A separate site at dcsheriff.net was checked and discarded: it is the Douglas County, Colorado Sheriff's Office, a different jurisdiction entirely.
- The only Douglas County page that did open is a Missouri Department of Public Safety county contact page, which is a state page and not the county publishing. It gives the sheriff's office address at 209 SE 2nd Ave., Ava, and lists no jail and no officials by name.
- Whether Douglas County operates a jail, or boards its prisoners with a neighbouring county, is unknown from any source opened, and nothing is asserted here in either direction.
- 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 and city jails, and the Missouri Sheriffs' Association is a private association, 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 is required by RSMo 221.350.
- On 19 September 2026 the sheriff's site dcsosheriff.com also failed to load in the built-in browser (https navigation failed), so the county stays not examined.
- County Commission. No Douglas County commission page could be reached and no commissioner names were obtained from any first-party source.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Douglas 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