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 triedOne WebSearch for Hickory County MO sheriff/jail/commission returned no official county or sheriff domain — only a Facebook page, Wikipedia, the Missouri Association of Counties, and commercial inmate-lookup farms
- Refusedhttps://www.mocounties.com/hickory-county — ROBOTS_DISALLOWED on repeated attempts
- Openedhttps://dps.mo.gov/dir/programs/cvsu/counties/hickory.php — a Missouri DPS victim-services page listing a Hickory County Sheriff's Office at Hermitage, MO (417-745-6415); it is a state page, not the county publishing
- Commercial sites ignoredmissourijailroster.com, missouriprisons.org, missouricountyjails.org, hickorycountyarrests.org — scraped aggregators, not sources
Source: No first-party source reached · 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 Gregory Burke
- Runs the jailNot established — no first-party Hickory County or sheriff's office page could be reached
- How the office is filledElected county sheriff (RSMo 221.020 makes the sheriff the jailer in Missouri counties)
- 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)Hickory County Sheriff's Office, 18682 Jackson Street, Hermitage, MO 65668; phone (417) 745-6415
- 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
Hickory County is not one of the six Missouri jurisdictions under the Missouri Nonpartisan Court Plan at circuit level, so its circuit and associate circuit judges are elected on a partisan ballot. They are state judicial officers, not county officials. The circuit number could not be sourced from a page actually opened.
Missouri Circuit Court — judicial circuit serving Hickory County
- 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 an EMPTY OBJECT. No Hickory County government domain and no Hickory County sheriff domain could be located or opened, so the county was never examined. It must not be scored as a closed county.
- 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. The Missouri Sheriffs' Association publishes non-binding jail guidance but is a private association, not a regulator.
- The only inspection-like mechanisms in Missouri law are local and lay: a grand jury visit to the jail under RSMo 221.300, and a county board of visitors under RSMo 221.320-221.350, which RSMo 221.350 requires to report yearly to the county. Nothing of the kind was found published for Hickory County.
- Missouri has no death-in-custody reporting law and no public dataset. RSMo 58.451(1)(5) requires notice to the coroner of a death believed to have resulted from injury or illness while in the custody of the law.
- Missouri's Sunshine Law, RSMo 610.023, requires a records request to be acted upon as soon as possible and in no event later than the end of the third business day after receipt.
- No jail here is not by itself a gap, but nothing was reachable either way — whether Hickory County operates a jail or boards its prisoners elsewhere could not be established from any first-party source.
- Ordinary Missouri county government — a three-member County Commission (a presiding commissioner and two associate commissioners) — but no Hickory County page could be opened to confirm the form or name the commissioners.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Hickory 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