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://hocomosheriff.com/detentionunit.html — the sheriff's own domain — was attempted three times and each time returned a 302 redirect from HTTPS back to plain HTTP that WebFetch will not follow, so no page content was ever obtained
- Refusedhttps://www.mocounties.com/howard-county — ROBOTS_DISALLOWED
- Openedhttps://dps.mo.gov/dir/programs/cvsu/counties/howard.php (Missouri DPS, a state page, not the county publishing) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_County,_Missouri, both of which give Fayette as the seat
- No county government domainThe search returned no howardcountymo-style county government site — only the sheriff's domain, Facebook, Wikipedia and commercial aggregators
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 Jeffrey Oswald
- Runs the jailAlmost certainly — the Howard County Sheriff's Office site advertises a Detention Unit, but that page could not be opened, so the current sheriff is not confirmed (the name above comes from the state list)
- How the office is filledElected county sheriff; RSMo 221.020 gives the sheriff custody, rule, keeping and charge of the county jail
- Office address100 N. Mulberry St., Fayette, MO 65248 — 660-248-2477, per a Missouri DPS county page
- 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)Howard County Sheriff's Office, 100 N Mulberry, Fayette, MO 65248; phone (660) 248-2477
- 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
Howard 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 Howard 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. The Howard County Sheriff's Office site (hocomosheriff.com) refused every automated attempt through a redirect loop, and no separate Howard County government domain was found. The county was never examined and must not be scored as a closed county.
- The search result title for the unreachable page was 'Detention Unit - Howard County Sheriff's Office', which indicates the sheriff's site does have a detention page — but a search result title is not the county publishing and is not cited as a finding.
- 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 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 for Howard 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.
- Ordinary Missouri county government — a three-member County Commission (presiding commissioner and two associate commissioners) — but no Howard County government page could be located or opened to confirm the form or name the commissioners.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Howard 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