The Detention Center
Lawrence County Law Enforcement Center
- Operated byLawrence County Sheriff's Office
- Beds120 in the detention center, published by the county
- ReplacedA 52-bed jail built in 1986
- Cost$23 million facility
- FundingA 3/8-cent county sales tax approved by voters on 2 November 2021, collection beginning April 2022, repaying a 20-year lease-purchase; the county states 1/8-cent drops off once the debt is repaid and the remainder continues for maintenance
- Groundbreaking9 February 2023
- Substantially complete1 December 2024
- Designed for expansionTwo future 90-bed expansions
- Sheriff's office address1525 Missouri Drive, Mt. Vernon, MO 65712
- Daily populationNot published
Source: Lawrence County, Missouri - Law Enforcement Center · 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 builtDetention centre substantially complete 1 December 2024; it replaced a jail built in 1986
- Original cost$23 million
- Paid for byA 3/8-cent county sales tax approved by voters 2 November 2021, collected from April 2022, repaying a 20-year lease-purchase; county property and sales taxes, not federal funding
- Beds120 (the replaced 1986 jail had 52)
Since then
- Designed to allow two future 90-bed expansions
The Sheriff
Sheriff Brad DeLay
- Runs the jailYes - the sheriff's office has a Jail / Detention Division
- How the office is filledElected county sheriff
- Statutory basisRSMo 221.020 gives the sheriff of each county the custody, rule, keeping and charge of the jail and of all prisoners in it; RSMo 221.080 puts jail expense on the county commission.
- Office address1525 Missouri Drive, Mt. Vernon, MO 65712
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Lawrence County Sheriff - Divisions and Services · checked 2026-09-18
The Judges
Missouri's 1940 Nonpartisan Court Plan covers the Supreme Court and Court of Appeals statewide, but at circuit level it applies in only six jurisdictions - Clay, Greene, Jackson, Platte, St. Louis County and St. Louis City. This county is not one of them, so its circuit and associate circuit judges are elected on a partisan ballot. They are state judicial officers, not county officials. No judge's name was confirmed from a page that could be opened.
- 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 →
- Where the jail money is decidedAgendas and minutes →
Notes on the record
- The most transparent county in this group. Its own site publishes the new detention centre's bed count, total cost, financing mechanism, groundbreaking and completion dates, and the bed count of the 1986 jail it replaced.
- The facility is funded by a dedicated county sales tax. County jails in Missouri run on county property and sales taxes; RSMo 221.080 puts jail expense on the county commission.
- The budget check is recorded as no on a strict reading: the county publishes the capital cost and the sales-tax financing of the building, but no corrections or detention operating budget document could be opened. The financing detail is nonetheless recorded in full above.
- The roster check is recorded as no. The sheriff's home page advertises access to an inmate roster, but the roster page itself could not be opened, so nothing is claimed about what it shows.
- The commission minutes page and the sheriff's deeper division pages refused automated fetches, so no board of visitors report and no grand jury jail report could be examined; nothing is claimed either way about whether the county publishes one.
- The sheriff's office runs its own domain, lawrencecosheriff.com, separate from the county's lawrencecountymo.org. Both are first-party.
- No Missouri state agency inspects county jails. The Department of Corrections operates and 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 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 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.
- Missouri has no death-in-custody reporting law and no public dataset; RSMo 58.451(1)(5) requires only notice to the coroner.
- Three-member County Commission, the ordinary Missouri form. Presiding Commissioner Bob Senninger, Eastern Commissioner Brad Smith, Western Commissioner Chris Prater. The commission meets from 8 a.m. to completion of the agenda each Monday and Thursday except holidays, at the Historic Courthouse, 1 Courthouse Square, Suite 101, Mt. Vernon. The county publishes an agenda page and a commission minutes page.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Lawrence 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