McDonald County, Missouri — The Jail, the Sheriff, the Judges

The Detention Center

McDonald County Detention Center

Operated byMcDonald County Sheriff's Office
Jail address300 East 7th Street, PO Box 68, Pineville, Missouri 64856
VisitationSaturdays - male inmates 8:30-11:30 am, female inmates 1:30-3 pm; no more than two visitors per inmate
Phone and commissaryPhone accounts and commissary through a named vendor, CityTeleCoin; no rates published
BedsNot found - no bed count published on any page that could be opened
Daily populationNot found
What was triedThe sheriff's detention center, home, about us and inmate roster pages were opened. The roster page (mcdonaldcountysheriff.com/InmateRoster/MCSO_inmatelist.html) returned no inmate list when fetched. No McDonald County government domain was returned by the search.

Source: McDonald County Sheriff's Office - Detention Center · checked 2026-09-18

Transparency rating

1/10Closed

✓The jail is named
✗Who is in custody — not published
✗Beds and daily population — not published
✗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

This rates disclosure, not conduct — what McDonald County publishes about a jail its taxpayers own, checked 2026-09-18. Nothing here says the jail is run well or badly. Every mark moves the moment the county posts the document.

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 Robert Evenson

Runs the jailYes - the McDonald County Sheriff's Office operates the McDonald County Detention Center
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 address300 East 7th Street, PO Box 68, Pineville, Missouri 64856
Listed contact417-223-4319

Still needed

Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail

Source: McDonald County Sheriff's Office · 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 judicial circuit number or judge's name was confirmed from a page that could be opened.

Still needed

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

The sheriff's office runs its own domain, mcdonaldcountysheriff.com, which counts as first-party. It names the McDonald County Detention Center, gives its address, and publishes visitation hours and the phone and commissary vendor.
The sheriff's site links an inmate roster page, but when fetched it displayed no inmate list, so the roster check is recorded as no; nothing is claimed about what the page shows in a browser.
The fees check is recorded as no: the phone and commissary vendor is named but no phone, video or commissary rate is published.
No McDonald County government website was returned by the search. A site styled as mcdonaldcountygov.com appeared in results; on opening it describes itself as a privately owned informational website not operated by any government agency. It is not cited as a source or counted anywhere in this record, and neither are the commercial inmate-lookup sites the search returned.
No budget, commission minutes, board of visitors report or grand jury jail report could be examined.
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.
Ordinary Missouri counties are governed by a three-member County Commission. No McDonald County government website was found by the search, so no commissioner's name was confirmed and none is recorded here.

These three offices decide who sits in a cell in McDonald 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