The Detention Center
Not found
- Operated byNot found
- JailNo jail is named on any New Madrid County page that could be opened
- Where prisoners goNot found - no county page says where arrested persons are held
- What was triednewmadridcountymo.gov home, sheriff, commissioners and county directory pages were opened; none names a jail. new-madrid.mo.us (tried before it surfaced in search) was refused for lack of provenance; the Missouri Association of Counties page returned a 429 error. The county directory is an interactive map whose names did not render as text.
Source: New Madrid County - Sheriff Department · checked 2026-09-18
Transparency rating
0/10Closed- ✗The jail is named — not published
- ✗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
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 Danny Higgerson
- Runs the jailNot established - the county's Sheriff Department page does not describe a jail
- 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 address450 Main Street, New Madrid, MO 63869 (P.O. Box 68), as listed on the county's Sheriff Department page
- County page searchThe county's Sheriff Department page and county directory page do not give the sheriff's name in fetchable text, and the sheriff's office has no website of its own that could be found
- 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)New Madrid County Sheriff's Office, #1 Courthouse Square, New Madrid, MO 63869; phone (573) 748-2516
- 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 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 or circuit number 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 →
Notes on the record
- The county's own domain, newmadridcountymo.gov, was reachable and its home, sheriff, commissioners and directory pages were read. None names a jail, publishes a roster, or gives the sheriff's or commissioners' names in fetchable text.
- All ten transparency checks are recorded as no. The county domain was reachable and was read, so this is an examined county with nothing published there, not an unexamined one. The absence of any web presence for a jail is not proof that the county has no jail.
- The sheriff's office's only other presence found was a social media page, which is not treated as a published county source. A policing-careers directory listing for the office was opened but is a third-party source and is not cited.
- Search results for this county were dominated by commercial inmate-lookup sites styled to look official (for example newmadridcountyjailmo.org, newmadridcountyjail.org and newmadridcountyarrests.org). They are not county publications and are not cited or counted.
- 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.
- County Commission, the ordinary Missouri form. The county's own commission page describes the commission as the governing body of the county, meeting regularly on Monday and Thursday mornings at 9:00 a.m. in the Office of the County Commission on the first floor of the courthouse, 450 Main Street, New Madrid. The page names no individual commissioner and links no minutes, agendas or budget, so no name is recorded here.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in New Madrid 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