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
- JailNo first-party Ozark County page could be found or opened
- What was triedThe group's county search returned only commercial inmate-lookup sites (jailexchange.com, ozarkcountyjail.org, ozarkcountyarrests.org and others), none of which is cited. A combined follow-up search returned no Ozark County domain. ozarkcountymo.gov did not resolve.
Source: · 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 Cassidy Martin
- Runs the jailNot established from a first-party page
- 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.
- 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)Ozark County Sheriff's Office, 1818 County Road 806, Gainesville, MO 65655; phone (417) 679-4633
- 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
- Unexamined county: no Ozark County government site and no sheriff's site could be found or opened within the search budget, so the transparency checks are left empty rather than scored. This is not a finding that the county publishes nothing.
- The county seat is taken from a Wikipedia list of Missouri county courthouses, not from a county page.
- Every search result for this county was a commercial inmate-lookup site styled to look official. None is a county publication and none is 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.
- Ordinary Missouri counties are governed by a three-member County Commission. No Ozark County government site could be found or opened, so no commissioner's name was confirmed and none is recorded here.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Ozark 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