The Detention Center
Not found
- Operated byNot found
- JailNo jail is named on any Ralls County page that could be opened
- Where prisoners goNot found - no page that could be opened says where arrested persons are held
- Historic buildingThe Ralls County Courthouse and Jail-Sheriff's House in New London is a historic site (courthouse built 1858); nothing opened says whether the old jail building is still in use
- What was triedrallscountymo.gov sheriff, commissioners, associate judge, circuit clerk, budget-reports and commission minutes pages opened; 2026 budget PDF had no readable text, 2025 budget PDF text carried no sheriff or jail lines, 2025 budget spreadsheet unreadable; the sheriff's own site rcsomo.com, linked from the county page, refused
Source: Ralls County Missouri - Sheriff · 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 Brian Allen
- Runs the jailNot established - the county's sheriff page names the sheriff but describes no jail, and the sheriff's own site could not be opened
- 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 address209 E. 4th Street, New London, MO 63459
- Listed contact573-985-5611
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Ralls County Missouri - Sheriff · 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. The county's own associate judge page lists David C. Mobley as Associate Circuit Judge at the Ralls County Courthouse, 311 S. Main St., New London. The judicial circuit number was not confirmed from a page that could be opened.
Associate Circuit Judge
- David C. Mobley
- 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
- Ralls County's own site, rallscountymo.gov, is unusually open for a small county: it publishes commission minutes from 2016 through July 2026, agendas, and full county budgets for 2024, 2025 and 2026.
- The budget check is recorded as no on a strict reading. The 2026 budget PDF contained no machine-readable text, the readable part of the 2025 budget PDF showed no sheriff or jail line, and the budget spreadsheets could not be read, so no corrections or detention budget figure was confirmed.
- The minutes index was opened but the individual monthly minutes files were not, so nothing is claimed either way about a board of visitors report or grand jury jail report.
- No jail is named, and no roster, bed count, bond guidance or fee schedule is published, on any county page that could be opened. The sheriff's own site, rcsomo.com, refused automated fetching, so this is recorded as not found rather than as a finding that the county has no jail.
- Search returned several sites styled to look official, including rallscountyjail.org and rallscountyarrests.org, and other commercial inmate-lookup sites. These 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.
- Three-member County Commission, the ordinary Missouri form. Presiding Commissioner John Lake, Western District Commissioner John Wieczorek, Eastern District Commissioner Junior Muehring, all listed on the county's own commissioners page. The commissioners meet Monday and Thursday, 9 a.m. to noon, in the County Clerk's office. The county publishes commission agendas, minutes for 2016 to 2026, and annual budgets for 2024 to 2026 plus a 2024 financial statement.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Ralls 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