St. Clair County, Missouri — The Jail, the Sheriff, the Judges

The Detention Center

St. Clair County Jail

Operated bySt. Clair County Sheriff's Office
Jail address360 Chestnut Street, Osceola, MO 64776
Jail line(417) 646-7704
VisitationIn-person visits limited to privileged visits (attorneys, law enforcement, prosecutors); family and friends visit by video kiosk or tablet, for a fee whose amount is not stated
Commissary depositsBy kiosk or online vendor; about $9 fee per deposit, $200 maximum per card deposit and $1,000 per rolling 10 days
PhonesOutgoing calls paid from the commissary account; free calls to the Public Defender and the PREA hotline
BedsNot found - no bed count published on any page that could be opened
Daily populationNot found

Source: St. Clair County Sheriff's Office - Jail · 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 St. Clair 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 Lee Hilty

Runs the jailYes - the St. Clair County Sheriff's Office operates the St. Clair County 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 address360 Chestnut St., P.O. Box 546, Osceola, MO 64776
Non-emergency line(417) 646-2565

Still needed

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

Source: St. Clair 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. The county's own circuit court page names Hon. M. Brandon Baker as Presiding Circuit Judge and M. Blane Baker as Associate Circuit Judge; it does not state the judicial circuit number, so none is recorded.

Presiding Circuit Judge

M. Brandon Baker

Associate Circuit Judge

M. Blane Baker

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 →
Where the jail money is decidedAgendas and minutes →

Notes on the record

The sheriff's office runs its own domain, scsomo.org, separate from the county's stclaircomo.com. Both are first-party and both were opened.
Not to be confused with St. Clair County, Illinois. Search results for this county returned the Illinois sheriff's inmate roster (stclairsheriff.org) and an Illinois inmate lookup (inmates.stclaircounty.org); neither is cited or counted here.
The sheriff's jail page publishes visitation rules and commissary deposit limits and an approximate per-deposit fee, but no telephone or video-visit rates, so the fees check is recorded as no on a strict reading. It mentions free access to the PREA hotline but publishes no PREA audit, so the prea check is no.
No roster, bed count, bond guidance, jail budget or housing contract was found on either county domain. The commission minutes page links to a separate recent-meetings listing and itself mentions no jail, board of visitors or grand jury report; the individual minutes were not examined.
Commercial inmate-lookup sites returned by search (missouriprisons.org, missourijailroster.com, missouriprisonroster.org and similar) are not county publications and are not cited.
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 Robert Salmon, North District Commissioner Matthew Noakes, South District Commissioner Randy Smith, all listed on the county's own commissioners page. The commission usually meets Mondays and Wednesdays at 655 2nd St., Osceola; the page lists meetings scheduled for 21, 23 and 28 September 2026. Minutes are published through the county's agendas and minutes section.

These three offices decide who sits in a cell in St. Clair 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