The Detention Center
Not found
- Operated byNot found
- JailNo jail is named on any Worth County page that could be opened
- Where prisoners goNot found - no page opened says where arrested persons are held
- What was triedThe county site (a Wix site linked by the Missouri Association of Counties) home page was opened; its County Minutes link leads to a maintenance page, and a guessed county-officers page returned 404. worthcountysheriff.com and worthcounty.us both appeared in search but are not Worth County, Missouri: the first is the Worth County, Georgia sheriff and the second carries gambling spam
Source: Worth County, Missouri (county site) · 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 Scott Sherer
- Runs the jailNot established - no jail is described on any county page that could 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.
- County page searchThe county's own site lists no officials by name. An undated letter on the City of Maryville's document server is signed by Worth County Sheriff Scott Sherer, but it is undated and not a county publication, so it cannot confirm who holds the office now
- 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)Worth County Sheriff's Office, PO Box 36 11 West 4th Street, Grant City, MO 64456; phone (660) 564-2222
- 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 circuit number and no judge's name 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
- One of the smallest counties in Missouri and the thinnest record in this group. The county's own web presence is a Wix site, liwake.wixsite.com/worthcountymo, maintained by the County Clerk; only its home page could be read.
- No sheriff's office site for Worth County, Missouri was found. worthcountysheriff.com belongs to the Worth County, Georgia sheriff and is not cited. worthcounty.us is a compromised domain serving gambling content and is not cited.
- The sheriff's name is recorded as Not found. An undated letter hosted by the City of Maryville is signed by Worth County Sheriff Scott Sherer, but without a date or a county source it cannot confirm the current officeholder.
- No Worth County page that could be opened names a jail or says where the county's prisoners are held. That is recorded as not found rather than as a finding that the county has no jail.
- All ten transparency checks are recorded as no. The county's home page was reachable and read, but its minutes link was under maintenance and no deeper page could be opened, so budget, minutes and any board of visitors or grand jury jail report are unexamined rather than confirmed absent.
- 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: the Missouri Association of Counties directory lists a Presiding Commissioner and East and West District Associate Commissioners for Worth County but gives no names, and the county's own home page names no one. No commissioner's name is recorded. The county site carries a County Minutes link that leads to a maintenance page and a Financial Records link that was not opened.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Worth 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