The Detention Center
Not found
- Operated byNot found
- JailNo jail is named on any Wright County page that could be opened
- Courthouse125 Court Square, Hartville, MO 65667
- Sheriff's web presenceThe county's contact page links the sheriff to wrightcountysheriff.net, but that domain now carries a privately owned inmate-lookup site that states it is not operated by any government; it is not cited or counted
- What was triedwrightcountymo.gov home, contact-us, commissioners and circuit-clerk pages were opened; wrightcountyclerk.org was refused (PROVENANCE_REQUIRED) and not retried
Source: Wright County, Missouri - home page · 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 BJ Adler
- Runs the jailNot established from a county page - the sheriff is listed as an elected official but 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.
- Name as publishedListed by the county as County Sheriff 'BJ Adler'; no fuller name is published
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Wright County, Missouri - home page · 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 home page lists R. Craig Carter as Circuit Judge and Lynette Veenstra as Associate Circuit Judge. The judicial circuit number was not confirmed from a page that could be opened.
Circuit Judge
- R. Craig Carter
Associate Circuit Judge
- Lynette Veenstra
- 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 contact page still points to wrightcountysheriff.net as the sheriff's site, but that domain is now a privately owned commercial inmate-lookup site with a disclaimer that it is not government-operated. It is not first-party and is not cited or counted. No working sheriff's own site was found.
- No Wright County page that could be opened names a jail, gives a bed count, publishes a roster, 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.
- The County Clerk's separate site, wrightcountyclerk.org, was refused before it could be read, so no budget, commission minutes, board of visitors report or grand jury jail report could be examined there.
- All ten transparency checks are recorded as no. The county's main domain was reachable and was read; the clerk's site could not be, so budget and minutes in particular are unexamined rather than confirmed absent.
- Search results for this county were dominated by commercial inmate-lookup sites and by Wright County, Minnesota; 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.
- Three-member County Commission, the ordinary Missouri form. Presiding Commissioner Zach Williams, Eastern District Commissioner Randy Pamperien, Western District Commissioner Tommy Kingery, all listed on the county's own commissioners page. The commission meets Mondays and Tuesdays in the County Commission room of the Courthouse in Hartville, and the county states agendas are posted 24 hours in advance, but the page links no minutes, agendas or budget documents. County Clerk Loni Pedersen.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Wright 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