The Detention Center
Not found
- Operated byNot found
- What was triedBrown County's own directory (browncountyne.gov/directory/) lists 14 departments/offices — Assessor, Attorney, Board of Commissioners, Clerk, District Court, Election Commissioner, Emergency Manager, Highway Department, Planning and Zoning, Register of Deeds, Sheriff, Treasurer, Veterans Services, Weed Superintendent — and none is a jail or detention department. The Sheriff's Office page does not mention jail operations either. No county-published jail information was located.
Source: Brown County, NE — Directory · checked 2026-08-25
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 Brent J. Deibler
- How the office is filledElected countywide (Neb. Rev. Stat. 32-520 — partisan ballot, four-year term)
- Runs the jailNot established from the Sheriff's Office page on the county's own site — it gives contact information and links to Crime Stoppers, FBI, ATF, Nebraska State Patrol and the Sex Offender Registry, but does not say whether the office currently operates a jail
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Brown County, NE — Sheriff · checked 2026-08-25
The Judges
Nebraska uses merit selection with retention elections for every level of court, including the county court judges who set bail at first appearance. Under Nebraska Constitution Article V, section 21, the Governor fills a vacancy from a list of at least two nominees from a judicial nominating commission; if the Governor does not act within 60 days the Chief Justice appoints. An appointed judge later faces an uncontested retention vote. Trial courts are the District Court (general jurisdiction, felony trials) and the County Court (misdemeanors, small claims, probate, most first appearances and bail-setting). Judges are state judicial officers, not county officials.
County Court
- Not found
District Court
- Not found
- The county's bond schedule
- Share of the jail population held pretrial
- Median time from booking to first appearance
Source: the state judiciary · checked 2026-08-25
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
- No jail, roster, budget, deaths, PREA, inspection, contracts, bond or fee information was found published on Brown County's own domain (browncountyne.gov) within the resources reviewed.
- Under Neb. Rev. Stat. 83-4,131 any active criminal detention facility this county operates would receive a written inspection report from Nebraska Crime Commission personnel, delivered to the county's governing body — not published by the state. state_inspection is left blank because no county-published report was found.
- Brown County uses a Board of Commissioners, not the seven-member Board of Supervisors used by some Nebraska township counties — confirmed directly from the county's own site. Members: Donnie Painter, Dennis Bauer (Chairman), Jeremiah Dailey. The Board meets the 1st and 3rd Tuesday of each month.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Brown 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 2026-08-25 · dollars and outcomes still being gathered