The Detention Center
Cass County Jail
- Operated byCass County Sheriff's Office, Corrections Division
- FacilityHoused in the City-County Law Enforcement Center, a 73,000-square-foot building built in 2002 and shared with city police
- Address336 Main Street, Plattsmouth, NE 68048 (jail entrance at 303 Avenue A)
- Capacity / staffingHouses up to 110 inmates; staffed by about 30 employees, including a Sergeant, four shift Corporals, deputies, corrections officers, two nurses and one doctor
- ProgramsDomestic violence classes, GED courses, Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and church services; inmate trustees assist with meals, cleaning and laundry
Source: Cass County Sheriff's Office — Corrections Division · checked 2026-08-25
Transparency rating
5/10Partial- ✓The jail is named
- ✓Who is in custody
- ✓Beds and daily population
- ✗What it costs taxpayers — not published
- ✗Deaths in custody — not published
- ✓PREA audits
- ✗Independent inspection — not published
- ✗Who else it holds, and for how much — not published
- ✓How to post bond
- ✗Phone, video and commissary rates — not published
The Building
You paid for it. Here is what the record says it cost.
- Year built2002 (City-County Law Enforcement Center)
- Original costNot found
- Paid for byNot found
- Beds110 (rated capacity, per the Sheriff's Office Corrections Division page)
Since then
- Not found
The Sheriff
Sheriff Robert Sorenson
- Runs the jailYes — the Sheriff's Office Corrections Division operates the Cass County Jail inside the City-County Law Enforcement Center
- How the office is filledElected countywide (Neb. Rev. Stat. 32-520); Sorenson "was elected Cass County Sheriff in 2022 and sworn into office in January 2023"
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Cass County Sheriff's Office — Meet Your 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
- Hon. David J. Partsch
District Court
- Michael A. Smith (also serves as resident judge in Sarpy County)
- 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
- The Cass County Sheriff's Office publishes its jail information (roster search, bond information, PREA policy, corrections division facts) at casscountysheriffne.gov — a separate .gov domain from the county's main site (casscountyne.gov / cassne.org), but it is the county's own official Sheriff's Office site (linked directly from casscountyne.gov/county-sheriff as "the Cass County Sheriff's Office website"), not a third-party aggregator, so its published pages are treated as the county publishing for these checks.
- `prea` reflects that 13 dated PREA policy PDFs (2023, one updated 01-04-2024) are published on the Sheriff's Office site; no separate independent PREA AUDIT RESULT (as distinct from the written policy) was found, so `inspections` is recorded "no".
- No published jail budget figure, death-in-custody disclosure, inter-agency housing contract, or phone/video/commissary fee schedule was found on either the county's or the Sheriff's Office's own domain.
- 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.
- Cass County uses a Board of Commissioners, not the seven-member Board of Supervisors — confirmed directly from the county's own site. Five members by district: Terry Dasher (Dist. 1), Taylor Boyle (Dist. 2), Alexander DeGarmo (Dist. 3), Daniel Stohlmann (Dist. 4), Duane Murdoch (Dist. 5). The Commissioners meet at the Cass County Courthouse every other Tuesday at 8:00 a.m.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Cass 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