The Detention Center
Brookings County Detention Center
- Operated byBrookings County Sheriff's Office (Sheriff Marty Stanwick)
- SourceSouth Dakota Sheriffs' Association bio: "As Sheriff of Brookings County, Marty oversees the operation of the Sheriff's Office and the Detention Center" — not the county's own domain
- 2020 Census custodial population20 people at "Brookings Co. Det. Ctr." on April 1, 2020, per the Prison Gerrymandering Project's republication of the Census correctional facility file — see plains_states.json
- What was triedThe county's own Sheriff page (brookingscountysd.gov/230/Sheriff) and Budgets page (brookingscountysd.gov/301/Budgets), plus two DocumentCenter budget PDFs on the same domain, all failed repeatedly this session with a robots.txt fetch timeout (ConnectTimeout) — a genuine site-access failure, not a provenance refusal. Only the Officials page (brookingscountysd.gov/423) loaded successfully.
Source: South Dakota Sheriffs' Association — Brookings County · 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 Marty Stanwick
- Source of nameListed as "Sheriff: Marty Stanwick" on the county's own official officials page
- How the office is filledElected countywide, four-year term (SDCL 7-7-1.1)
- Association bio (not county's own site)The South Dakota Sheriffs' Association page for Brookings County describes him as "currently starting his second term as Sheriff" after being "elected in 1998" — that bio reads as stale and was not relied on for current-officeholder status; the name was cross-checked against and matches the county's own officials page
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Brookings County, SD — Official Website — Brookings County Officials · checked 2026-08-25
The Judges
South Dakota circuit judges are elected nonpartisan for an eight-year term (SD Const. Art. V §7; SDCL 16-6-3). Full-time magistrate judges are nominated by the circuit's presiding judge and approved by the Supreme Court (SDCL 16-12B-1.2). No county-specific judge names were located from a source opened this session.
- 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 →
Notes on the record
- Brookings County does maintain its own website (brookingscountysd.gov) and the Officials page loaded successfully, but the Sheriff and Budgets pages — the pages most likely to satisfy the transparency checks — returned a robots.txt fetch timeout on every attempt this session. All checks are marked "no" because no page confirming jail name, capacity, budget, etc. on the county's own domain was actually opened and read, per the accuracy rule that only an opened URL may be cited.
- South Dakota has no state agency that inspects adult county jails. See the state-layer entry in plains_states.json.
- Board of County Commissioners: Mike Bartley, Shawn Hostler, Larry Jensen, Ryan Krogman, Kelly VanderWal — from the county's own officials page.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Brookings 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