The Detention Center
The county publishes no formal name for this facility.
- Operated byNot established — Clark County contracts out jail services rather than operating its own facility
- Where prisoners goNot established from a source opened this session. The South Dakota Sheriffs' Association listing for Clark County states only that the office 'contracts jail services'; it does not name the receiving county or facility
- 2020 CensusClark County does not appear among the 26 South Dakota counties with a facility in the 2020 Census correctional-facility file, consistent with contracting out rather than operating a jail
- What was triedclarkcountysd.org was fetched directly and refused for lack of search provenance. The group's 5-search WebSearch budget was spent on other counties in this group before Clark could get a dedicated search.
Source: South Dakota Sheriffs' Association — Clark 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 Tad Heaton
- Jail'Contracts jail services' — Clark County has no jail of its own
- Staffing3 total staff, 2 deputies
- How the office is filledElected countywide, four-year term (SDCL 7-7-1.1)
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: South Dakota Sheriffs' Association — Clark County · checked 2026-08-25
The Judges
South Dakota circuit judges are elected in a nonpartisan election for an eight-year term (SD Const. Art. V §7; SDCL 16-6-3); a mid-term vacancy is filled by the Governor from Judicial Qualifications Commission nominees. 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.
Circuit Court — Third Judicial Circuit (14 judges; the state's largest circuit by judge count)
- 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
Notes on the record
- Clark County's own domain (clarkcountysd.org) could not be fetched this session — every attempt returned a provenance refusal because no WebSearch call was spent on Clark County within the group's hard cap of 5. This is a coverage gap of this research session, not a finding about the county's transparency; it is recorded honestly as 'not found' rather than guessed.
- South Dakota has no state agency that inspects adult county jails. See the state-layer entry in plains_states.json.
- Not found — clarkcountysd.org could not be reached this session (refused for lack of search provenance; the group's 5-search budget was exhausted on other counties before a dedicated Clark County search could be run).
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Clark 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