Lake County, South Dakota — The Jail, the Sheriff, the Judges

The Detention Center

Lake County Jail

Operated byLake County Sheriff's Office (Sheriff Sarina Talich)
Capacity"Lake County operates a 26 bed facility," per the South Dakota Sheriffs' Association — not the county's own domain
2020 Census custodial population14 people at "Lake Co. Jail" on April 1, 2020, per the Prison Gerrymandering Project's republication of the Census correctional facility file (a one-day snapshot, not a bed count) — see plains_states.json
What was triedLake County's own site, http://www.lake.sd.gov/, was fetched successfully but its content was limited to office-closure and commission-meeting-schedule announcements; no sheriff, jail, budget, or commissioner-roster page could be reached through it (its navigation menu is not exposed in the page's static content).

Source: South Dakota Sheriffs' Association — Lake 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

This rates disclosure, not conduct — what Lake County publishes about a jail its taxpayers own, checked 2026-08-25. Nothing here says the jail is run well or badly. Every mark moves the moment the county posts the document.

The Building

You paid for it. Here is what the record says it cost.

Year builtNot found
Original costNot found
Paid for byNot found
Beds26, per the South Dakota Sheriffs' Association (not the county's own site — not counted toward the checks above)

Since then

Not found

The Sheriff

Sheriff Sarina Talich

Contact200 E Center St., Madison, SD 57042
How the office is filledElected countywide, four-year term (SDCL 7-7-1.1)
CircuitThird Judicial Circuit (SDCL 16-5-1.2)

Still needed

Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail

Source: South Dakota Sheriffs' Association — Lake County · 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); a mid-term vacancy is filled by the Governor from two or more names put forward by the Judicial Qualifications Commission. Full-time magistrate judges are nominated by the circuit's presiding judge and approved by the Supreme Court, not elected (SDCL 16-12B-1.2). No county-specific judge names were located from a source opened this session.

Circuit Court — Third Judicial Circuit (6 judges; Lake is one of 14 member counties)

Not found

Magistrate Court — Third Circuit (2 full-time magistrate judgeships circuit-wide)

Not found

Still needed

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

Lake County's own government site loaded but exposed only meeting-schedule and closure announcements to this fetch; none of the ten items were found published on the county's own domain, so every check is "no." That is a real finding about what the site currently exposes, not a claim that Lake County withholds these records on request.
South Dakota has no state agency that inspects adult county jails. See the state-layer entry in plains_states.json (SDCL ch. 24-11 contains no inspection section; SDCL 24-11-27 is a discretionary circuit-judge visitation power only).
Board of County Commissioners (per SDCL ch. 7-8). Lake County's own site, http://www.lake.sd.gov/, was reached and shows a regular schedule of Commission, Planning Commission and Board of Adjustment meetings at 9:00 AM in the Commission Chambers, but no page naming individual commissioners, an agenda archive, or budget documents could be located in the content the fetch returned.

These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Lake 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