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

The Detention Center

Yankton County Jail

Operated byYankton County Sheriff's Office
Detention commandSteven Luke — Jail Administrator Captain
Capacity"120 inmates"
Address410 Walnut Suite 104, Yankton, SD 57078
Work release fee"$40.00 a day for each day utilizing the work release program"
Video visitation5:00 AM to 12:00 AM, 7 days a week; access can be restricted "due to disciplinary actions or other issues within the jail"
RosterA current in-custody PDF ("Daily_In_Custody") dated 2026-08-25 — the day of this research — is linked from the Current Inmates page, with the note that an inmate with no charges listed is either serving time or on a Marshal hold
StaffJail Sergeants Tonna Poppe and Cass Rabe; Jail Corporals Steven Bolhouse, Jerome Koenig, Leah Brandt, Quinn Danielson; Jail Detention Deputies Mindy Anderson, Alicia Jacob, Parker Harrison, Duane Carr, Vicente Medina Lopez, Natasha Olsen, Zach Berger, Issac Wilcox, Alexis Grams

Source: Yankton County Sheriff's Office — Jail Information · checked 2026-08-25

Transparency rating

4/10Partial

✓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 — 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

This rates disclosure, not conduct — what Yankton 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
Beds120

Since then

Not found

The Sheriff

Sheriff Preston Crissey

Runs the jailThe Sheriff's Office is responsible for "the administration and operation of the Yankton County Jail"
Sworn inJanuary 3, 2023
ElectedYes — SDCL 7-7-1.1, four-year term
BackgroundBegan in law enforcement in 2010 as a deputy sheriff in Aurora and Bon Homme counties, later Yankton Police Department; criminal justice degrees from Southeast Technical College and Central State University
Contact410 Walnut St, #104, Yankton, SD 57078; (605) 668-3567 ext. 2; sheriff@yanktonlaw.com

Still needed

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

Source: Yankton County Sheriff's Office — Meet the Sheriff · checked 2026-08-25

The Judges

South Dakota circuit judges are elected in a nonpolitical election to eight-year terms (SD Constitution Art. V §7; SDCL 16-6-3); vacancies are filled by the Governor from Judicial Qualifications Commission nominees. Many first appearances go instead to an appointed magistrate judge (SDCL 16-12B-1.2) or a clerk magistrate working off a bond schedule (SDCL 16-12C-10), neither of whom is elected. All are state judicial officers, not county officials.

First Judicial Circuit (Yankton County, per SDCL 16-5-1.2)

Not found — no judge roster was located on a source opened this session

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

yanktonsheriffsoffice.com functions as the Yankton County Sheriff's Office's own official site (its own email domain, its own jail-staff and roster pages) rather than a commercial aggregator, and is treated here as the county publishing on its own domain.
Board of County Commissioners exists under SDCL ch. 7-8, but a commissioners/minutes page on the county government domain (co.yankton.sd.us) could not be confirmed this session — the sheriff's office domain (yanktonsheriffsoffice.com) used for the checks above does not cover commission business, and the county government root site returned a fetch error each time it was tried.

These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Yankton 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