The Detention Center
The county publishes no formal name for this facility.
- Operated byNot found — the county website could not be reached
- County publishes a jail nameCould not be determined — www.childresstx.us returned HTTP 500 Internal Server Error on every attempt on the research date
- Server banner returnedApache/2.4.29 (Ubuntu) Server at www.childresstx.us Port 443
- What was triedhttps://www.childresstx.us/ (500) ; https://www.childresstx.us/pages/county-sheriff (500) ; http://childresstx.us/ (500) ; https://www.childresscountytx.gov/ (no DNS) ; https://childresscounty.org/ (no DNS) ; https://www.co.childress.tx.us/ (no DNS)
- Archive attemptweb.archive.org is blocked from this research environment, so no archived copy could be checked
- Beds and population, 2026-0847 people held in 94 rated beds
Source: Sheriffs' Association of Texas — Childress County · checked 2026-08-22
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
- Beds94 rated capacity (Texas Commission on Jail Standards county jail population report, 1 August 2026)
Since then
- Not found
The Sheriff
Sheriff Matthew Bradley
- TitleChildress County Sheriff
- Address1005 Avenue F NE, Childress, TX 79201
- Phone(940) 937-2535
- NoteTaken from the Sheriffs' Association of Texas directory because the county's own website was unreachable
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Sheriffs' Association of Texas — Childress County · checked 2026-08-22
The Judges
No bench information could be sourced. Childress County's official website (www.childresstx.us) was returning HTTP 500 throughout the research window, and no alternative county-run domain resolves. County Judge, Justice of the Peace and district bench are recorded as not found rather than guessed.
- The county's bond schedule
- Share of the jail population held pretrial
- Median time from booking to first appearance
Source: the state judiciary · checked 2026-08-22
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
- All ten checks are scored 'no' because the county published nothing that could be reached. This is an availability finding, not a judgement that the material never existed: the site was returning a server error, not a 404.
- A county whose entire public website is down is, for the period of the outage, publishing none of the ten items.
- TCJS reports a 94-bed rated capacity at 50 percent occupancy on 1 August 2026.
- Four commissioners plus the County Judge, who presides. Individual names could not be sourced — the county website was down.
- County seat: Texas State Library and Archives Commission — Counties and County Seats
The record
2 people have died in the Childress County jail since 2016.
Deaths: Texas Justice Initiative, the cleaned copy of the Texas Attorney General’s custodial death reports — the state’s own public index carries no cause of death and has not been refreshed since August 2025. Population: Texas Commission on Jail Standards monthly report. Counted, not estimated.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Childress 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 2026-08-22 · dollars and outcomes still being gathered