The Detention Center
The county publishes no formal name for this facility.
- Operated byMason County Sheriff's Office (the Sheriff's Office recruits certified jailer/dispatchers; the county publishes no jail page)
- County publishes a jail nameNo — the word "jail" appears on the Sheriff page only inside a job posting for a "Full-Time Jailer/Dispatcher"
- Only jail evidence on the county siteThat job posting, which requires jailer/dispatcher certification and directs applicants to the Sheriff's Office at 205 Westmoreland
- Custody statusThe Sheriff page sends the public to VINELink rather than publishing a roster
- What was triedhttps://www.co.mason.tx.us/page/mason.Sheriff ; https://www.co.mason.tx.us/page/mason.Home ; https://www.co.mason.tx.us/page/mason.Budgets ; https://www.co.mason.tx.us/upload/page/0268/Mason%20County%20Budget%202026.pdf (scan, no extractable text)
- Beds and population, 2026-081 people held in 5 rated beds
Source: Mason County — Sheriff · checked 2026-08-22
Transparency rating
1/10Closed- ✗The jail is named — not published
- ✗Who is in custody — not published
- ✗Beds and daily population — not published
- ✓What it costs taxpayers
- ✗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
- Beds5 rated capacity (TCJS Inmate Population Report, 1 Aug 2026); 1 held — the smallest operating jail in this group, and not published by the county itself
Since then
- Not found
The Sheriff
Sheriff Joe Lancaster
- Published as"Sheriff Joe Lancaster"
- Address205 Westmoreland Street / P.O. Box 391, Mason, TX 76856
- Phone325-347-6937; dispatch 325-347-5252
- Emailjoe.lancaster@co.mason.tx.us
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Mason County — Sheriff · checked 2026-08-22
The Judges
No County Court at Law. One Justice of the Peace is published. The 452nd District Court is headquartered in Mason and also serves McCulloch, Edwards, Kimble and Menard Counties.
County Judge
- Shannon Worrell
District Court (452nd Judicial District)
- Robert R. Hofmann
Justice of the Peace
- James Treg Hudson (Pct. 1)
- 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 →
- Where the jail money is decidedAgendas and minutes →
Notes on the record
- Mason County's jail is a five-bed holding facility. On 1 Aug 2026 it held one person. The county website does not acknowledge it exists except through a jailer job posting.
- Budgets are published back to 2014 in proposed and adopted pairs and the FY2027 proposed budget and hearing notice are current, but the adopted budget PDFs are scans with no extractable text, so no jail or sheriff line item can be read.
- Agendas and minutes are hosted off-site on TownCloud.
- TCJS does not publish a per-county inspection page or routine inspection report online; the only county-level TCJS documents found are the statewide Inmate Population Report (https://www.tcjs.state.tx.us/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/PopReportCurrent.xlsx) and the Non-Compliant Jails list (https://www.tcjs.state.tx.us/non-compliant-jails/), which did not list this county as of 22 Aug 2026.
- Four commissioners plus the County Judge, who presides. Precinct 1 Reggie Loeffler, Precinct 2 Fred Estes, Precinct 3 Buddy Schuessler, Precinct 4 Dave Underwood; County Judge Shannon Worrell.
- County seat: Texas State Library and Archives Commission — Counties and County Seats
The record
No death in the Mason County jail appears on the state's record 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 Mason 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