The Detention Center
The county publishes no formal name for this facility.
- Operated byPecos County Sheriff's Department
- County publishes a jail nameNo — co.pecos.tx.us has no jail, detention, inmate, visitation, commissary or bond page at all. The Sheriff's Department entry is a name, address, phone and email card and nothing more
- Sheriff's Department address (the jail address in practice)1774 N Hwy 285, Fort Stockton, TX 79735
- No sheriff's office websiteThe Sheriff's Department has no site of its own; the only other presence found was a Facebook page, which is not counted here
- What was triedhttps://www.co.pecos.tx.us/wp-sitemap-posts-page-1.xml and wp-sitemap-posts-department-1.xml (full site inventory) ; /department/pecos-county-sheriffs-department/ ; /county-offices-officials/law-enforcement/ ; /category/notices-announcements/county-budgets/ ; /category/notices-announcements/commissioners-court-agendas/
- Beds and population, 2026-0833 people held in 49 rated beds
Source: Pecos County — Pecos County Sheriff's Department · 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
- Beds49 rated capacity (Texas Commission on Jail Standards Inmate Population Report, 1 August 2026); the county's own site publishes no bed count
Since then
- Not found
The Sheriff
Sheriff Thomas J. Perkins
- Published as"Sheriff — Thomas J. Perkins" on the county's Pecos County Sheriff's Department page
- Address1774 N Hwy 285, P.O. Box 1647, Fort Stockton, TX 79735
- Phone(432) 336-3521 (fax 432-336-2519)
- Emailtj.perkins@co.pecos.tx.us
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Pecos County — Pecos County Sheriff's Department · checked 2026-08-22
The Judges
Pecos County publishes no County Court at Law. Its four Justice of the Peace offices are numbered Precincts 1, 3, 4 and 6 — Fort Stockton, Iraan, Imperial and Sheffield. Each JP has its own department page under /department/justice-of-the-peace-precinct-N/. Two of the four JPs publish personal yahoo.com addresses rather than county email.
County Judge
- Joe Shuster
83rd District Court
- Robert Cadena
112th District Court
- Pete Gomez, Jr.
Justices of the Peace
- Rankin Mitchell (Pct. 1)
- Dena Kennedy (Pct. 3)
- Debbie Braden (Pct. 4)
- Renee Melius (Pct. 6)
- 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
- Pecos County publishes nothing about its jail. Nine of the ten checks are no, and the county does not even name the facility — that is the finding.
- The county's whole published inventory was read from its two WordPress sitemaps; there is no jail page, no roster, no visitation or commissary page, and no bail bond page.
- The Judge & Commissioners and Law Enforcement index pages leak an unrendered shortcode ([pta_member_directory location=...]) instead of a directory; the names above were taken from the individual /department/ pages, which do render.
- Four commissioners plus the County Judge, who presides. Members: Joe Shuster (County Judge), Francisco Ramirez (Pct. 1), Jerome Chavez (Pct. 2), Mickey Jack Perry (Pct. 3), Nathan Reeves (Pct. 4). Courthouse at 103 West Callaghan, Fort Stockton.
- County seat: Texas State Library and Archives Commission — Counties and County Seats
The record
No death in the Pecos 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 Pecos 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