The Detention Center
Lincoln County Jail
- Operated byLincoln County Sheriff's Office
- Jail address1104 East First Street, Merrill, WI 54452
- Beds183 beds (increased from 53 following a 2008 renovation)
Source: Lincoln County, WI - Jail · checked 2026-09-19
Transparency rating
4/10Partial- ✓The jail is named
- ✗Who is in custody — not published
- ✓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
- ✓Phone, video and commissary rates
The Building
You paid for it. Here is what the record says it cost.
- Year builtNot found
- Original costNot found
- Paid for byNot found
- Beds183 (53 prior to a 2008 renovation)
Since then
- 2008 renovation
The Sheriff
Sheriff Ken Schneider
- Runs the jailThe Lincoln County Sheriff's Office operates the Lincoln County Jail at 1104 E. First Street, Merrill, WI
- How the office is filledElected, four-year term, Wis. Stat. ch. 59
- Statutory basisWis. Stat. ch. 59 gives the elected county sheriff custody of the county jail
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Lincoln County, WI - Sheriff's Office · checked 2026-09-19
The Judges
Wisconsin circuit court judges are elected on a nonpartisan ballot to six-year terms under Wis. Const. art. VII — state judicial officers, not county officials.
Lincoln County Circuit Court
- Not found
- The county's bond schedule
- Share of the jail population held pretrial
- Median time from booking to first appearance
Source: the state judiciary · checked 2026-09-19
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 boardLincoln County Board of Supervisors
- Where the jail money is decidedNot found
Notes on the record
- The current inmate roster is hosted on a third-party Zuercher portal (lincoln-so-wi.zuercherportal.com), a separate domain from the county's own site, so the roster check is marked no.
- A page titled 'Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA)' was found at lincolncountysheriff.us/prea/, but on inspection that domain and page are for Lincoln County, Nebraska (North Platte, NE), not Lincoln County, Wisconsin — it was not used as a source, and no Wisconsin PREA page was found.
- The fee schedule covers civil process, mileage, postage and sheriff's sale fees rather than jail-specific inmate fees; it is still counted as a published fee schedule on the office's own site.
- State inspection/oversight: Wisconsin county jails are subject to inspection by the WI Department of Corrections, Division of Community Corrections, under Wis. Admin. Code DOC 350; no county-specific inspection report was found on the Lincoln County site.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Lincoln 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 2026-09-19 · dollars and outcomes still being gathered