The Detention Center
Monroe County Jail
- Operated byMonroe County Sheriff's Office (jail operator per Wis. Stat. ch. 59; not independently confirmed on a page opened during this research pass)
- FindingRepeated attempts to open the Monroe County Sheriff's Office jail sub-page (co.monroe.wi.us/departments/sheriff-s-office/jail) and several related sub-pages returned 403 (access denied) errors, both via the fetch tool and via direct request; the county's home page and general Sheriff's Office landing page loaded but did not include jail address, capacity, or administrator information
- Domain cautionA search result for 'monroecountysheriffsoffice.com/Jail_Information.html' was opened and found to describe Monroe County, MISSOURI (area code 660, Missouri Sheriff's Association), not Monroe County, Wisconsin — discarded as the wrong jurisdiction rather than cited
Source: Monroe County, WI - Sheriff's Office (landing page only; jail sub-page inaccessible) · checked 2026-09-19
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
- BedsNot found
Since then
- Not found
The Sheriff
Not found
- Runs the jailWisconsin county sheriffs have custody of the county jail under Wis. Stat. ch. 59; Monroe County's own site lists a Sheriff's Office but its current sheriff's name could not be confirmed from a page successfully opened during this research pass
- How the office is filledElected, four-year term, Wis. Stat. ch. 59
- Statutory basisWis. Stat. ch. 59 (county sheriff)
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Monroe 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.
Monroe 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 boardMonroe County Board of Supervisors
- Where the jail money is decidedNot found
Notes on the record
- Monroe County's own domain (co.monroe.wi.us) appears to run Akamai bot-mitigation that returned 403 errors on most sub-pages attempted during this pass, including the Sheriff's Office jail sub-page, the civil-process-services page, and the county-board sub-pages, despite the site's home page and the bare Sheriff's Office landing page loading successfully (with only a mission statement, no names or jail details).
- Per the accuracy rule that a sheriff who has left office is worse than 'Not found,' and that only the office's own site counts for the audit checks, the current sheriff's name and all ten audit checks are reported as 'Not found' / 'no' rather than filled in from an aggregator or an out-of-state look-alike domain.
- The county seat (Sparta) and courthouse address (124 N. Court St., Sparta, WI 54656) were confirmed from the county's own home page.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Monroe 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