The Detention Center
Vernon County Sheriff's Office & Detention Center
- Operated byVernon County Sheriff's Office
- Jail address1320 Bad Axe Court, Viroqua, WI 54665
- BedsNot found on the county's own site (a third-party architecture-firm portfolio page, not the county's own site, describes the facility as accommodating 86 inmates in Huber and secure housing, expandable to 125 with double bunking, replacing a jail dating to the early 1900s; not used to answer the capacity check since it is not the office's own site)
- PREAFacility maintains a Prison Rape Elimination Act policy and publishes annual PREA reports
- PaymentsCitations/warrants can be paid via GovPayNow (online or phone); a transaction fee is added; page states 'No bond posting' for citations and warrants
Source: Vernon County, WI - Jail Information · checked 2026-09-19
Transparency rating
3/10Closed- ✓The jail is named
- ✗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
- ✗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
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
Sheriff Roy Torgerson
- Runs the jailVernon County Sheriff's Office operates the Vernon County Sheriff's Office & Detention Center
- 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: Vernon County, WI - Sheriff's Office Administration · 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.
Vernon 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 boardVernon County Board of Supervisors →
- Where the jail money is decidedAgendas and minutes →
Notes on the record
- The Sheriff's Office site has both a 'jail.php' (Jail Information) page and a separate 'jail_info.php' page; jail_info.php described in general terms that a dedicated jail section covers capacity, roster, bond, fees and PREA, but the specific data (bed counts, roster listing, bond amounts) was not present in the fetched content of either page.
- The Citations and Warrants page explicitly states 'No bond posting' is available for citations/warrants payments (a different function from posting jail bond), and only mentions that a GovPayNow transaction fee applies without giving a specific bond-posting page; bond_info is therefore recorded as 'no'.
- A third-party architecture firm's portfolio page (potterlawson.com, not the county's own site) describes the Vernon County Detention Center's capacity as 86 beds (Huber and secure housing), expandable to 125 with double bunking, and notes it replaced 'the oldest operational jail in the state of Wisconsin' (early 1900s); this is included here for context only and was not used to mark the capacity check as 'yes' since it is not on the sheriff's own domain.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Vernon 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