The State Line
Before you click a county, here are the rules that county is playing by. Three questions, asked the same way of every state.
GOVERNING BODY. The board of county commissioners. SDCL 24-11-2 places the duty to establish and maintain the jail on "the board of county commissioners and at the expense of the county," SDCL 24-11-23 makes the board (as "[t]he governing body or commission responsible for the operation of a jail") the author of the jail's written policies and procedures, SDCL 24-11-8 makes the board the body that fixes the per-diem charged to the United States, other states and other counties for boarding their prisoners and that controls the special jail building fund those charges feed, and SDCL 7-12-9 makes the board the body that authorizes and compensates the sheriff's jailers. Under SDCL 7-8-1 commissioners serve staggered terms; SDCL 7-8-2 provides that each is elected by the voters of the district in which the commissioner resides, and that moving out of the district or failing to attend meetings creates a vacancy; SDCL 7-8-3 to 7-8-8 govern changing the number of commissioners by petition and election, and SDCL 7-8-10 requires decennial redistricting. General powers are at SDCL 7-8-20. An optional form of county government exists at SDCL ch. 7-8A. A decision of the board can be appealed to circuit court under SDCL 7-8-27, and SDCL 7-8-32 makes that appeal the exclusive remedy. TRIBAL JURISDICTION — THE POINT THAT MUST NOT BE GOT WRONG. Nine federally recognized tribes hold reservation land in South Dakota; the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of South Dakota organizes its Indian country work around nine reservations — Cheyenne River, Crow Creek, Flandreau, Lower Brulé, Pine Ridge, Rosebud, Sisseton-Wahpeton, Standing Rock and Yankton. Six South Dakota counties lie entirely within a reservation: Bennett, Corson, Dewey, Oglala Lakota, Todd and Ziebach. A reservation lying inside a county's boundaries does NOT mean the county sheriff runs detention there, and it does not mean the county sheriff has general criminal jurisdiction there. The U.S. Attorney's Office states the rule directly: "South Dakota's enabling legislation and state constitution disclaimed state court criminal jurisdiction for cases arising in Indian country," and "[a]n effort by the state legislature to assert Indian country jurisdiction in 1961 was unsuccessful, and South Dakota remains a non-Public Law 280 state." The statutory wreckage of that effort is still in the code and is worth reading, because it is unusually explicit. SDCL 1-1-12 (1957) purported to assume "jurisdiction of all criminal and civil causes of action arising in Indian country," and SDCL 1-1-15 said offenses on Indian lands "shall be dealt with and proceeded against in like manner as if they had occurred on other lands within such respective counties." SDCL 1-1-18 (1961) restated the assumption. But SDCL 1-1-20 then provides that "[s]ubject to the provisions of §1-1-21, §§1-1-12 to 1-1-17, inclusive, are hereby repealed," and SDCL 1-1-21 supplies the condition that never came true: "Except as to criminal offenses and civil causes of action arising on any highway, as defined in chapter 31-1, the jurisdiction provided for in §1-1-18 is not assumed or accepted by this state, and §§1-1-18 and 1-1-20 is not considered in effect, unless and until the Governor of the State of South Dakota, if satisfied that the United States of America has made proper provision for the reimbursement to this state and its counties for the added costs in connection with the assumption of said jurisdiction, has issued a proper proclamation duly filed with the secretary of state declaring the said jurisdiction to be assumed and accepted." No such proclamation issued. The Bureau of Indian Affairs lists South Dakota among the optional Public Law 280 states with the parenthetical "(1957-1961)" rather than among the mandatory states, which is consistent with an attempted and abandoned assumption; the DOJ statement that South Dakota "remains a non-Public Law 280 state" is the cleaner citation. Two caveats for accuracy: the highway carve-out in the surviving text of SDCL 1-1-21 (amended as recently as SL 2023, ch 3, §1) has its own contested litigation history, which was NOT researched here; and none of this displaces state jurisdiction over crimes by non-Indians against non-Indians within reservation boundaries, or over non-Indian fee land questions, which turn on federal case law not reviewed here. What follows practically is that detention on the reservations is tribal and federal, not county. The Census Bureau's 2020 correctional facility file for South Dakota lists, alongside the county jails, a distinct set of tribal and federally operated detention facilities: Cheyenne River Sioux Adult Detention Center (10) and Cheyenne River Sioux Juvenile Detention Center (2); Lower Brule Justice Center-Adult Detention (45); Rosebud Sioux Tribal Police Department and Adult Detention (88) and Rosebud Sioux Wanbli Wiconi Tipi Juvenile Detention (14); Sisseton-Wahpeton Law Enforcement Adult Detention Center (15); Oglala Sioux Tribal Offenders Facility and Medicine Root Detention Center on Pine Ridge, and Ki Yuksa O'tipi Reintegration Center, all flagged as federal in that file and reported without counts. Sixty percent of the U.S. Attorney's criminal caseload in this district — the office says "[b]etween 50-60 percent" — is Indian country offenses. The one bridge in state law runs the other way: SDCL 24-11-3 lets a county with no jail, or an overcrowded one, deliver a prisoner to "the jail or juvenile detention facility of any near or adjoining state, Indian reservation, county, organized township, or municipality" under written agreement, and requires that "[a]ny written agreement with a federally recognized Indian tribe shall receive approval from the Bureau of Indian Affairs prior to the delivery of any prisoner." So a county can pay to house its people on a reservation, but that does not make the reservation facility a county jail or put it under the sheriff. THE UNORGANIZED COUNTIES. South Dakota has 66 counties (SDCL ch. 7-1 names each one's boundaries, at §§7-1-2 through 7-1-68, with 7-1-66 repealed). Two of them are unorganized and have no functioning county seat of their own. Todd County, created in 1909 and coterminous with the main Rosebud Indian Reservation, "does not have its own county seat. Instead, Winner in neighboring Tripp County serves as its administrative center," and "[i]t contracts with Tripp County for its Auditor, Treasurer, and Registrar of Deeds." Oglala Lakota County — renamed from Shannon County, lying entirely within the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation — "does not have a functioning county seat; Hot Springs in neighboring Fall River County serves as its administrative center," and it "contracts with Fall River County for its Auditor, Treasurer, and Registrar of Deeds." Both nonetheless appear as full counties in the judicial map: SDCL 16-5-1.2 places Todd in the Sixth Circuit (with Tripp) and Oglala Lakota in the Seventh (with Fall River, Custer and Pennington). SDCL ch. 7-17, "Government Of Unorganized Counties," has been repealed, and the current statutory basis for the Todd–Tripp and Oglala Lakota–Fall River arrangements was NOT located in the sources reviewed; the description above rests on encyclopedic sources and the counties' own site, not on a statute read here. Neither county appears in the 2020 correctional facility file as operating a jail. The practical consequence for a county page: for Todd County the nearest detention is the Winner City Jail in Tripp County (census-day population 94, larger than all but four county jails in the state) and the Rosebud Sioux tribal adult detention facility; for Oglala Lakota County it is the Pine Ridge tribal and BIA facilities and, for state charges, Fall River and Pennington counties. HOW MANY COUNTIES ACTUALLY RUN A JAIL — AND WHY THAT NUMBER IS SOFT. The figure of 26 is a floor derived facility by facility from the U.S. Census Bureau's 2020 correctional facility file: Beadle (Beadle County Regional Corrections Center), Bon Homme, Brookings, Brown, Brule, Charles Mix, Clay, Codington, Davison, Day, Dewey, Edmunds, Fall River, Faulk, Grant (Milbank Detention Center), Hughes, Lake, Lawrence, Marshall, Meade, Minnehaha, Pennington, Roberts, Union, Walworth and Yankton. It should be treated as a floor and not as a licensed-facility count, for a specific structural reason: no South Dakota agency licenses, inspects, grades or lists county jails, so unlike North Dakota — where the count can be derived from dated Department of Corrections inspection reports naming every facility, its grade, its rated capacity and its population — South Dakota has no authoritative roster to check it against. A facility that was empty on census day, or that has opened or closed since April 2020, will be wrong in this count. Commercial jail-directory websites give higher numbers but none was traceable to a government source and none is used here. Where the other 40 counties send people was NOT established: it would have to be reconstructed county by county from individual intergovernmental agreements under SDCL 24-11-3 and 24-11-4, which are county records, not a state dataset. SHARED AND REGIONAL FACILITIES. South Dakota's sharing statutes are real but produce a weaker form of regional facility than North Dakota's. SDCL 24-11-4 authorizes two or more townships, municipalities or counties to contract so a jail may be "used, owned, constructed, maintained, or operated" jointly. SDCL 24-11-4.1 authorizes "[a]ny combination of counties or municipalities" to form "an area jail or juvenile detention facility compact which may be a separate legal entity" under SDCL ch. 1-24, able to issue revenue bonds and enter lease and lease-back agreements under SDCL 7-25-19 and 7-25-20, and to impose liquidated damages on a member that withdraws without the consent of all other parties. But the same section provides that "[o]peration of the jail or juvenile detention facility shall remain under the authority of the county where the facility is located or by agreement with a municipality" — so even a bonded, multi-county compact does not create an independently administered regional jail under its own hired administrator, the way NDCC 12-44.1-02(1)(c) does across the border. The host county's sheriff remains the jailer. SDCL 24-11-4.2 and 24-11-4.3 govern annual member rates, additional compensation to the sheriff, daily rates for nonmembers, and how collected money is distributed to the member operating the facility and to compact debts. The only facility name in the 2020 census file that advertises a regional role is the Beadle County Regional Corrections Center in Huron; the identity of its partner counties was NOT established here, and no compact membership roster was located. Boarding revenue is otherwise handled through SDCL 24-11-8 (charges for prisoners held for the United States, other states, or other counties, with proceeds available for a special jail building fund), SDCL 24-11-5 (fugitives from justice) and SDCL 24-11-6 and 24-11-7 (federal prisoners, with the sheriff transmitting a calendar of federal prisoners to the federal district judge). That is contract revenue; no source reviewed indicates South Dakota county jails receive federal money to operate. THE HEADLINE. South Dakota and North Dakota are the two halves of a natural experiment, and they landed in opposite places. North Dakota's Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation must write binding jail standards, must inspect every facility at least once a year, grades each jail by how long it may hold anyone, can bill it for monitoring, can order it closed, and publishes the full narrative report for every facility. South Dakota has none of that: no state jail standards, no state inspector, no grades, no reports, no state agency with jurisdiction over an adult county jail at all. Each county writes its own policies under SDCL 24-11-23 and the only outside check in the chapter is a circuit judge who "may" visit. On deaths the two states are closer, and both are poor: neither has a death-in-custody reporting statute, both told the federal government so, and neither publishes a jail-death number. South Dakota's coroner statute is at least explicit that a county jail death must be investigated (SDCL 23-14-18(3)) — but the coroner is a county officer, may be an appointee serving at the pleasure of the same county commission that runs the jail, and reports the death into the vital records system, not into any accountability record. Layered on top is a jurisdictional map no other Plains state matches: nine tribes, six counties entirely inside reservations, two counties without their own county seat, and a state that never took Public Law 280 jurisdiction — so on a great deal of South Dakota's land, the question "who runs the jail" does not have a county answer at all.
Compare all fifty states →That is the one thing every county in America has in common. The jail belongs to the people of the county and is paid for out of their taxes. The sheriff who runs it is elected. The judge who decides who sits in it is elected or appointed. Three offices, enormous power, and almost nobody watching.
How much is your sheriff — and your judge — costing you?
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. The Justice Department is required to count deaths in custody and does not do it properly — a Senate investigation found it failed to identify more than 990 such deaths in a single year. MoBetta is building the county-by-county record instead.
Your VOTE is POWERFUL.
The sheriffs who run these jails are elected. So are the commissioners who pay for them.
Deadlines, ID rules and South Dakota’s own election office, from vote.gov — the official U.S. government voter site. Where you vote on the day is set by your county election office.
South Dakota — all 66 counties open. Click any county on the map, or see the transparency scoreboard below.
This is our jail
Every county in South Dakota was checked against the same ten questions on 2026-08-25. This measures disclosure, not conduct — what a county publishes about a building its taxpayers own. A county can raise its score in an afternoon by posting a document.
Two state agencies do what these counties don't. The State Department of Health inspects every county jail each year under state law and publishes the report — Wyoming has no such agency at all — and the State Auditor and Inspector audits every county's books. Both are the state's disclosure, not the county's. Not one Oklahoma county posts its own inspection result, so every county page here links the state report instead. And on the number that matters most, no state agency stands in: not one of the 77 publishes a death in custody.