Following an election year with a new jail under construction, Sheriff Danny Boyd said his Office is hitting the ground running in 2025.
Staving off challengers in a four-candidate race — ultimately winning the August Primary Election by 48 votes among more than 6,000 after a hand and machine recount — Boyd said for the next four years in office, transparency and increasing service are his key goals.
“Our goal is to be more transparent for our community, let them know stuff that’s going on as far as, like, if somebody’s put in jail and if they’re released, why they were released,” Boyd said. “We are working on our Facebook page for that to give more information out to the community.”
A frequently accessed information outlet was the Barry County Sheriff’s Office’s jail roster, which has been offline since the old facility closed in June 2024. Boyd said the roster will be relaunched on Monday (Feb. 3) as an ongoing service to the community.
“[Maintaining a jail roster is] not a requirement,” Boyd said. “There are a lot of sheriffs who don’t do it. It’s a headache to keep up with. People think all we do is arrest them and put their picture on there. There’s a process that you have to go through, and then when they bond, or if the charges get reduced, you have to go in and redact that. So you tie up one person with a roster just keeping up with the court dates. There’s a lot that goes into it.
“It does take a little bit more time, but I do it as a courtesy for the people, so they can see things like this is why this person was out, or this is what this guy’s in here for. I understand the public wanting to know that, and we haven’t been trying to hide it, we just haven’t had our jail up and going.”
Regarding increasing service, Boyd said a big factor in achieving that goal is staffing, as for the first time in many years, the Office is fully staffed. The three newest deputies are finishing field training after having graduated from the Police Academy recently. Boyd’s Office paid for a percentage of their Academy fee, with the remainder covered by a scholarship. In return, they have contracts committing at least two years of service to Barry County, or the percentage the Sheriff’s Office contributed to the Academy fee must be returned.
Deputy pay now starts at $46,800, plus an additional $1,500 annually for court paper service for a total annual salary of $48,300.
“We are up to 18 road officers, and that does not count myself, Deputy Sheriff Angela Cole or the detectives, or our transport team or bailiffs,” Boyd said. “We’re up to four officers per shift, so we’ll be seen more, and we’re going to be hitting more of the back roads where our property crimes are being committed. Being able to do more stops will also help us try to get to the drug trafficking. So we’re trying to be more self-initiated because we have more time to stop cars, instead of going from call to call to call to call because we were short-handed. So you’re going to see us out more.”
Boyd said the four cars on duty have assigned areas, with one car patrolling the northern part of the county, one patrolling the south and a floater car to help all areas as needed. The fourth car is a 12-hour shift that takes the place of the floater, allowing the original floater to focus on more specific, heavier-crime areas.
“If we get hitting hard down in Eagle Rock, we can have him go down and work that area very, very hard,” Boyd said. “We basically isolate him to where he can go to different areas with high crime rates.”
A major transition in recent months has been the move to the new administrative office and jail off Old Exeter Road. The new jail, a $17 million, state-ofthe- art facility, can hold up to 120 inmates with a full staff of 16, nine of whom are already on duty, with the other seven beginning a two-week training this week. The jail administrators puts total staff at 17. The old jail was being operated by only six correctional officers. Boyd said the transition has not come without some challenges.
“It’s a big deal to open a building this size,” he said. “There are little things that you don’t realize that you have to do; like for the jail, for instance, had inmates coming in, and we had to make sure we had the inmate uniforms and had food here for them. We had to make sure we had enough things like food trays, because we’ve doubled our capacity on inmates. There’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes people don’t really realize.”
Bringing on the new correctional officers, Boyd said, will also help with retention.
“With 17, we can go from 12-hour shifts to 8-hour shifts, and that’s a lot easier on our COs,” he said. “When you’re working in a jail for 12 straight hours, that’s a lot. It’s not like on the road where you can get out and get away from a little bit. You’re just in that constant jail environment all the time.”
The jail opened for inmates on Jan. 6, and Boyd said all inmates previously being held in other counties, about 40-50, are now back in Barry.
“We couldn’t just bring them all in at once, and it worked out really well because in January, some of the ones we had at Stone County had court,” Boyd said. “So, we had about 12 that had to come to court, and instead of bringing them to court and taking them back, we were able to bring them over and book them in. When you have 50 inmates that are coming in, it took us a week to get everybody transferred back over.
“We maintained about 40-42 housed in other counties through the whole process, and there at the end, we had some that failed to appear that we picked up, so that bumped us up to about 48-49.”
Boyd said finance-wise, with other counties charging a cheaper rate to house inmates, the Sheriff’s Office managed to spend about the same amount of money by closing the jail and sending inmates elsewhere as it would have to keep the facility running. Factors in that equation included less spending on jail upkeep and on staff salaries.
“We had only four people on, and all they did was transport,” Boyd said. “It was working out well, but at the end, we started to get to the point it was going to cost us money.”
With the jail now in operation and a capacity of 120, Boyd said Barry County will likely begin housing inmates from other counties, with any revenue from housing individuals supplementing the jail budget.
“McDonald County has already contacted us about us wanting to maybe house some of their folks,” Boyd said. “We’re not here to make money, but that does help kind of take some of the cash flow off of the people here in Barry County.”
Boyd is also preparing to hold inmates for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
“With the new presidential administration, we’ve been told that on these ICE holds, we’re going to be holding more people,” he said. “In Greene County, I think they’re up to 300 or 400 beds they left open for strictly for the ICE holds. We will have that here in our area once that starts and the trickling comes down, but we have been told to be prepared. We’re just holding them for a short term until the federal agents can pick them up for deportation.”
Boyd said since opening, the Sheriff’s Office has had very few issues with inmates in the jail, one of which he said occurred on day one and was handled quickly.
“Our first day, we had a little bit of an issue with one inmate,” he said. “Again, they’re going from the old building, where they had a little more free rein and do what they wanted to do, to this one that’s state-of-theart. They don’t get to do that anymore.
“So, you have some people like a bully in school. They’re going to see how far they can push you. But once you make an example out of one, it’s kind of cleared it up for everybody else. They understand this is a whole different procedure now.”
Regarding the jail and how his Office handles inmates, Boyd said he hopes to provide more education about the process in coming years.
“People think that we just go out, arrest a person and put them in jail, then we turn around and kick them loose,” he said. “There’s a process that person has to go through, and our court systems, their hands are kind of tied on what they can hold people on and what they can’t since Missouri’s Supreme Court set that ruling on non-violent correct.
“I understand the people’s frustrations. If somebody stole my car, I’d be aggravated. But, they have to understand there are certain criteria that we have to follow. We do our part. A person with a criminal history, that helps us to be able to keep them in jail. I just wish the public would understand and look up that Supreme Court law that states what crimes that we can actually hold people in jail for and try to get on our side. We really are trying. Our guys don’t like to go out and arrest someone and just kick them loose. That’s not our goal.”
Boyd said the new jail being open will also help his Office do more than in the past.
“Before, we were kind of limited on what we could and couldn’t do because of having to transport,” he said. “Now that the jail is up and going, we’re hoping that turns things around and people realize they’re going to be put in jail and probably end up staying. Now that we’re up and going and the citizens helped us build the new building, we want to show them, ‘You did this, and we’re going to do our part by doing our job as far as arresting these folks and making them pay for their crimes.’” While held, Boyd said inmates have some opportunity for rehabilitation through education. Of the 48 inmates being held last week, nine have signed up for the new GED program.
“We’re getting ready to get that up and going, and hopefully, we can help basically rehab these folks,” Boyd said. “When they go back out, they can actually get a job because they have a diploma. That was a lot of what we’d hear is, ‘I can’t get a job because a lot of places won’t take you if you don’t have a high school diploma or any kind of GED.’ That’s why we’re trying to get this process up and going.”
People can follow the Sheriff’s Office on Facebook at www.facebook.com/profile. php?id=100064845214128, and the office’s website is www. barrycountysheriff.com.
