The Detention Center
Boone County Jail
- Operated byBoone County Sheriff's Office
- Jail address1019 West Mamie Eisenhower Ave., Boone, IA 50036
- How to post bondThe jail page states accepted payment is limited to 'cash, cashier's check or money orders'; cashier's checks and money orders must be made payable to the clerk of court of the county where the charges originated. Charge and bond information by phone at 515-433-0524 opt. 1.
- Inmate telephone and commissaryTelephone service is provided through Reliance Telephone and there is a commissary account system, with a 24-hour kiosk in the sheriff's office lobby for deposits. No rates are published.
- PREAThe jail page states a 'zero tolerance toward all forms of sexual abuse and sexual harassment' and gives reporting routes (the Sheriff, the Jail Administrator, or ACCESS at 515-432-3606). That is a stated policy, not a published audit result, so `prea` is recorded 'no'.
- A jail administrator exists but is not namedBoone County's July 1, 2025 supervisors minutes discuss a pay adjustment for the 'Jail Administrator' and approve a jailer promotion, but no name is given, and the post is an internal role under the elected sheriff, so jail_administrator stays null.
- Rated capacity and daily populationNot found on any Boone County page opened.
- What was triedhttps://boonecounty.iowa.gov/departments/ and the assignment's pre-authorised http://www.boonecounty.iowa.gov/home were both refused with PROVENANCE_REQUIRED and so are not cited. The published inmate-roster PDF at https://boonecounty.iowa.gov/files/sheriff/inmate_roster_10287.pdf was opened but returned no machine-readable text.
Source: Boone County Sheriff's Office - Jail · checked 2026-09-18
Transparency rating
4/10Partial- ✓The jail is named
- ✓Who is in custody
- ✗Beds and daily population — not published
- ✓What it costs taxpayers
- ✗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 — 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
Sheriff Andy Godzicki
- Runs the jailYes - the elected county sheriff. Iowa Code 356.2: 'The sheriff shall have charge and custody of the prisoners in the jail or other prisons of the sheriff's county,' repeated in the sheriff's general duties at Iowa Code 331.653(35).
- How the office is filledElected. Iowa Code 331.651 makes the office elective for a four-year term, requires the sheriff to be a certified peace officer (or to complete basic training within a year), and provides that on a vacancy the first deputy assumes the office.
- Source of nameNamed as 'Andy Godzicki, Sheriff' on Boone County's own sheriff page, opened September 2026
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Boone County Sheriff's Office · checked 2026-09-18
The Judges
Iowa district judges are merit-selected, not elected in contested races: a district judicial nominating commission (Iowa Code ch. 46 - five electors appointed by the governor, five elected by the resident bar, chaired by the judge of longest service) sends the governor two nominees, the governor appoints one, and the judge then faces a yes/no retention election and six-year terms. Iowa has 14 judicial election districts for nominating purposes. The official who actually sets bail at first appearance is a magistrate: Iowa Code 804.22 requires an arrested person to be taken 'without unnecessary delay...before the nearest or most accessible magistrate,' who 'shall fix the amount of bail or other conditions of release.' Iowa magistrates are appointed, not elected - Iowa Code 602.6501 puts a magistrate appointing commission in each county (one district judge, three members appointed by the county board of supervisors, and two attorneys elected by the county's attorneys), and 602.6403 has that commission appoint the county's magistrates to four-year terms. The three supervisor appointees are therefore the only voter-accountable link in how the person who sets bail in this county got the job. Judges and magistrates are state judicial officers, not county officials.
Iowa District Court - Judicial District 2 (covers Boone County)
- Not found - no judge was named on any Boone County page opened
- The county's bond schedule
- Share of the jail population held pretrial
- Median time from booking to first appearance
Source: the state judiciary · checked 2026-09-18
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 boardBoard of County Commissioners →
- Where the jail money is decidedAgendas and minutes →
Notes on the record
- `budget` passes on the county's own supervisors minutes of June 26, 2019, which record a specific departmental appropriation: 'The departmental appropriation for Jail Expenses is lowered by $5,000 to $926,481.' That is a county-published detention figure, but it is seven years old as of this research and is not a current adopted budget line.
- `roster` passes on the county's own Inmate Roster page, which publishes a PDF roster on the county domain. The PDF itself was opened and returned no machine-readable text, so the individual names and charges it carries could not be read or verified here.
- The July 1, 2025 and June 26, 2019 supervisors minutes were both opened and searched for an IDOC jail inspection report, jail capacity or population figures, and prisoner-boarding contracts with rates. None of those appear in either document.
- Iowa publishes no statewide dataset of deaths in county jail custody. Two duties exist and neither produces a public number: Iowa Admin. Code 201-50.22(14) requires the state jail inspection unit of the Department of Corrections to be 'notified within 24 hours of any death, attempted suicide, fire, escape, injury to staff or prisoners from assaults, or use of force and prisoner self-injuries'; and Iowa Code 127.3(1) requires an autopsy for a death 'in a prison, jail or correctional institution or under police custody, where there is not a natural disease process that accounts for the death,' routing it through the state medical examiner. The `deaths` check therefore passes only if this county itself publishes a death in its own custody, and none was found.
- Iowa Code 356.49 requires every sheriff to file a monthly written report with the IDOC director giving the number of men, women and juveniles held, so the population data exists inside IDOC, but no evidence was found that IDOC publishes it and there is no state jail-population page. `capacity` can therefore only pass on the county's own published numbers.
- Open records in Iowa run under Iowa Code ch. 22; the right is at 22.2 ('Every person shall have the right to examine and copy a public record'). There is no blanket response deadline - the only clock is 22.8(4), which caps delay taken to screen a record for confidentiality: 'a reasonable delay for this purpose shall not exceed twenty calendar days and ordinarily should not exceed ten business days.'
- Research constraint: WebFetch in this run would only open URLs that had appeared in one of the five permitted search results - the pre-authorised county home-page URLs supplied in the assignment and every link harvested from an already-opened page were refused with PROVENANCE_REQUIRED. Several known-to-exist county pages therefore could not be opened and so are not cited; they are listed under 'What was tried'.
- Board of Supervisors, three members elected countywide to four-year terms: Erich Kretzinger (Chairman, term expires 2028), Scott Longhorn (term expires 2028) and Shawn Bryant (Vice-Chairman, term expires 2026). All three were recorded present in the July 1, 2025 minutes. The board is a statutory recipient of the county's IDOC jail inspection report under Iowa Code 356.43(4); no inspection report was found in the minutes opened.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Boone 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 2026-09-18 · dollars and outcomes still being gathered