The Detention Center
Bremer County Jail
- Operated byBremer County Sheriff's Office
- Jail address111 4th Street NE, Waverly, Iowa 50677
- Rated capacityThe jail page states the facility 'can house up to 79 inmates in various configurations'
- Daily populationNot published on any Bremer County page opened
- Boarding other agencies' prisonersThe jail page states: 'Bremer County currently has contracts with other counties to house prisoners along with a contract for federal prisoners.' No counterparty names and no per-diem rates are published, so `contracts` is recorded 'no'.
- VisitationEach inmate is authorised two 30-minute social visits per week, with hours varying by pod (GP1, GP2, F1, WR) between 0800 and 2200; visitors 18 and over must show valid ID and a dress code applies.
- Inmate telephoneProvided through Securus (1-800-844-6591). No rates are published on the county page.
- What was triedThe county's PREA page at https://www.bremercounty.iowa.gov/government/sheriff/prea.php is listed in search results but could not be opened - three attempts returned ROBOTS_DISALLOWED (robots.txt fetch failures, including an HTTP 500). Its contents are therefore not cited and `prea` is recorded 'no'. https://bremercounty.iowa.gov/departments/sheriff/index.php also returned ROBOTS_DISALLOWED, and the assignment's pre-authorised https://www.bremercounty.iowa.gov/ was refused with PROVENANCE_REQUIRED.
Source: Bremer County Jail · checked 2026-09-18
Transparency rating
2/10Closed- ✓The jail is named
- ✗Who is in custody — not published
- ✓Beds and daily population
- ✗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
- BedsThe county's jail page states the facility 'can house up to 79 inmates in various configurations'
Since then
- Not found
The Sheriff
Sheriff Dan Pickett
- 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 nameBremer County's own sheriff page states 'our current Sheriff being Dan Pickett'
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Bremer 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 (covers Bremer County)
- Not found - no judge was named on any Bremer County page opened, and the judicial district number was not confirmed from a source opened in this run
- 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
Notes on the record
- `capacity` passes on the beds figure only. Bremer County publishes a rated capacity ('up to 79 inmates in various configurations') on its own jail page but does not publish a daily population anywhere that was opened.
- Bremer County's jail page confirms the county boards prisoners for other counties and holds a federal contract, but publishes no counterparty and no per-diem rate, so `contracts` is 'no'. Note that this is per-diem boarding revenue coming in; it is not federal funding of the jail.
- A PREA page exists on the county's own domain (it appears in search results as 'PREA - Welcome to Bremer County, IA') but could not be opened across three attempts, all blocked at robots.txt. Because it was never read, it is not cited and `prea` is scored 'no' - not because nothing is published, but because nothing could be verified.
- 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'.
- Bremer County is governed by a Board of Supervisors (Iowa's universal county governing body - supervisors, not commissioners), which is a statutory recipient of the county's IDOC jail inspection report under Iowa Code 356.43(4). No supervisors page, agenda or set of minutes could be opened for Bremer County within the search budget: the only Bremer URLs that gained provenance were sheriff-office pages, and every other path was refused. Board size and member names are therefore Not found.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Bremer 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