The Detention Center
Buchanan County Sheriff's Office Correctional Facility (the county also calls it the Correctional Division, and Reliance Telephone lists it as Buchanan County Jail)
- Operated byBuchanan County Sheriff's Office
- Jail address210 5th Ave NE, Independence, IA 50644
- Rated capacity46 beds
- Daily populationNot published on any Buchanan County page opened
- Day-to-day supervisorCorrectional Supervisor Steve Vine - an internal post under the elected sheriff, not a separate county detention department, so jail_administrator stays null
- VisitationTuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, 1:00 pm to 4:00 pm excluding holidays; pre-approval required and limited to once weekly per inmate
- Inmate telephonePhone cards through Reliance Telephone (select Iowa, then Buchanan County Jail). No rates are published.
- Victim notificationIowa VINE
- What was triedThe county's own sheriff page links a Board of Supervisors page, a County Budgets page and an Agendas & Minutes page, but all three were refused with PROVENANCE_REQUIRED and so cannot be cited. The assignment's pre-authorised https://www.buchanancounty.iowa.gov/ was refused the same way. The sheriff's FAQ page was opened and contains no bond, fee, capacity, population or roster information.
Source: Buchanan County Sheriff's Office - Correctional Division · 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
- Beds46 beds, per the county's own Correctional Division page
Since then
- Not found
The Sheriff
Sheriff Scott Buzynski
- 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 the sheriff on Buchanan County's own sheriff page, which also names Chief Deputy Chris Chesmore
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Buchanan County Sheriff · 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 Buchanan County)
- Not found - no judge was named on any Buchanan 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
Notes on the record
- `capacity` passes on the beds figure only - the county publishes 46 beds on its own Correctional Division page but publishes no daily population.
- Buchanan County names a 'Correctional Supervisor' (Steve Vine) over the facility. Under Iowa Code 356.2 the elected sheriff still has charge and custody of the prisoners, and this is an internal supervisory post rather than a separate county detention department or a 28E regional director, so jail_administrator is recorded as null per the brief.
- A County Budgets page exists on the county's own domain (linked from the sheriff page) but could not be opened, so `budget` is scored 'no' on the basis that nothing was verified, not that nothing is published.
- 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, the standard Iowa county governing body and a statutory recipient of the county's IDOC jail inspection report under Iowa Code 356.43(4). Buchanan County's own sheriff page links a supervisors page, a county budgets page and an agendas-and-minutes page, so all three exist on the county domain, but none of them could be opened in this run (PROVENANCE_REQUIRED). Board size and member names are Not found, and no minutes could be searched for an inspection report.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Buchanan 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