The Detention Center
Not found - Calhoun County does not name a jail of its own on its own website
- Operated byNot found
- Where the county's prisoners goTwo county-published records, opened in this run, show Calhoun County boarding its prisoners with neighbouring counties. Calhoun County's own supervisors minutes of January 13, 2026 record: 'Motion by George seconded by Ridgely to approve the Calhoun & Pocahontas County Jail Contract. Ayes all. Motion carried.' Carroll County's own supervisors minutes of October 20, 2025 record its sheriff discussing 'the Calhoun County and Carroll County Agreement to House Calhoun County Prisoners' and stating that he intends to terminate that agreement. Read together, Calhoun County's prisoners were being held in Carroll County and a contract with Pocahontas County was approved in January 2026.
- Per-diem ratesNeither record states a rate, so `contracts` is scored 'no'.
- Is there any Calhoun County jail at allNot determined. The sheriff page opened here describes sheriff's sales, weapons permits and driving records and says nothing about a detention facility. Iowa Code 356A.1 allows a board of supervisors to establish a detention facility in lieu of or in addition to the county jail, and plain bilateral boarding contracts are common in Iowa; no authoritative count exists of how many of Iowa's 99 counties operate their own jail, and none is asserted here.
- What was triedhttps://www.calhouncounty.iowa.gov/county_offices/board_of_supervisors/board_membership.php was refused with PROVENANCE_REQUIRED, as was the assignment's pre-authorised https://www.calhouncounty.iowa.gov/. The supervisors agenda page and the January 13, 2026 minutes PDF were both opened.
Source: Calhoun County Board of Supervisors minutes, January 13, 2026 · checked 2026-09-18
Transparency rating
0/10Closed- ✗The jail is named — not published
- ✗Who is in custody — not published
- ✗Beds and daily population — not published
- ✗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
- BedsNot found
Since then
- Not found
The Sheriff
Sheriff Pat Riley
- Runs the jailCalhoun County's own sheriff page describes no detention facility. Under Iowa Code 356.2 the sheriff has charge and custody of prisoners in the county's jail, but on the evidence opened here Calhoun County's prisoners are held under contract in other counties' jails - see jail.facts.
- 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 Calhoun County's own sheriff page, opened September 2026
- Office address416 Fourth Street, Calhoun County Courthouse, Rockwell City, Iowa 50579
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Calhoun 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 Calhoun County)
- Not found - no judge was named on any Calhoun 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
- Calhoun County scores zero of the ten checks, and the reason is structural rather than evasive: the county publishes no jail of its own to be transparent about. Its prisoners are boarded with other counties under contracts its board approves in open session, and those approvals are published - the January 13, 2026 minutes record approval of the Calhoun & Pocahontas County Jail Contract. That is the finding, not a gap.
- Carroll County's own October 20, 2025 minutes independently corroborate the boarding arrangement from the other side, recording Carroll's sheriff discussing the agreement to house Calhoun County prisoners and his intention to terminate it and replace those inmates with additional Polk County inmates.
- No per-diem rate appears in either county's minutes, so `contracts` is 'no' even though the existence of the contracts is published.
- If Calhoun County holds no prisoners of its own, the annual IDOC inspection duty under Iowa Admin. Code 201-50.3 would attach to whichever facility actually holds them, in the county that operates it.
- 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 - the January 13, 2026 minutes record all three present, given by surname only as Jacobs, George and Ridgely; no page giving their full names could be opened, so they are recorded exactly as the minutes print them. The board is a statutory recipient of the county's IDOC jail inspection report under Iowa Code 356.43(4), and it is the body that approved the Pocahontas County jail contract.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Calhoun 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