The Detention Center
Not scored. The county's own website was not reachable in the session that produced this record, so its disclosures were never examined. This is a gap in the research, not a finding about the county.
- Operated byNot found
- StatusNothing about Cherokee County's jail is recorded here, because no page on either of the county's domains could be retrieved. Every attempt was refused under the site's own robots.txt rules. This is a crawling restriction on the county's web infrastructure, not a finding that the county publishes nothing.
- Domain correctionThe domain on file, cherokeecountyiowa.com, is a legacy site. The county's current site is www.cherokeecounty.iowa.gov. Both were tried and both are robots-disallowed.
- What was triedhttps://www.cherokeecounty.iowa.gov/ (ROBOTS_DISALLOWED); https://www.cherokeecounty.iowa.gov/departments/offices_f_-_z/sheriff/index.php (ROBOTS_DISALLOWED); https://www.cherokeecounty.iowa.gov/departments/offices_f_-_z/sheriff/staff_directory.php (ROBOTS_DISALLOWED); https://www.cherokeecounty.iowa.gov/community/service_center/department_directory.php (ROBOTS_DISALLOWED); https://www.cherokeecounty.iowa.gov/Document_Center/Minutes/2024/Oct%2022%202024%20min.pdf (ROBOTS_DISALLOWED); https://cherokeecountyiowa.com/offices/sheriff/index.htm (ROBOTS_DISALLOWED)
- Leads not followed upSearch results show the county maintains a sheriff's page with a staff directory and a forms page, a Board of Supervisors section with separate agendas and minutes pages, a Document_Center holding Board of Supervisors minute books by year, and a department directory. None of those pages could be opened, so nothing from them is cited or relied on. A search for a separate first-party sheriff's domain, of the kind Black Hawk County has, found none — only the county site and a Facebook page. Commercial inmate-lookup sites returned by that search are disregarded entirely and are not sources.
Source: Not found — no Cherokee County page could be opened · checked 2026-09-18
The Building
You paid for it. Here is what the record says it cost.
- Year builtNot found
- Original costNot found
- Paid for byNot found. County jails in Iowa run on county property and local taxes; no federal funding is claimed here.
- BedsNot found
Since then
- Not found
The Sheriff
Sheriff Not found
- Runs the jailYes — the elected sheriff, under 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") and Iowa Code 331.653(35)
- How the office is filledElected to a four-year term under Iowa Code 331.651; the sheriff must be a certified peace officer or complete basic training within a year, and on a vacancy the first deputy assumes the office
- Why no name is recordedNo Cherokee County page could be opened. Every URL on both of the county's domains is refused by the fetch tool under the site's robots.txt rules, including the site root. No page naming the current sheriff was read, and naming a sheriff who may have left office is worse than "Not found", so none is given.
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Not found — no Cherokee County page could be opened · checked 2026-09-18
The Judges
Iowa's 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. Bail at first appearance is set by a magistrate, not a district judge: 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 Iowa Code 602.6403 has that commission appoint the county's magistrate or magistrates to four-year terms. The three supervisor appointees are the only voter-accountable link in how the official who sets bail got the job. Judges are state judicial officers, not county officials, and are not added to the vote line.
Iowa District Court — district judges for this county's judicial election district
- Not found
Magistrate — the officer who fixes bail at initial appearance (Iowa Code 804.22)
- Not found
- 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
- Not scored. Every page on both Cherokee County domains refused automated retrieval, so the county was never examined. Ten "no" entries would read as a finding that the county publishes nothing; no such finding was made.
- All ten checks are "no" for the narrow and honest reason that no URL on a Cherokee County domain could be opened. Every attempt was refused under the site's robots.txt rules, on both www.cherokeecounty.iowa.gov and the legacy cherokeecountyiowa.com, including the site root. These "no" answers mean "not verified from a page that was opened" — they are not evidence that this county fails to publish. This entry should be re-run by a method that can read the site.
- The seat is recorded as Cherokee with an empty seat_source, because no page stating it was opened.
- No sheriff name is recorded. Naming a sheriff who may have left office would be worse than recording nothing.
- One correction was still established: the domain on file, cherokeecountyiowa.com, is a legacy site and the county's current site is www.cherokeecounty.iowa.gov.
- 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.
- Deaths in custody: Iowa has no public dataset. 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; 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. Neither produces a public number.
- Open records: 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 at twenty calendar days and says it ordinarily should not exceed ten business days.
- Board of Supervisors. No member is named here, because the county's Board of Supervisors pages and its minutes archive could not be opened under the site's robots.txt rules. The county clearly maintains an indexed archive of Board of Supervisors minute books by year; it simply could not be read from here.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Cherokee 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