The Detention Center
Chickasaw County Jail
- Operated byChickasaw County Sheriff's Office
- Detention commandJordan P. Gansen — Jail Administrator
- LocationIn the Chickasaw County Courthouse, 8 E Prospect St, New Hampton, IA 50659; sheriff's office 641-394-3121
- Jail administratorJordan P. Gansen
- Inmate phone ratesPhone cards at $0.50 per minute, sold in $10 and $20 denominations, through Reliance Telephone; collect calls also available with a $35 prepayment through Reliance (1-800-896-3201)
- Inmate texting ratesTexting devices at $4.00 per 30 days, with texts at $0.09 each
- MailInmates may send up to three letters weekly
- VisitationWednesdays between 1:00 and 3:00 p.m., 15 minutes per visitor, recorded and monitored, government-issued photo ID required. Attorneys and ministers have unlimited access at reasonable hours.
- PREAThe county publishes a "ZERO tolerance policy" for sexual assaults, with reports made to the Sheriff's Office at 641-394-3121. No PREA audit result is published.
- Bail bond servicesThe jail page lists eight bail bond services with contact numbers, but publishes no bond schedule and no explanation of how bail is posted
- Beds / daily population / year builtNot found — no capacity figure, no population figure and no construction date is published
- What was triedhttps://chickasawcounty.iowa.gov/sheriff/ ; https://chickasawcounty.iowa.gov/sheriff/county_jail/ ; https://chickasawcounty.iowa.gov/sheriff/administration/ ; https://chickasawcounty.iowa.gov/board_of_supervisors/ ; https://chickasawcounty.iowa.gov/board_of_supervisors/meetings_minutes/ ; https://chickasawcounty.iowa.gov/departments/ . No roster, no bed count, no PREA audit result, no IDOC inspection report, no boarding contract and no corrections budget was found.
Source: Chickasaw County — County Jail, Sheriff's Office · checked 2026-09-18
Transparency rating
2/10Closed- ✓The jail is named
- ✗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
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 Ryan Shawver
- 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
- How this sheriff took officeThe county's own sheriff's administration page states that Ryan Shawver was "appointed as the Chickasaw County Sheriff by the Chickasaw County Board of Supervisors" on January 23, 2023, having previously served as Chief Deputy under Sheriff Martin Hemann
- Confirmed currentNamed as Sheriff on the county's own sheriff's office administration page at chickasawcounty.iowa.gov
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Chickasaw County — Sheriff's Office, Administration · 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 →
- Where the jail money is decidedAgendas and minutes →
Notes on the record
- The domain on file for Chickasaw County, chickasawcoia.org, was wrong. The county's live site is chickasawcounty.iowa.gov.
- fees passes here, which is uncommon in this dataset, and it passes on genuine published prices rather than a named vendor: $0.50 per minute for phone cards in $10 and $20 denominations, a $35 prepayment for collect calls, $4.00 per 30 days for a texting device and $0.09 per text. Those are the county's own figures on its own jail page.
- prea is marked "no". Chickasaw does publish a zero-tolerance statement on sexual assault with a reporting number, which is more than most counties in this group, but the check asks for PREA audit results and no audit result is published.
- bond_info is marked "no" on a strict reading. The jail page lists eight bail bond services with phone numbers, but publishes no bond schedule and no description of how bail is actually posted, which is what "clear guidance on how to post bail" asks for. The list itself is recorded above as what is published.
- jail_administrator is filled in even though Iowa's normal rule is that the elected sheriff is the jailer, because the county itself names a specific officer over the facility. The role sits inside the sheriff's office.
- How the sheriff took office is recorded exactly as the county states it: appointed by the Board of Supervisors on January 23, 2023. Iowa Code 331.651 makes the office elective with a four-year term; the county's own page is the source for the appointment and nothing beyond it is inferred.
- 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 — five members, one per district: Steven Breitbach (First District, term expires 2028), Scott Cerwinske (Second District, 2026), Jacob Hackman (Third District, 2028), Issac Carter (District 4, 2028) and Travis Suckow (Fifth District, 2026). All correspondence to the board is directed through the Auditor's Office. This board is also the body that appointed the current sheriff in January 2023, and under Iowa Code 602.6501 three of its appointees sit on the commission that appoints the county's magistrates.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Chickasaw 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