The Detention Center
Not found - the county's Sheriff & Local Departments page names a 'Clarke County Law Enforcement Center' at 220 Townline Road, Osceola, Iowa 50213, but the page opened does not name or describe a jail at that address.
- Operated byNot found - under Iowa Code 356.2 the elected sheriff has charge and custody of the prisoners in the county jail, but no Clarke County page opened states whether the county operates a jail or where its prisoners are held.
- Law enforcement centre address220 Townline Road, Osceola, Iowa 50213, phone (641) 342-2914, per the county's own Sheriff & Local Departments page
- Not published on the page openedNo jail capacity or bed count, no inmate roster, no bail-posting guidance, no phone, video-visit or commissary rates, and no jail administrator.
- County domainclarkecounty.iowa.gov. Iowa.gov's Local Government directory lists 'https://www.clarkecountyiowa.org/services/' for Clarke County; that URL could not be opened, and the county's live pages are on the iowa.gov subdomain.
- What was triedhttps://clarkecounty.iowa.gov/ and https://clarkecounty.iowa.gov/departments/sheriff-local-departments/ were opened. Links labelled 'Board of Supervisors', 'BOS Agendas & Minutes', 'Public Hearing Notices' and 'Levy Rates' were seen on those pages but could not be opened (see notes on method).
Source: Clarke County, Iowa - Sheriff & Local Departments · 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 Rob Kovacevich
- 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.' Iowa Code 331.653(35) repeats it in the sheriff's general duties.
- How the office is filledElective, four-year term (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.
- Keeper's dutyIowa Code 356.5 requires the jail be kept clean and healthful, prisoners furnished bedding, clothing, towels, fuel and medical aid, served 'three times each day with an ample quantity of wholesome food,' given clean fresh water, an account kept of what is furnished, and a matron kept on the premises at all times while any female prisoner is held.
- Source of nameNamed as Sheriff on Clarke County's own 'Sheriff & Local Departments' page on clarkecounty.iowa.gov, opened September 2026.
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Clarke County, Iowa - Sheriff & Local Departments · checked 2026-09-18
The Judges
Iowa district judges are merit-selected, not elected in contested races: a district judicial nominating commission under 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; the judge then faces a yes/no retention election and, after winning retention, serves a six-year term. Iowa has 14 judicial election districts for nominating purposes. The official who actually sets bail 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's 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(s) to four-year terms. The three supervisor appointees are the only voter-accountable link in how the bail-setting official got the job. Judges are state judicial officers, not county officials, and are not added to the vote line.
Iowa District Court - judges serving this county
- Not found - no court or county page naming the district judges for this county was opened within the search budget
County magistrate(s) - the official who fixes bail at first appearance under Iowa Code 804.22
- Not found - no county or court page naming this county's appointed magistrate(s) was 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
- Named is marked no: the county names a 'Clarke County Law Enforcement Center' but the page opened does not identify a jail at it, and nothing else on the county's site that could be opened names a jail.
- Budget is marked no for a specific reason worth recording: the county's own navigation carries a 'County Budget / Annual Financial Report' link, but it points off the county's domain to the State of Iowa's local budget system at iowaonline.state.ia.us. A state system is not the county publishing, so it does not satisfy the check.
- No county-published IDOC jail inspection report was found. Iowa does inspect: Iowa Code 356.43 requires the Iowa Department of Corrections and its inspectors to make periodic inspections of every jail and municipal holding facility, and Iowa Admin. Code rule 201-50.3 requires the chief jail inspector to 'visit and inspect each jail within this state at least annually,' with rule 201-50.2(3) allowing those visits to be unannounced and requiring jail staff to produce 'all books, records, medical records, data, documents and accounts.' The standards are mandatory under Iowa Code 356.36. But Iowa Code 356.43(4) routes the resulting report to only four recipients - the IDOC director, the sheriff or police chief, the local governing body, and the county attorney - and nothing requires anyone to post it. doc.iowa.gov has no jails, jail-standards or jail-inspections section, so there is no state page to read it on. This county does not publish its copy on its own site. That is the finding: the inspection happens annually and the result is unpublished.
- 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, 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.' Neither duty produces a published number. No death in this county's custody is published on the county's own site.
- Population and capacity: 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 data exists inside IDOC - but no evidence was found that IDOC publishes it, and there is no state jail-population page. Capacity therefore passes only from the county's own published numbers.
- 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: 'A reasonable delay for this purpose shall not exceed twenty calendar days and ordinarily should not exceed ten business days.'
- Structure: Iowa Code 356A.1 lets a board of supervisors establish a detention facility 'in lieu of or in addition to the county jail,' in which case 'the sheriff shall not have charge or custody of a person detained or confined,' and Iowa Code ch. 28E is the vehicle behind genuinely regional facilities. Nothing opened for this county indicates either arrangement; no authoritative count exists of how many of Iowa's 99 counties operate their own jail, and none is asserted here.
- Method and budget: WebFetch in this session would only retrieve URLs that had appeared in a WebSearch result. Links harvested from pages that were successfully opened, and redirect targets reported by the fetcher, were both refused with PROVENANCE_REQUIRED and could not be opened. The hard cap of 5 WebSearch calls was therefore the binding limit on how many county pages could be reached, and all 5 were used.
- Board of Supervisors. The county's site has a Board of Supervisors department page and a 'BOS Agendas & Minutes' page, both seen as links on pages that were opened, but neither could be opened, so the board's size and the supervisors' names are not recorded. Iowa counties are governed by a Board of Supervisors, not commissioners.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Clarke 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