The Detention Center
Dallas County Correctional Facility
- Operated byDallas County Sheriff's Office
- Jail address28985 Thin Blue Line Lane, Adel, IA 50003
- Jail phone515-993-4771 (jail directory listing 515-993-5815)
- Beds / capacityNot found — no rated capacity or daily population figure appears on any Dallas County page opened
- Year built / costNot found on the county's own site
- Boarding other agencies' inmatesThe Board of Supervisors' January 8, 2026 budget workshop for the Jail records: 'When housing out of county inmates this is $55 for a non-difficult inmate and $75 for difficult.' On federal inmates the board recorded 'Discussed the cons outweigh the possible revenue source.'
- Inmate lookupHosted on the county's own subdomain at inmates.dallascountyiowa.gov; the page opened returns the arrest-record disclaimer ('Record of an arrest is not an indication of guilt') ahead of the inquiry
- Vendors namedCIDNET for video visitation and inmate correspondence; JailATM (deposits.jailatm.com) for inmate account deposits — no rates are published for either
Source: Dallas County Sheriff — Jail Division · checked 2026-09-18
Transparency rating
4/10Partial- ✓The jail is named
- ✓Who is in custody
- ✗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
- ✓How to post bond
- ✗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 Adam Infante
- Runs the jailYes — the Sheriff's Office operates the Dallas County Correctional Facility as its Jail Division
- How the office is filledElected; Iowa Code 331.651 makes the sheriff elective to a four-year term. Iowa Code 356.2 gives the sheriff charge and custody of the prisoners in the jail of the sheriff's county, and Iowa Code 331.653(35) repeats it among the sheriff's general duties.
- Listed as'Adam Infante, Sheriff, Sheriff's Office' on the county's own staff directory
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Dallas County staff directory · checked 2026-09-18
The Judges
Iowa district judges are merit-selected: a district judicial nominating commission (Iowa Code ch. 46 — five electors appointed by the governor, five elected by the resident bar) sends the governor two nominees, the governor appoints one, and the judge then faces a yes/no retention election and a six-year term. Bail at first appearance is set by a magistrate under Iowa Code 804.22, and 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, two attorneys elected by the county's attorneys) and Iowa Code 602.6403 has that commission appoint the county's magistrates to four-year terms. The three supervisor appointees are the only voter-accountable link in how the bail-setting magistrate got the job. No Dallas County magistrate or district judge was named on any county or court source opened for this entry.
- 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
- Bond: the Sheriff's Office publishes three routes — cash, cashier's check or money order to the Clerk of Court at the Dallas County Courthouse in Adel during business hours; cash or credit card at the Jail Teller in the jail lobby; or online through deposits.jailatm.com. Private bonding companies set their own terms and the Sheriff's Office states it does not recommend or endorse any of them. No fee schedule is published.
- Corrections budget: the county publishes Budget Report and Audit Report pages, but no jail or corrections figure was obtained from a page actually opened, so the budget check is 'no'.
- Separate capital project: in November 2025 voters considered a bond referendum for a new criminal court building in Adel on Highway 6 adjacent to the Sheriff's Office — 84,143 square feet, three stories, two courtrooms and a partial basement for law enforcement; total cost $66,355,000, bond amount $60,300,000, direct costs $7.1 million, repaid through the property tax debt service levy with taxes running through FY47/48. This is a courthouse project, not a jail expansion, and the county page gives no jail bed count.
- County jails in Iowa run on county property and other local taxes; federal money enters only through per-diem boarding, SCAAP and grants. Dallas County's board recorded deciding against housing federal inmates.
- No copy of this county's Iowa Department of Corrections jail inspection report was found on its own domain. Inspection happens annually — Iowa Code 356.43 requires periodic inspection of every jail and Iowa Admin. Code 201—50.3 requires the chief jail inspector to visit and inspect each jail in the state at least annually, with 201—50.2(3) allowing the visit to be unannounced — but Iowa Code 356.43(4) routes the report only to the IDOC director, the sheriff, the local governing body and the county attorney, and nothing requires anyone to post it. This county does not publish it.
- Deaths in custody: Iowa publishes no statewide 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 jail or police custody not accounted for by a natural disease process. Neither duty produces a public number, and this county publishes no death in its custody on its own site.
- 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 a delay taken to screen a record for confidentiality at twenty calendar days and says it ordinarily should not exceed ten business days.
- Pages that could not be opened for this entry: the Sheriff's Office page (/502/Sheriffs-Office), the Budget Report page (/247/Budget-Report) and the Board of Supervisors page (/189/Board-of-Supervisors) were each refused by the fetcher, so nothing is cited from them.
- Board of Supervisors, three members elected by district: Brad Golightly (District I), Julia Helm (District II) and Kim Chapman (District III). The minutes of January 8, 2026 record Julia Helm as Chair. The board holds departmental budget workshops — the January 8, 2026 session included a '1050- Jail' workshop covering jail medical contracting, out-of-county inmate rates, a move to 12-hour shifts, and capital items (transport van, body scanner, radio and equipment maintenance). No dollar figures for the jail appropriation were printed in those minutes.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Dallas 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