The Detention Center
Emmet County Jail
- Operated byEmmet County Sheriff's Office
- Detention commandLaurie Thomas — Civil Clerk and Jail Administrator (part-time jailer)
- LocationLaw Enforcement Center, 114 North 6th Street, Suite #2, Estherville, IA 51334
- BedsNot published
- Daily populationNot published
- Room and board for sentenced prisonersWeekdays without work release $35/day; with work release $50/day; weekends $50/day
- Other published feesFingerprinting $10; permit to acquire firearms $25; new weapons permit $50; weapons permit renewal $25; driving record copy $10; accident report copy $10
- Jail staff namedJailers listed on the sheriff's page: Rosalia Rodriguez, Emma McFarland, Conrad Putrah, Corey Rasch, Stephanie Franzen Nelson
- VendorsThe page links reliancetelephone.com and orders.tigercommissary.com but publishes no phone, video-visit or commissary rates
- Note on the county domainIowa.gov's local-government directory lists Emmet County as emmetcounty.iowa.gov; the live county site opened for this research was emmetcountyia.gov
Source: Emmet County Sheriff · checked 2026-09-18
Transparency rating
1/10Closed- ✓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 — 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 Justin Schultes
- How the office is filledElected county office with a four-year term (Iowa Code 331.651); on a vacancy the first deputy assumes the office
- Statutory charge of the jailIowa Code 356.2 - the sheriff shall have charge and custody of the prisoners in the jail or other prisons of the sheriff's county; repeated at Iowa Code 331.653(35)
- Runs the jailYes - the Emmet County Jail, in the Law Enforcement Center
- Office addressLaw Enforcement Center, 114 North 6th Street, Suite #2, Estherville, IA 51334
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Emmet County Sheriff · 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, 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 a six-year term. There are no contested judicial elections in Iowa. Bail at first appearance is set by 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 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 official who sets bail got the job. Judges are state judicial officers, not county officials. No magistrate or district judge for this county was named from a court or county source opened in this research.
Iowa District Court
- Not found
County magistrate (sets bail at first appearance under 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
- Fees is marked no against the check's own wording - phone, video-visit and commissary rates are not published. The county does publish a room-and-board schedule ($35/$50 per day) and a civil and permit fee schedule on the sheriff's page.
- Capacity is marked no: no bed count and no daily population are published. 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.
- Bond information is marked no: no bail-posting guidance appeared on the sheriff's page.
- 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.
- Open records 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 at twenty calendar days and says it ordinarily should not exceed ten business days.
- Research constraint: in this environment WebFetch would only open URLs that had appeared in a web search result. Links harvested from pages that were opened could not themselves be opened, and the five-search budget was fully spent. URLs listed under 'What was tried' were seen but not opened, and are therefore not cited as sources.
- Emmet County is governed by a Board of Supervisors. The supervisors page and a minutes-and-agendas page were harvested as links from the sheriff's page but could not themselves be opened, so no member names are recorded and the URLs below are listed as leads, not as sources that were read.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Emmet 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