The Detention Center
Grundy County Jail
- Operated byGrundy County Sheriff's Office
- Named on the county's own siteYes - the Sheriff page refers to the '14 bed Grundy County Jail'.
- Capacity14 beds, as the county states it. No daily population figure is published.
- Visitation'Inmate Visitation Hours: Sunday and Wednesday ONLY 2:00 pm - 5:00 pm' - the only operational detail the page publishes.
- Not publishedNo jail address, no roster of who is in custody, no bond or bail posting guidance, and no phone, video-visit or commissary rates appear on the Sheriff page.
- What was triedOpened https://grundycountyiowa.gov/departments/sheriff and https://grundycountyiowa.gov/departments/supervisors . The county's robots.txt then became unreachable to the fetcher and every later request on the domain was refused, including the alternate sheriff page (https://www.grundycountyiowa.gov/departments/supervisors/supervisor-district-map/25-departments/sheriff), the current-year and past-year supervisors minutes pages, the auditor's supervisor-minutes page and the 2025 minutes PDF (https://grundycountyiowa.gov/images/departments/supervisors/pdf/past-year-minutes/2025%20MINUTES.pdf).
Source: Grundy County Sheriff · checked 2026-09-18
Transparency rating
2/10Closed- ✓The jail is named
- ✗Who is in custody — not published
- ✓Beds and daily population
- ✗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
- Beds14 beds - 'the 14 bed Grundy County Jail', as the county's own Sheriff page states it
Since then
- Not found
The Sheriff
Sheriff Not found
- 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; on a vacancy the first deputy assumes the office.
- Keeper's dutyIowa Code 356.5 requires the keeper to keep the jail clean and healthful; furnish bedding, clothing, towels, fuel and medical aid; serve each prisoner three times each day with an ample quantity of wholesome food; furnish clean fresh water; keep an account of what is furnished; and keep a matron on the premises at all times while any female prisoner is held.
- Current officeholderNot found. The county's own Sheriff page was opened and read in full; it describes the office and the jail but names nobody - no sheriff, no chief deputy, no jail administrator. No name is recorded rather than risk naming someone who has left office.
- Office hours'Monday-Friday, 8:00 am - 4:00 pm', as the Sheriff page states. Crime reports are taken by email; 911 for emergencies.
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Grundy County Sheriff · checked 2026-09-18
The Judges
Iowa judges are not county officials and are not elected in contested races. District judges are merit-selected: a district judicial nominating commission (Iowa Code ch. 46) sends the governor two nominees, the governor appoints one, and the judge then stands in a yes/no retention election for six-year terms. The official who actually sets bail at first appearance 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 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 magistrates to four-year terms. The three supervisor appointees are the only voter-accountable link in how the bail-setting official got the job. No magistrate for this county was named from a source actually opened.
Iowa District Court - magistrate who sets bail at initial appearance
- 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
- The domain carried on file for Grundy County, grundycounty.org, is not the county's current site. Grundy County has migrated to https://grundycountyiowa.gov/ , which is where everything recorded here was read. That is why an earlier attempt reached only a contentless home page and a broken supervisors link.
- Grundy County names its jail and publishes its bed count - 14 beds - and its visitation hours on the sheriff's own page, and that is the whole of what the sheriff's page publishes about the facility. There is no roster, no daily population, no jail address, no bond-posting guidance and no phone, video-visit or commissary rates on it.
- The 'capacity' check is marked yes on the 14-bed figure alone. The county publishes the bed count but not the daily population, so only half of what that check asks for is actually available.
- The 'budget', 'deaths', 'prea', 'inspections' and 'contracts' checks are marked no on the basis that nothing was found on the two pages that could be opened. They were not tested against the county's minutes archive: after two successful page reads the county's robots.txt became unreachable to the fetcher and every subsequent request on the domain was refused. The county does publish current-year meeting minutes, past-year meeting minutes, an auditor's supervisor-minutes page, current-year resolutions and a 2025 minutes PDF - that archive is where an IDOC jail inspection report or a jail budget line would most likely appear, and it was not searched.
- The county seat is recorded as Grundy Center from this project's own county list. Neither page opened stated it, so seat_source is left empty rather than pointing at a page that does not say it.
- Commercial inmate-lookup and records-aggregator sites returned by search were excluded as sources on principle; they are scraped and are never first-party.
- 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 and population can only be judged from what the county itself publishes.
- 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. Neither is published.
- Open records run under Iowa Code chapter 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.'
- Board of Supervisors (Iowa counties have supervisors, not commissioners). Grundy County is one of the larger Iowa boards: '5 members who are elected to staggered 4 year terms', as the county's own supervisors page states. The members listed there are Lucas Halverson (District #1), Heidi Nederhoff (District #2, Vice Chairperson), Vic H. Vandehaar (District #3), Mark Schildroth (District #4) and Barbara L. Smith (District #5, Chairperson). The county publishes current-year and past-year meeting minutes and current-year resolutions, but those pages were refused after the county's robots.txt became unreachable, so no minutes URL is recorded as opened.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Grundy 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