The Detention Center
Howard County Jail / Law Enforcement Center (LEC)
- Operated byHoward County Sheriff's Office
- Detention commandJennifer Bauer — Jail Administrator and Civil Deputy
- Jail address124 South Park Place, Cresco, IA 52136
- Security levelPublished as a "medium-security detention center" holding people awaiting trial or sentencing, with most sentenced inmates serving less than two years
- Who it holdsThe county's page says the facility accepts inmates from surrounding municipalities, the U.S. Marshals Service and the Cresco Police Department - but publishes no rate or contract
- VisitationWednesdays 1-4 pm; Saturdays 1-3 pm
- Phone providerReliance Telephone - inmate phone cards and texting-device funding, no price list published
- What was triedhowardcounty.iowa.gov/sheriffs-office/ and /sheriffs-office/lec/ - no bed count, year built, cost, roster, budget, inspection report, per-diem rate or fee schedule published
Source: Howard County Sheriff's Office - LEC · 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 Rick Busch
- Runs the jailYes - Iowa Code 356.2 gives the sheriff charge and custody of the prisoners in the county jail; repeated at Iowa Code 331.653(35)
- How the office is filledElected county-wide to a four-year term (Iowa Code 331.651); on a vacancy the first deputy assumes the office
- Office address124 South Park Place, Cresco, IA 52136
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Howard County Sheriff's Office · checked 2026-09-18
The Judges
Iowa 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 faces a yes/no retention election for a six-year term - there are no contested judicial elections. Bail at first appearance is set by a magistrate (Iowa Code 804.22), and Iowa magistrates are appointed, not elected: under Iowa Code 602.6501 a county magistrate appointing commission - one district judge, three members appointed by the county board of supervisors, and two attorneys elected by the county's attorneys - appoints the county's magistrates to four-year terms under 602.6403. The three supervisor appointees are the only voter-accountable link in how the bail-setting officer got the job. Judges are state judicial officers, not county officials.
Magistrate - sets bail at first appearance (Iowa Code 804.22)
- Not found
Iowa District Court - district judges
- 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
- Howard County operates its own jail rather than boarding its prisoners out; the LEC page says so on the county's own domain.
- The county states it houses prisoners for surrounding municipalities, the U.S. Marshals Service and the Cresco Police Department, but no agreement or per-diem rate is published, so the contracts check is 'no'. Federal per-diem boarding of this kind is the only way federal money normally reaches an Iowa county jail - it does not make the jail federally funded.
- The county home page carries an FY27 County Budget Hearing Notice and a Proposed Property Tax Levy in its Public Notices section. That is a county-wide budget notice, not a corrections or detention budget line, so the budget check stays 'no'. It does confirm the ordinary Iowa position that the jail is carried on county property-tax revenue.
- The county's older domain co.howard.ia.us is still in the Iowa.gov directory; the live site is howardcounty.iowa.gov.
- Iowa inspects every jail annually - Iowa Admin. Code 201-50.3 requires the chief jail inspector to visit and inspect each jail in the state at least annually, and 201-50.2(3) allows the visit to be unannounced. But Iowa Code 356.43(4) routes the resulting report only to the IDOC director, the sheriff, the local governing body and the county attorney. Nothing requires it to be posted, doc.iowa.gov has no jail-inspections section, and this county does not publish its copy on its own site.
- Iowa publishes no statewide jail death 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 under police custody where no natural disease process accounts for it. Neither duty produces a public number.
- 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.
- 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 a 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. The county home page, opened at https://howardcounty.iowa.gov/, states that the board meets every Monday morning at 9:00 a.m. at the courthouse, 137 North Elm Street, Cresco, and points to a Board of Supervisors page and to agendas and minutes hosted on a third-party document portal (cap.gmdsolutions.com). Neither was opened in this run, so no member names are claimed and no unopened URL is cited.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Howard 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