The Detention Center
Linn County Correctional Center
- Operated byLinn County Sheriff's Office
- Detention commandMajor Casey Meyer — Jail Administrator (Second Deputy); Assistant Jail Administrator Captain Chad Shover; Assistant Jail Commanders Lieutenant Yon Abel and Lieutenant Deric Oshel
- Jail address53 3rd Avenue Bridge, Cedar Rapids, IA 52401 (mail: P.O. Box 608, Cedar Rapids, IA 52406)
- Rated capacity401 beds - the county page states it 'is a 401-bed facility and is the only jail in Linn County'
- Who is heldCounty page states it houses inmates awaiting trial and serving time for state, county and municipal offenses, and also houses overflow inmates for other jurisdictions and federal prisoners awaiting trial
- Inmate phone rate$0.20 per minute domestic, $0.50 per minute international, no connection fee; vendor Telespan/NCIC Inmate Communications
- Video visit rate$0.30 per minute for remote video visits through NCIC; on-site kiosk visits free
- Daily populationNot found - no Linn County page opened publishes a daily count
- What was triedhttps://www.linncountyiowa.gov/sitemap and https://www.linncountyiowa.gov/624/Command-Staff were not openable; the older linncounty.org site is disallowed to automated fetching by its robots.txt
Source: Linn County Correctional Center · checked 2026-09-18
Transparency rating
5/10Partial- ✓The jail is named
- ✓Who is in custody
- ✓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
- ✓Phone, video and commissary rates
The Building
You paid for it. Here is what the record says it cost.
- Year builtNot found
- Original costNot found
- Paid for byNot found
- Beds401
Since then
- Not found
The Sheriff
Sheriff Brian D. Gardner
- Runs the jailYes - Iowa Code 356.2 gives the sheriff charge and custody of the prisoners in the county jail
- How the office is filledElected county office, four-year term (Iowa Code 331.651)
- Sheriff's Office phone319-892-6100
- Correctional Center phone319-892-6300
- Name currencyTaken from the county's own Sheriff's Office page as published; no county page opened gave a term or election date
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Linn 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 - 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 six-year terms. Iowa has 14 judicial election districts for nominating purposes and no contested judicial elections. Bail at first appearance is set by a magistrate under Iowa Code 804.22, which 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 official who sets bail got the job. Judges are state judicial officers, not county officials.
Iowa District Court - the district court serving Linn County
- Not found
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
- State inspection: Iowa inspects every jail every year but does not publish the report. Iowa Code 356.43 requires the Iowa Department of Corrections and its inspectors to make periodic inspections of every jail, and Iowa Admin. Code 201-50.3 requires the chief jail inspector to visit and inspect each jail within this state at least annually, with 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 report only to four places - 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 or jail-inspections section. No copy of this county's own inspection report was found published on any county page opened.
- Linn County moved its website to linncountyiowa.gov; the older linncounty.org host is disallowed to automated fetching by its robots.txt, so the older Board of Supervisors and budget pages there could not be opened.
- Roster: the county's own inmate search at inmatesearch.linncounty.org is a Linn County host linked from the Sheriff's Office page, but it is behind a CAPTCHA gate, so the list itself was not read.
- Capacity: rated capacity (401 beds) is published on the county's Correctional Center page. No daily population count was found on any Linn County page opened.
- PREA: the Correctional Center page and the inmate handbook state a zero-tolerance policy on sexual misconduct, but no PREA audit report or audit result was found published by the county.
- Contracts: the county's own page states the facility houses overflow inmates for other jurisdictions and federal prisoners awaiting trial, but no boarding contract or per-diem rate was found published.
- A December 14, 2020 Board of Supervisors agenda opened on the county site contains the Telespan video visitation contract for the Correctional Center, with remote video at $0.25 per minute, on-site at $0.00, secure inmate messaging at $0.25 per message, 35% of gross remote-visitation revenue to the county, $109,000 of equipment and installation and a $35,000 technology grant, on a five-year initial term. The current published rate on the county's visitation page is $0.30 per minute for remote video.
- 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 jail or under police custody where no natural disease process accounts for it. Neither produces a public number, and Linn County publishes none.
- Open records: Iowa Code ch. 22; the right to examine and copy is at 22.2. 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.
- 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 can therefore only be judged from the county's own numbers.
- Board of Supervisors (Iowa counties have a board of supervisors, not commissioners). Linn County's staff directory lists a three-member board: Kirsten Running-Marquardt (District 1), Sami Scheetz (District 2) and Brandy Z. Meisheid (District 3). The board is a statutory recipient of the annual jail inspection report under Iowa Code 356.43(4).
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Linn 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