Lyon County

Notes on the record

• Domain correction. The address carried in the directory for this county, lyoncountyiowa.com, is not where Lyon County publishes. The county's live site is lyoncounty.iowa.gov, and every fact in this record was read from a page on that domain.
• Lyon County is one of the more forthcoming counties in this state file. On its own domain it names the jail, publishes a designed capacity of 26, posts a live Jail Inmate Roster PDF with charges and bond amounts, posts an arrest press log and a warrant list, publishes a full inmate room-and-board fee schedule, and explains in its FAQ that a bond amount 'is set by either the Iowa State statute or by a magistrate'.
• The fees check is recorded yes on the strength of a published inmate fee schedule - room and board at $25/day in county, $55/day out of county, work release at $35/day plus $10 daily and $70/week for monitoring, and $120 for a weekend. Phone, video-visit and commissary prices themselves are not published; the FAQ says only that an inmate may call using a calling card bought through commissary.
• The capacity check is recorded yes because the county publishes both a designed capacity (26) and, through the live roster PDF, the number of people actually held - 11 on 09/18/2026.
• No Lyon County budget page was found; the homepage links no budget document. No PREA audit, no death in custody, no inspection report and no boarding contract or per-diem rate was found published on the county's own domain.
• The county's Board of Supervisors page and its meetings-and-minutes archive were both returned in the Departments page navigation but could not themselves be retrieved in this session, so the supervisors' minutes were not searched for an inspection report. Supervisor names come from the county's Contacts page, which was opened.
• Jail inspection: Iowa inspects every jail every year but the state 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 municipal holding facility, and Iowa Admin. Code 201-50.3 requires the chief jail inspector to visit and inspect each jail within the 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. Iowa Code 356.43(4) then routes the report to only four places - the IDOC director, the sheriff or police chief, the local governing body, and the county attorney. Nothing requires anyone to post it, and doc.iowa.gov has no jail-inspections section. Lyon County does not publish its copy on its own domain; the sheriff's pages carry no inspection page and the supervisors' minutes archive could not be opened to check for an attached report.
• Iowa has no public statewide dataset of deaths in county custody. 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 no natural disease process accounts for the death. Neither produces a published number. No death in Lyon County custody was found published by the county.
• 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. No evidence was found that IDOC publishes those counts, so capacity and daily population can pass only from the county's own figures.
• Iowa's open-records right is Iowa Code ch. 22; 22.2 gives every person 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.
• Under Iowa Code 356.2 the elected sheriff has charge and custody of the prisoners in the jail or other prisons of the sheriff's county, and Iowa Code 331.653(35) repeats it among the sheriff's general duties. Iowa Code 356.5, the keeper's duty section, requires the jail to be kept clean and healthful, bedding, clothing, towels, fuel and medical aid to be furnished, each prisoner to be served three times each day with an ample quantity of wholesome food and clean fresh water, an account kept of what is furnished, and a matron kept on the premises at all times while any female prisoner is held.
• Board of Supervisors (Iowa counties are governed by a Board of Supervisors, not commissioners). Five members, elected by district: Douglas Vanden Bosch (District 1), Dennis Scholten (District 2), Cory Altena (District 3), Cody Hoefert (District 4) and Steve Herman (District 5), as published on the county's own Contacts page. Other elected officials named there are County Attorney Nolan McGowan, Auditor Amy Sprock, Treasurer Stacy Knobloch, Recorder Amie Griesse and Assessor Ashley Lewis. The board is a statutory recipient of the annual jail inspection report under Iowa Code 356.43(4); no such report was found published. The board page and minutes archive URLs below are taken from the navigation of the county's Departments page, which was opened; those two pages themselves could not be retrieved in this session, so no meeting schedule or minutes content is asserted.