The Detention Center
Mahaska County jail (the county publishes a jail page but no formal facility name)
- Operated byMahaska County Sheriff's Office
- How it is runThe county page describes 'a direct supervision jail' that 'is operated 24 hours a day, seven days a week', with jail administration and additional support staff operating it at the direction of the sheriff
- Staff dutiesMaintaining inmates' court appearances, medical appointments, mental health appointments and transports
- Rated capacityNot found on any Mahaska County page opened
- VisitationIn person only - 'Visitation requires a trip to the Jail by the person that wants to talk to the inmate'. Days are Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday; times per inmate on request at 641-673-2591; maximum two adults per inmate per visitation day
- Inmate phonePhone system vendor Reliance; inmates 'can purchase calling cards off of commissary'. No per-minute rate published
- CommissaryThe facility accepts cash, money orders and cashier's checks. No price list published
- Other published chargesLobby lockers 25 cents, refunded on return of the key; fingerprinting $5.00 cash only per card
- What was triedEvery mahaskacounty.org URL tried (sheriff/jail.php, board_of_supervisors/budget.php, board_of_supervisors/current_members.php, board_of_supervisors/ordinances.php, treasurer/payments_online.php) returned HTTP 409; the county has moved to mahaskacountyia.gov and all citations here are on that host
Source: Mahaska County Sheriff - Jail · 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 Russell Van Renterghem
- Runs the jailYes - the county's jail page says the jail is 'operated at the direction of the Sheriff'; 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)
- Office addressMahaska County Law Center, 214 High Avenue East, Lower Level, Oskaloosa, IA 52577
- Phone641-673-4322 (office); 641-673-2591 (jail/visitation line)
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Mahaska 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 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 Mahaska 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 Mahaska County's own inspection report was found published on any county page opened.
- Named: the county maintains a dedicated jail page on its own domain identifying the facility as its jail, but publishes no formal facility name on any page opened, so the name recorded here is descriptive rather than quoted.
- Fees: the check asks for phone, video visit and commissary rates. Mahaska County names its phone vendor (Reliance) and says calling cards are bought from commissary, but publishes no per-minute or per-item rates, so this is recorded as no. The only published charges found were 25 cents for a lobby locker (refunded) and $5.00 cash per fingerprint card.
- Mahaska County has moved its website from mahaskacounty.org to mahaskacountyia.gov. Requests to the old host returned HTTP 409 throughout.
- Supervisor names are recorded from the county's own board page, but the terms it prints have all expired, so currency is not established and the names should be treated as unverified for the present day.
- 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 Mahaska 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). Three members serving overlapping four-year terms. The county's board page lists Mark Groenendyk (Chair), Steve Wanders (Vice-Chair) and Chuck Webb, but the terms printed beside those names (2017-2020, 2019-2022, 2020-2022) have all expired, so the page appears not to have been updated and the current membership is not established here. The board meets the first and third Monday of every month at 9:00 a.m. in the third-floor conference room of the Mahaska County Courthouse, 106 South 1st Street, Oskaloosa. Minutes are available for public viewing in the County Auditor's office and published in the Oskaloosa Herald. The county's own page says the budget process begins in the late fall and is certified to the State of Iowa by the following March 15th. 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 Mahaska 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