Monona County

Notes on the record

• Domain correction. The address carried in the directory for this county, mononacounty.iowa.gov, answers with an HTTP 302 redirect to mononacountyiowa.gov, which is where Monona County now publishes. That site was opened in this pass and every fact in this record was read from it.
• Monona County does operate a jail. Its Inmate Visitation page identifies the Monona County Jail as run by the Sheriff's Department and sets visiting hours, and the county publishes a Jailer job description reporting to the Sheriff/Sergeant. That satisfies the named check and nothing else.
• Beyond visiting hours and the rule that 'Visitors must be 18 years of age and family to the inmate they are visiting', the county publishes no jail information at all - no capacity, no population, no roster, no bond guidance, no phone, video or commissary rates, no boarding agreement, no PREA audit, no inspection report and no death in custody. The county FAQ's Sheriff section covers only mental health evaluations and no contact orders.
• The sheriff's name was not found. The county's Contacts page names ten other department heads individually but lists the Sheriff as an office only, and four further sheriff pages plus the FAQ were opened without a name appearing. This is recorded as Not found rather than filled from an outside directory.
• No county budget document was found. The Auditor's Financial and Tax Information page publishes property valuations for 2018-2025 only and directs users to the Iowa Department of Management site for budgets, which is a state domain and does not count as the county publishing.
• 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. Monona County does not publish its copy on its own domain, and the titles in its supervisors' agenda and minutes archive for 2023-2026 show no inspection 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 Monona 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). Three members: Bo Fox (Chairman, District 1), Tom Brouillette (Vice Chair, District 2) and Vince Phillips (District 3), as published on the county's own Contacts page. The county posts supervisor meeting agendas and minutes covering 2023 through September 2026; the archive index was opened and lists only meeting dates and document titles, none of which mentions a jail, a jail inspection, a sheriff's budget or an inmate boarding agreement. The individual minutes PDFs were not opened. The board is a statutory recipient of the annual jail inspection report under Iowa Code 356.43(4). The board page URL below was taken from the navigation of the county Auditor page, which was opened; the board page itself could not be retrieved in this session.