Monroe County

Notes on the record

• Domain correction. The address carried in the directory for this county, monroecoia.us, is not where Monroe County publishes. The county's live site is monroecounty.iowa.gov, and every fact in this record was read from a page on that domain. A separate site at monroecountysheriff.com is a commercial directory that lists seventeen Monroe County sheriff's offices in different states and states plainly that it 'is not a sheriff's office and is not affiliated with any government agency'. It was disregarded and nothing from it is cited.
• Monroe County confirms on its own domain that it runs a jail and gives its size: the Sheriff's Office 'maintains the 26 bed county jail facility'. The named and capacity checks rest on that one sentence. The jail's daily population is not published.
• The county publishes no jail sub-page. There is no roster, no visitation page, no bond guidance, no fee schedule, no PREA audit, no inspection report, no death in custody and no boarding contract anywhere on monroecounty.iowa.gov that could be opened. The sheriff's section consists of Documents and Forms and Special Executions, both routed to the county's cap.gmdsolutions.com document portal.
• No county detention or corrections budget line was found. The county's agendas, minutes, claims and auditor documents are all served from a third-party document portal, cap.gmdsolutions.com, rather than from the county domain; those portal indexes were not opened and nothing from them is asserted.
• The Board of Supervisors page could not be retrieved in this session, so no supervisor is named here. The board and minutes URLs recorded were read from the Auditor page's navigation, which was opened, and are not fetched citations.
• 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. Monroe County does not publish its copy on its own domain; the county's minutes are served from an outside document portal that was not opened.
• 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 Monroe 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). No supervisor names, board size or meeting schedule could be confirmed: the county's Board of Supervisors page could not be retrieved in this session. The board page and the agenda and minutes portals listed below were read from the navigation of the county Auditor's page, which was opened; the county routes its agendas, minutes and claims through a document portal at cap.gmdsolutions.com. County Auditor Amanda R. Harlan, MBA is named on that Auditor page. The board is a statutory recipient of the annual jail inspection report under Iowa Code 356.43(4).