Osceola County

Notes on the record

• Iowa inspects every jail every year but does not publish the report. Iowa Code 356.43 and Iowa Admin. Code r. 201—50.3 require the chief jail inspector to visit and inspect each jail in the state at least annually, and r. 201—50.2(3) allows those visits to be unannounced. But Iowa Code 356.43(4) routes the resulting report only to 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-inspection section. This county does not publish its copy. No inspection report for this county was found on its own domain.
• Deaths in custody: Iowa has no public dataset. Iowa Admin. Code r. 201—50.22(14) requires the state jail inspection unit to be notified within 24 hours of any death, attempted suicide, fire, escape, injury to staff or prisoners from assaults, use of force or prisoner self-injury, and Iowa Code 127.3(1) requires an autopsy for a death in a jail or in police custody where no natural disease process accounts for it. Neither duty produces a published number. The 'deaths' check passes only if the county itself publishes a death in its custody, and this county does not.
• 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, but no evidence was found that IDOC publishes it and there is no state jail-population page, so capacity can pass only on the county's own numbers.
• The sheriff's own domain publishes a Current Inmate Roster as a weekly PDF — the roster for 9/10/2026–9/17/2026 was posted when the page was opened, with earlier weekly rosters back to August 2026. A sheriff's office on its own separate domain counts as first-party publication.
• The jail page publishes a $80 per day rate for people held for other jurisdictions and for work release, alongside $50 per day for Osceola County sentences. That is a published fee schedule, not a boarding contract with a named agency, so 'contracts' is recorded 'no' while the rate is recorded here.
• The jail page tells people sentenced to serve time to contact the Sheriff's Office before reporting; it does not explain how to post bail, so 'bond_info' is recorded 'no'.
• The May 27, 2025 board minutes were opened and contain no jail item — no inspection report, jail budget or boarding contract.
• Iowa county jails are funded by the county — property and local option sales taxes and county general fund appropriations. Federal money reaches them only through per-diem boarding, SCAAP and grants.
• Open records: Iowa Code ch. 22. The right is at 22.2 — 'Every person shall have the right to examine and copy a public record.' There is no blanket response deadline; the only clock is 22.8(4), which caps delay taken to screen a record for confidentiality at twenty calendar days and says it ordinarily should not exceed ten business days.
• Five-member Board of Supervisors, by district, from the county's own supervisors page: LeRoy DeBoer (District 1, term 01/01/2013–12/31/2026); Jayson Vande Hoef (District 2, term to 12/31/2028); Mike Schulte (District 3, term 01/01/2009–12/31/2026); Jerry Helmers (District 4, Chairman, term to 12/31/2028); Jeff Loring (District 5, Vice Chairman, term 01/01/2024–12/31/2028). Board office: 300 7th St., Sibley, IA 51249. The county also runs a Public Safety Commission whose agendas and minutes are archived under the Sheriff department page.