The Detention Center
Not found
- Operated byNot found
- FindingPage County's Sheriff's Office page names no jail, gives no bed count, no roster, no bond-posting guidance and no fee schedule. Whether the county operates its own jail could not be established from any page opened, and no county page saying where its prisoners are held was found. This is recorded as a not-found, not as an assertion that the county has no jail.
- County courthouse112 E Main Street, Clarinda, IA 51632
- What was triedhttps://pagecounty.iowa.gov/offices/sheriffs-office/ (opened — no jail content); https://pagecounty.iowa.gov/ (opened); https://co.page.ia.us/offices/sheriff/index.htm and https://www.co.page.ia.us/bosinfo/minutesarchive.htm (the old co.page.ia.us domain 302-redirects everything to pagecounty.iowa.gov); the county's FY27 proposed budget and its board minutes and agendas are hosted off-domain on cap.gmdsolutions.com and could not be opened.
Source: Page County — Sheriff's Office · checked 2026-09-18
Transparency rating
0/10Closed- ✗The jail is named — not published
- ✗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 Charles McCalla
- TitlePage County Sheriff
- Runs the jailIowa Code 356.2 gives the sheriff charge and custody of the prisoners in the county jail; the county does not describe a jail on the pages opened
- How the office is filledElected countywide to a four-year term (Iowa Code 331.651)
- Office address323 N 15th, Clarinda, IA 51632 — phone (712) 542-5193
- Office hoursMonday–Friday, 8:00am–4:30pm
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Page County — Sheriff's Office · 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, and Iowa magistrates are appointed, not elected: a county magistrate appointing commission — one district judge, three members appointed by the county board of supervisors, and two attorneys elected by the county's attorneys (Iowa Code 602.6501) — appoints the county's magistrates to four-year terms (Iowa Code 602.6403). The three supervisor appointees are the only voter-accountable link in how the bail-setting officer got the job. Judges are state judicial officers, not county officials, and are not added to the vote line.
Magistrate — sets bail at first appearance (Iowa Code 804.22)
- Not found
Iowa District Court — judicial district serving Page County
- 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
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.
- Page County moved its website from co.page.ia.us to pagecounty.iowa.gov; the old domain now 302-redirects every path to the new home page, so older sheriff and board URLs no longer resolve to content.
- The sheriff's page is a contact-and-links page. Its outbound links are to Iowa VINE, the Iowa and national sex offender registries, Iowa Courts Online and a county document portal — nothing about the jail.
- Page County's board minutes, agendas and budget are published through cap.gmdsolutions.com rather than on the county domain. That portal was not reachable in this research, so nothing from it is cited.
- This is the thinnest county in the group. Every check is 'no' because nothing was opened that would support a 'yes', not because the county was judged to have withheld anything.
- 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.
- Page County is governed by a Board of Supervisors (Iowa's governing body in all 99 counties). The county's home page links a Board of Supervisors page and hosts its agendas, minutes, archived minutes and its FY27 proposed budget on an off-domain document portal (cap.gmdsolutions.com), none of which could be opened. Member names and board size: Not found.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Page 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