The Detention Center
Plymouth County Jail
- Operated byPlymouth County Sheriff's Office
- Law Enforcement Center address451 14th Ave NE, LeMars, Iowa 51031
- Law Enforcement Center / Communication Center$5.4 million facility, opened August 2003, per the county's own County Directory
- 2026 capital itemOn January 13, 2026 the board approved an opioid-funds request for a body scanner for the Plymouth County Jail at $141,500, plus up to $40,000 for a five-year warranty
- ReportingA 'Sheriff, Jail and Communication' quarterly report is presented to the board — the October–December 2025 report was approved January 13, 2026 and the January–March 2026 report on April 21, 2026
- What was triedhttps://plymouthcountysheriff.com/ and https://plymouthcountyiowa.gov/board-of-supervisors/ could not be opened; no bed count, roster, bond guidance, fee schedule, PREA audit, death record or inspection report was found.
Source: Plymouth County — 2026 Board of Supervisors minutes · 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 builtLaw Enforcement Center / Communication Center opened August 2003
- Original cost$5.4 million (Law Enforcement Center / Communication Center)
- Paid for byNot found
- BedsNot found
Since then
- Not found
The Sheriff
Sheriff Jeff TeBrink
- TitlePlymouth County Sheriff
- Runs the jailYes — Iowa Code 356.2 gives the sheriff charge and custody of the prisoners in the county jail
- How the office is filledElected countywide to a four-year term (Iowa Code 331.651)
- Confirmed currentNamed as Sheriff throughout the county's 2026 Board of Supervisors minutes — he introduced two new deputies at the March 31, 2026 meeting and presented jail budget proposals on January 13 and February 24, 2026
- Separate sheriff's websitehttps://plymouthcountysheriff.com/ is linked from the county home page; it could not be opened in this research
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Plymouth County — 2026 Board of Supervisors minutes · 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 Plymouth 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
- Where the jail money is decidedAgendas and minutes →
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.
- 'named' rests on the county's own 2026 board minutes, which refer to the 'Plymouth County Jail' by name on the county domain. No dedicated jail page on the county domain was opened.
- The sheriff presented jail budget proposals to the board on January 13 and February 24, 2026, but no dollar figure for the jail budget appears in the minutes text recovered, so 'budget' is recorded 'no'.
- The board receives a recurring 'Sheriff, Jail and Communication' quarterly report. That is a standing channel through which jail data reaches the board; the reports themselves were not found published.
- The $141,500 jail body scanner (plus up to $40,000 for a five-year warranty) approved January 13, 2026 was funded from the county's opioid settlement funds.
- Plymouth County publishes consolidated annual minutes PDFs (2020, 2021, 2024, 2025, 2026) on its own domain — the most likely place a county copy of the IDOC annual jail inspection report would appear, since the board is a statutory recipient under Iowa Code 356.43(4). None was found in the 2026 file.
- 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 elected to four-year terms, all five present through the 2026 minutes: Don Kass (District 3, Chairman), John Meis (District 1), Mike Van Otterloo (District 2), Craig Anderson (District 4), Doug Manley (District 5). Courthouse: 215 4th Ave SE, LeMars, Iowa 51031. District assignments are from the county's own County Directory PDF (posted 2023); the 2026 minutes confirm all five names and the chairmanship.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Plymouth 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