The Detention Center
Pocahontas County Jail
- Operated byPocahontas County Sheriff's Office
- Jail address22 SE Court Street, Pocahontas, IA 50574
- Jail phone712-335-5071 (fax 712-335-5072)
- Video visitationFamily and friends may have a video visitation with an inmate for up to 20 minutes per day; in-person visits must be arranged in advance through the jail
- Inmate accounts and commissaryTurnKey Inmate Canteen — https://team3.inmatecanteen.com (a vendor site; no county-published rate schedule)
- Victim notificationVINE
- Jail project under wayBoard of Supervisors minutes of April 8, 2025 record Supervisor Smith reporting that 'the jail is moving along and is slightly ahead of schedule.' No cost, funding source, bed count or completion date was found in any document opened
- Jail staffingThe tentative agenda of October 28, 2025 lists Deana P. Hayek as a part-time jailer and acknowledges the retirement of Ann Garvey from the Sheriff's Department
- Beds, rated capacity, daily population, year built, costNot found on any county page opened
- What was triedhttps://pocahontascounty.iowa.gov/sheriff/ (opened — addresses and phones only, no officeholder named); https://pocahontascounty.iowa.gov/sheriff/patrol/ (opened — names the sheriff and deputies); https://pocahontascounty.iowa.gov/sheriff/jail/ (opened); https://pocahontascounty.iowa.gov/wp-content/uploads/Jail-Roster-3.pdf (the county's Current Inmate Roster PDF — repeated fetches failed at the robots.txt stage, so its contents are not cited); the 2026 minutes PDFs (BOS-03-10-2026, BOS-05-12-2026) and the FY23 state auditor's report PDF on the county domain returned 403 or robots errors and could not be opened
Source: Pocahontas County — Sheriff, Jail · checked 2026-09-18
Transparency rating
2/10Closed- ✓The jail is named
- ✓Who is in custody
- ✗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 Steven E. Nelson
- TitlePocahontas County Sheriff
- Runs the jailYes — Iowa Code 356.2 gives the sheriff charge and custody of the prisoners in the county jail; the county publishes a Pocahontas County Jail page under its Sheriff section
- How the office is filledElected countywide to a four-year term (Iowa Code 331.651)
- Office address22 SE Court Street, Pocahontas, IA 50574
- Office phone712-335-3308 (fax 712-335-4300); jail office 712-335-5071 (fax 712-335-5072)
- Chief DeputyWeston Van Donge
- SergeantSteven Henderson
- Deputy Sheriffs named by the countyChris Toner, Neil Christians, Wyatt Rahn, Jeremy Watson, Jacob Hinrickson
- CorroborationRecorded as 'Steve Nelson, Sheriff' among those present in the Board of Supervisors minutes of February 11, 2025 (https://pocahontascounty.iowa.gov/wp-content/uploads/BOS-2-11-2025-Minutes.pdf) and again in the minutes of April 8, 2025 (https://pocahontascounty.iowa.gov/wp-content/uploads/BOS-4-8-2025-Minutes.pdf)
Still needed
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Pocahontas County Sheriff's Patrol · 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 Pocahontas County
- Not found
Still needed
- 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
- Sheriff Steven E. Nelson is named on the county's own Sheriff's Patrol page, which also names the chief deputy, the sergeant and five deputy sheriffs. The Sheriff landing page and the Jail page do not name him. He is corroborated as 'Steve Nelson, Sheriff' in the Board of Supervisors minutes of February 11, 2025 and April 8, 2025.
- 'roster' is recorded yes on the county's own jail page, which carries a Jail Roster link, and the county does serve a dated 'Current Inmate Roster' PDF at https://pocahontascounty.iowa.gov/wp-content/uploads/Jail-Roster-3.pdf on its own domain. The PDF itself could not be opened — repeated fetches failed at the robots.txt stage — so it is described here but its contents are not cited.
- The jail page sets out visitation, mail and inmate-funds procedures in detail but publishes no bed count, no population figure, no per-minute phone or video-visit rate, no bail-posting instructions and no PREA, inspection or death information.
- Inmate accounts and commissary run through TurnKey Inmate Canteen (team3.inmatecanteen.com), a vendor site, so no county-published rate schedule supports the 'fees' check.
- A jail project was under way in 2025: the April 8, 2025 minutes record Supervisor Smith reporting that 'the jail is moving along and is slightly ahead of schedule.' No cost, funding source, bed count or completion date for it was found in any county document that could be opened, so the building fields stay Not found.
- Several 2026 county PDFs — the March 10, 2026 and May 12, 2026 board minutes and the FY23 state auditor's report — returned 403 or robots errors and could not be opened, so nothing from them is cited.
- 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, with jail staff required to produce all books, records, medical records, data, documents and accounts. 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.
- 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. The members recorded present in the county's own minutes of January 21, 2025 and February 11, 2025 are Clarence Siepker (Chairman), Peter Seehusen, Louis Stauter, Kyle Smith and Brent Aden. Supervisor Smith is the board's liaison to the jail. Meetings are held in the Supervisors Room at the Courthouse in Pocahontas. The county posts board agendas and minutes as PDFs, but the board-documents index page (https://pocahontascounty.iowa.gov/employee-access/board-documents/) could not be opened, so no minutes landing URL is recorded. Minutes opened: https://pocahontascounty.iowa.gov/wp-content/uploads/BOS-1-21-2025-Minutes.pdf and https://pocahontascounty.iowa.gov/wp-content/uploads/BOS-2-11-2025-Minutes.pdf
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Pocahontas 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