Polk 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.
• Polk County is Iowa's largest county and its jail is among the largest in the state. The county publishes a great deal, but several of its own pages returned HTTP 403 to this research and are therefore not cited: the Sheriff's 'Jail Report(s)' page, the Sheriff's PREA page, the command-staff page, the FY2025 Annual Comprehensive Financial Report PDF, the 2025 inmate handbook PDF and the Board of Supervisors pages. A PREA page and a jail-reports page do exist on the county domain; because neither was opened, both checks are recorded 'no' rather than cited.
• Capacity is recorded 'yes' on published rated beds only (1,500, expandable by 1,000). A published daily population count was not found.
• Fees: the county's 'Jail How Do I...' page publishes a $0.25 per message voicemail charge and directs commissary deposits to accesscorrections.com and phone accounts to ICSolutions (888.506.8407). Per-minute call rates and video-visit rates were not published on the pages opened.
• The public roster at polkinmates.polkcountyiowa.gov offers a Current Inmate Listing plus recent booking and release lists, and states that inmates with federal charges are excluded from all listings.
• Inmate room and board is charged under Iowa Code 356.7, which authorizes a sheriff's office to seek reimbursement from inmates convicted in state court; the county does not publish the daily dollar amount on that page.
• The sheriff's biography page states the office runs on an $80 million budget. That is a figure in a biography, not a published corrections or detention budget document, so 'budget' is recorded 'no'.
• 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.
• Polk County is governed by a Board of Supervisors (Iowa's governing body in all 99 counties). No board roster page was successfully opened — the county's own 'Board of Supervisors Elect Leadership for 2025' release and its board meeting-attachment API both returned 403. Member names and board size: Not found.