The Detention Center
Pottawattamie County Jail
- Operated byPottawattamie County Sheriff's Office, Corrections/Jail Division
- Detention commandTrisha Bernhards — Jail Administrator (Lt. Josh Kirlin is named as Assistant Jail Administrator)
- Jail address1400 Big Lake Road, Council Bluffs, IA 51501
- Design capacity288 beds - the county's jail page calls it a design capacity of 288 beds and the corrections division page calls it a 288 bed direct supervision jail facility
- Year built1999, per the county's own About the Jail page
- Supervision modelDirect supervision
- Who it holdsPre-trial detainees and sentenced men and women, with bookings from the sheriff's patrol, Council Bluffs Police, Carter Lake Police, Avoca Police and the Iowa State Patrol
- Jail phone712-890-2250
- Phone and visitation vendorEncartele/Cidnet - accounts created through the vendor's public portal; no per-minute rate is published
- Commissary vendorStellar Services, LLC, with deposits through JailATM; no fees or item prices published
- Room and boardThe county's sheriff FAQ gives 712-890-2257 as the number for room and board payment arrangements but publishes no rate
- What was triedhttps://www.pottcounty-ia.gov/board_of_supervisors/ was refused and could not be opened, so the supervisors' names, the county budget and any boarding contracts could not be verified
Source: About Pottawattamie County Jail · checked 2026-09-18
Transparency rating
3/10Closed- ✓The jail is named
- ✓Who is in custody
- ✓Beds and daily population
- ✗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 built1999
- Original costNot found
- Paid for byNot found
- Beds288 (design capacity, published by the county)
Since then
- Not found
The Sheriff
Sheriff Andrew Brown
- 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 county office, four-year term (Iowa Code 331.651). The sheriff's own page says he was elected in November 2020 and has served in the department since 1999, rising from detention officer
- Office address1400 Big Lake Road, Council Bluffs, IA 51501
- Office phone712-890-2200; non-emergency 712-328-5737
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Pottawattamie County Sheriff's Office · checked 2026-09-18
The Judges
Iowa district judges are merit-selected, not elected in contested races: 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. Bail at first appearance is set by a magistrate, not a district judge: Iowa Code 804.22 requires an arrested person to be taken without unnecessary delay before the nearest or most accessible magistrate, who shall fix the amount of bail or other conditions of release. Iowa magistrates are appointed, not elected - Iowa Code 602.6501 puts a magistrate appointing commission in each county (one district judge, three members appointed by the county board of supervisors, and two attorneys elected by the county's attorneys), and Iowa Code 602.6403 has that commission appoint the county's magistrate or magistrates to four-year terms. The three supervisor appointees are the only voter-accountable link in how the official who sets bail got the job. Judges are state judicial officers, not county officials, and are not added to the vote line.
Iowa District Court - district judges for this county's judicial election district
- Not found
Magistrate - the officer who fixes bail at initial appearance (Iowa Code 804.22)
- 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 does inspect this jail every year, but nobody publishes the result. Iowa Code 356.43 requires the Iowa Department of Corrections to make periodic inspections of every jail, and Iowa Admin. Code 201-50.3 requires the chief jail inspector to visit and inspect each jail in the state at least annually; 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. The standards themselves are mandatory under Iowa Code 356.36. But Iowa Code 356.43(4) routes the resulting report to only four places - the IDOC director, the sheriff, the local governing body and the county attorney - and nothing requires anyone to post it. doc.iowa.gov has no jails or jail-inspection section. This county does not publish its own copy on any page that could be opened, so state_inspection is recorded empty. That is the finding, not a gap in the search.
- Pottawattamie County publishes both a design capacity (288 beds) and a year built (1999) on its own jail page, which is more building detail than most Iowa counties post.
- The inmate roster page at https://www.pottcounty-ia.gov/sheriff/inmate_roster/ is first-party and describes the list as a public service; the list itself opens in a separate sheriff-run system at holt.pottcountysheriff.gov. The page notes inmates may be pre-trial, post-trial, or held for other agencies.
- The county names its phone, visitation and commissary vendors - Encartele/Cidnet and Stellar Services, LLC with JailATM deposits - but publishes no rate for any of them, so fees is recorded as no.
- That the jail books people in for Council Bluffs, Carter Lake and Avoca police and the Iowa State Patrol is stated on the corrections division page, but no agreement, rate or per-diem figure is published, so contracts is recorded as no.
- No corrections or detention budget figure was found on any Pottawattamie County page that could be opened.
- Iowa publishes no statewide dataset of deaths in county custody. Iowa Admin. Code 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, or use of force and prisoner self-injuries, and Iowa Code 127.3(1) requires an autopsy for a death in a jail or under police custody where no natural disease process accounts for it. Neither duty produces a public number, and this county publishes none of its own.
- Public records in Iowa run under Iowa Code chapter 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: a reasonable delay for this purpose shall not exceed twenty calendar days and ordinarily should not exceed ten business days.
- Iowa county jails run on county property and local taxes. Federal money reaches them only through per-diem boarding, SCAAP and grants.
- Board of Supervisors (Iowa counties have a board of supervisors, not commissioners). The county's own departments directory places the Board of Supervisors in the courthouse at 227 S 6th St, second floor, Council Bluffs, phone 712-328-5644 or 712-328-5641, open 8:00am to 4:30pm Monday to Friday, and gives its page as https://www.pottcounty-ia.gov/board_of_supervisors/. That page itself was refused and could not be opened, so the board's size and the supervisors' names are not recorded here.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Pottawattamie 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