The Detention Center
Not found - no Poweshiek County page opened gives the facility a published name such as Poweshiek County Jail
- Operated byPoweshiek County Sheriff's Office
- Sheriff's office address4802 Barnes City Rd., Montezuma, IA 50171
- Address given on the dispatch and jailers pagePoweshiek County Courthouse, 302 East Main, Montezuma, IA 50171
- That the county holds prisonersThe sheriff's office publishes a Dispatch & Jailers staff page naming eleven dispatch/jailer employees, and a statistics page counting inmates booked into jail
- Bookings publishedAnnual inmate bookings for 2000 through 2015, ranging from a low of 184 in 2014 to a high of 604 in 2012, with 560 in 2010, 570 in 2011 and 450 in 2015. The series stops at 2015
- Rated capacityNot found on any Poweshiek County page opened
- Bond, phone and commissary ratesNot found on any Poweshiek County page opened
- What was triedThe county's older poweshiekcounty.org addresses, including the county attorney's criminal process page, the supervisors' resolutions index and several board minutes PDFs, now all 302-redirect to the front page of poweshiekcountyiowa.gov and could not be read
Source: Poweshiek County Sheriff - Dispatch & Jailers · 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 Matt Maschmann
- 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)
- Office address4802 Barnes City Rd., Montezuma, IA 50171
- Office phone641-623-5679 (fax 641-623-5120)
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Poweshiek County Sheriff · 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 →
- Where the jail money is decidedAgendas and minutes →
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.
- Poweshiek County is the thinnest county in this group. The sheriff's office publishes a staff page and a statistics page but no jail page: nothing opened names the facility, states a capacity, lists who is in custody, explains how to post bail, or prints a phone or commissary rate.
- The one jail number the county does publish is a booking count: inmates booked into jail each year from 2000 through 2015, from a low of 184 in 2014 to a high of 604 in 2012. That is a throughput figure, not a capacity or a daily population, and the series stops in 2015, so the capacity check is recorded no.
- The county names eleven dispatch/jailer staff but no jail administrator, and the elected sheriff is the statutory jailer under Iowa Code 356.2, so jail_administrator is null.
- The county's website moved from poweshiekcounty.org to poweshiekcountyiowa.gov, and the old addresses now redirect to the new front page rather than to their equivalent pages, so older board minutes and the county attorney's criminal-process page could not be read.
- 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, three members: Jason Roudabush (chairperson, term expires 2026), Jacki Bolen (vice chairperson, term expires 2028) and Jeff Tindle (term expires 2026). The board meets Monday and Thursday mornings at 8:30 a.m. in the board room on the main floor of the courthouse south annex. The board's page lists the Central Iowa Juvenile Detention Center among its appointments - that is a juvenile facility, not the adult county jail - and mentions the county jail nowhere. No budget document is linked from the page.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Poweshiek 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