The Detention Center
Sac County Jail (the county's facility study calls it the Sac County Sheriff's Office & Jail)
- Operated bySac County Sheriff's Office
- Detention commandTyler Prescott — Sergeant / Jail Administrator
- Jail address100 NW State St., Suite 7, Sac City, IA 50583-0037
- Rated capacity26 beds, per the county's own published Sheriff's Office & Jail Facility Evaluation & Needs Assessment
- Average daily population8.15, on 2017-2022 data, per the same county-published study
- Age of the buildingThe study describes the current facility as having served in that capacity for roughly 100 years
- Boarding out - Buena Vista County$75 per day, per the county-published study
- Boarding out - Carroll County$65 per day, per the county-published study
- Transport cost of boarding outThe study puts transportation at $267.24 to $333.42 per inmate per trip, plus deputy wages, and says women are typically transported out of county because of the facility's limitations
- Cost of closing the jailThe study projects $12,098,693 over 20 years (2024-2043, assuming 3% annual growth) to house all Sac County inmates out of county
- Study authorMidwest Construction Consultants, 408 Denning St., Houghton, IA 52631; the document carries no explicit date but uses data through 2022
- Phone cardsSold at a fixed rate through Reliance Telephone; the handbook does not print the rate
- CommissaryToiletries, food and phone cards; an inmate whose account is under $1.00 is treated as indigent and cannot buy commissary. No prices are published
- VisitationIn person only, Tuesday through Saturday 9:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m., ten minutes per visit, two visitors per appointment, booked at least 24 hours ahead on 712-662-7127; no video visitation and no fee is published
Source: Sac County Sheriff's Office & Jail Facility Evaluation & Needs Assessment · checked 2026-09-18
Transparency rating
4/10Partial- ✓The jail is named
- ✗Who is in custody — not published
- ✓Beds and daily population
- ✗What it costs taxpayers — not published
- ✗Deaths in custody — not published
- ✗PREA audits — not published
- ✓Independent inspection
- ✓Who else it holds, and for how much
- ✗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 as a year; the county's own facility study describes the building as having served as the jail for roughly 100 years
- Original costNot found
- Paid for byNot found
- Beds26 (rated capacity, published in the county's facility study)
Since then
- Not found
The Sheriff
Sheriff Kathryn Stange
- 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 address100 NW State St., Suite 7, Sac City, IA 50583-0037
- Jail/visitation phone712-662-7127
- Earlier officeholderThe county's own jail inmate handbook PDF still carries a letter from Sheriff Ken McClure; the live sheriff page names Kathryn Stange, and that is the name recorded here
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Sac 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 →
- Where the jail money is decidedAgendas and minutes →
Notes on the record
- Sac County is the strongest county in this group for jail transparency, and it is all in one document: the Sac County Sheriff's Office & Jail Facility Evaluation & Needs Assessment, prepared by Midwest Construction Consultants and hosted on the county's own domain. It publishes the rated capacity (26 beds), the average daily population (8.15 on 2017-2022 data), the boarding rates the county pays other counties, and a 20-year cost projection.
- No Sac County copy of an Iowa Department of Corrections jail inspection report itself was found. What the county publishes is a consultant's facility study that reports what the State Jail Inspector noted. 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.
- The inspections check is recorded yes on the strength of that study, which is an independent evaluation of the facility published by the county itself. The study also reports that the State Jail Inspector has noted several problems with the facility and an inability to classify inmates in his reports - that is the study's own description of what the inspector recorded, quoted here as the county published it and left to stand.
- The contracts check is recorded yes, but the direction is worth stating plainly: these are rates Sac County pays other counties to hold its prisoners - $75 a day to Buena Vista County and $65 a day to Carroll County - not rates it charges to hold anyone else's. The county publishes those figures itself.
- No public roster of who is in custody was found on any Sac County page opened, and no guidance on how to post bail was found either.
- Phone cards are sold at what the handbook calls a fixed rate through Reliance Telephone, but no rate is printed, so fees is recorded no.
- The county site moved from saccounty.org to saccountyiowa.gov; the old addresses 302-redirect. Both are treated as the county's own domain.
- 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 elected by district to overlapping four-year terms: Ranell Drake (District 1), Mike Fischer (District 2) and James Wissler (District 3). The board meets every Tuesday at 10:00 a.m. at the Sac County Courthouse, 100 N.W. State St., Sac City. The board's own page calls the budget process the most important power of the board but links no budget document.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Sac 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