The Detention Center
Shelby County Jail
- Operated byShelby County Sheriff's Office
- Detention commandKyle Lindberg — Jail Administrator
- Jail address1104 9th Street, Harlan, IA 51537
- Rated capacity14 beds - the county's own jail page calls it a 14-bed facility
- Year built1985, per the county's own jail page
- Room and board - straight time$30.00 daily rate
- Room and board - 48-hour increments$35.00 daily rate, with $70.00 due per two-day set at booking
- Room and board - work release$35.00 daily rate, payable in advance before the inmate leaves for work
- Room and board - out-of-county sentences$65.00 daily rate
- Statutory basis for the chargesThe county cites Iowa Code section 356.7(1), and says eligibility to pay is determined by the District Court
- Commissary deposit fees$2.00 for a cash deposit, $8.95 for a card deposit
- Commissary vendorTurnKey Corrections, ordered through the Inmate Canteen platform; orders close at 9:00 p.m. Monday and Wednesday for Wednesday and Friday delivery
- Phone vendorReliance Telephone; the county's telephone, video calls and texting page could not be opened, so no per-minute rate is recorded
- VisitationIn person, 20 minutes per visitor, government photo ID required, no cameras or phones; no video visit fee is published
- Bail bondsmenThe county publishes a list of eight bondsmen with phone numbers but no procedure for posting bail
- What was triedhttps://shelbycounty.iowa.gov/sheriff/prison_rape_elimination_act_prea/ and https://shelbycounty.iowa.gov/sheriff/telephone_calls_video_calls_texting/ were both refused and could not be opened, so PREA results and phone rates could not be verified
Source: Shelby County Jail · 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 — not published
- ✓Who else it holds, and for how much
- ✗How to post bond — not published
- ✓Phone, video and commissary rates
The Building
You paid for it. Here is what the record says it cost.
- Year built1985
- Original costNot found
- Paid for byNot found
- Beds14 (the county calls it a 14-bed facility)
Since then
- Not found
The Sheriff
Sheriff Neil Gross
- 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 address1104 9th St, Harlan, IA 51537
- Office phone712-755-5026
- Office hours8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Shelby 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
- 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.
- Shelby County publishes an unusually complete rate card. Its room and board page prints four daily rates - $30.00 straight time, $35.00 for 48-hour increments (with $70.00 due per two-day set at booking), $35.00 work release, and $65.00 for out-of-county sentences - and cites Iowa Code 356.7(1) as the authority, with eligibility to pay determined by the District Court.
- The contracts check is recorded yes on the $65.00 daily rate the county publishes for out-of-county sentences, which is a published rate for holding someone sentenced elsewhere. No signed agreement with a named partner agency is posted, and that limit is stated here rather than glossed over.
- The fees check is recorded yes on the published commissary deposit fees - $2.00 cash and $8.95 card - on the county's own commissary page. Phone rates are a separate matter: the vendor is named as Reliance Telephone but the county's telephone, video calls and texting page could not be opened, so no per-minute rate is recorded.
- The county has a PREA page in its own jail navigation, but it could not be opened, so prea is recorded no. The page appears to exist; the finding is that its contents could not be verified.
- The county's Arrests page carries an embedded Power BI dashboard whose contents could not be read from the page source, so it could not be confirmed as a list of who is in custody now. Roster is recorded no on that basis. The January 2025 board minutes separately record the IT director working on a public-facing inmate portal for the sheriff's office and jail.
- The bail bondsman page lists eight bondsmen with phone numbers but gives no procedure, payment method or fee for posting bail, so bond_info is recorded no.
- 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. The supervisors recorded in the board's own minutes of 21 January 2025 are Bryce Schaben (chairman), Charles Parkhurst and Mike Kolbe, with Taryn Knapp as clerk. Those minutes record the sheriff raising water management at the facility and the board unanimously approving Sheriff Neil Gross's request for an allocation of opioid settlement funding for projects in his office not to exceed $15,000, and the IT director reporting work on a public-facing inmate portal for the sheriff's office and jail. They record nothing on jail inspections, the jail budget, inmate boarding or per-diem rates.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Shelby 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