The Detention Center
Not found as a published facility name — the county states it operates a jail at the Sheriff's Office, 1601 Justice Street, Bedford
- Operated byTaylor County Sheriff's Office
- Address1601 Justice Street, Bedford, IA 50833 — the jail is at the Sheriff's Office
- Visitation"Wednesday and Saturdays 2:00PM to 4:00PM" (county Sheriff's Office page)
- Inmate telephoneProvided by Reliance Telephone, 1-800-896-3201. No call rate is published by the county.
- Beds, population, year builtNot published on any county page opened here
- Roster, bond schedule, commissary or video-visit ratesNot published on any county page opened here
- What was triedtaylorcounty.iowa.gov served several pages but repeatedly refused others with a robots.txt error, including the minutes of February 5, 2026, March 10, 2026 and June 18, 2026. The minutes of January 30, 2025 and June 30, 2025 were read in full and contain no jail item. The Public Notices index (https://taylorcounty.iowa.gov/tag/public-notices/) was read and carries a Fiscal Year 2026 county tax hearing notice and an FY25 proposed budget notice, but publishes no document URL for either and nothing about the jail. The 2022 minutes archive index lists titles only.
Source: Taylor County — Sheriff's Office · 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. Iowa county jails run on county property and local taxes; no federal funding is claimed here.
- BedsNot found
Since then
- Not found
The Sheriff
Sheriff Joshua D. Weed
- Runs the jailYes — the elected sheriff, under Iowa Code 356.2 ("The sheriff shall have charge and custody of the prisoners in the jail or other prisons of the sheriff's county") and Iowa Code 331.653(35). The county's Sheriff's Office page carries the jail's visitation hours and inmate telephone arrangements.
- How the office is filledElected to a four-year term under Iowa Code 331.651; the sheriff must be a certified peace officer or complete basic training within a year, and on a vacancy the first deputy assumes the office
- Office and jail1601 Justice Street, Bedford, IA 50833; 712-523-2153; sheriff@taylorcounty.iowa.gov
- Chief DeputyNate Bucher
- Civil ClerkDani Gray
- Deputies named by the countyTyler Couch, Jordan Jenkins, Joshua Lynn, James O'Connor, Aleck Pafford, Erik Peterson, Daniel Wyckoff
- DispatchThe office provides 24/7 dispatch for all fire, EMS and law enforcement departments throughout Taylor County
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Taylor County — Sheriff's Office · checked 2026-09-18
The Judges
Iowa's 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
- named is marked no because no page opened here gives the facility a published name. The county does state on its Sheriff's Office page that it operates a jail, gives its address, publishes its visitation hours and names its inmate telephone provider. The jail plainly exists and the county says where it is; it does not give it a name.
- fees is marked no. The county names Reliance Telephone as the inmate phone provider but publishes no per-minute rate, and publishes no commissary or video-visit rate.
- The county's site intermittently refused pages with a robots.txt error during this work, so several 2026 minutes could not be read. Two sets of minutes that did open contain no jail item. The absence of an inspection record here should be read with that limitation in mind.
- No county-seat statement was found on a page opened here. Bedford is recorded as the seat on the strength of the county's own Sheriff's Office page, which places the office and jail at 1601 Justice Street, Bedford.
- Iowa Code chapter 22 gives every person the right to examine and copy a public record (22.2). There is no blanket response deadline; the only clock is 22.8(4), which caps a delay taken to screen a record for confidentiality at twenty calendar days and says it ordinarily should not exceed ten business days.
- Iowa has no public 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 — but neither duty produces a public number.
- 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, so state_inspection is recorded empty. That is the finding, not a gap in the search.
- Board of Supervisors — three members: Kim Watson, Ron Fitzgerald and Jack Beggs, named as present in the county's own minutes of January 30, 2025 and June 30, 2025. The board sits in regular session at 9:00 a.m.; the minutes opened here do not state the meeting room.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Taylor 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