The Detention Center
Union County Jail
- Operated byUnion County Sheriff's Office
- Detention commandJosh Christensen — Jail Administrator
- Address302 N. Pine St., Creston, IA 50801
- Beds"The jail holds 11 inmates (3 single cells and 2 four-person cells)" — county jail page
- How full it runsThe county's own jail page says the jail is "generally full to capacity including sending inmates to be temporarily housed in other county jails." No partner county is named and no boarding rate is published.
- Daily jail fee"DAILY JAIL FEES: $75.00" — published on the county jail page as a charge borne by the person in custody, not a contract rate paid by another agency
- Medical and dental fees"INMATES REQUESTING AND /OR RECEIVING MEDICAL/DENTAL SERVICES WHILE IN CUSTODY OF THE UNION COUNTY JAIL WILL BE RESPONSIBLE FOR SUCH SERVICE FEES" — county jail page
- Telephone"Inmates are not allowed incoming calls. Outgoing calls from inmates are allowed on a daily basis." No call rate is published.
- BuildingThe Gold Star article on the county's own site records that "In 1977, a new County-City Law Enforcement Center was opened and connected to the Courthouse," housing both the Sheriff's Office and the Creston Police Department, with direct access between the jail and the courtrooms.
- Earlier jailsA wooden jail adjoining the 1857 courthouse in Afton, replaced by a brick jail in Afton in 1880; after the county seat moved to Creston in 1890 the courthouse basement served as a jail, and in 1896 a two-storey brick jail was built on the adjoining lot with the sheriff living in the front section (Gold Star article, county site)
- Roster, bond schedule, average daily populationNone published on the county's own site
- What was triedhttps://unioncountyiowa.gov/board-minutes/ could not be opened here, so the board minutes were not searched for a Department of Corrections inspection report. https://unioncountyiowa.gov/departments/ carries no budget or financial-report link; the Auditor page is listed as covering financial audits but no budget document is linked from the departments index. Note also that unioncountyiowa.org — a .org, not the county — is a commercial inmate-search farm carrying pages for county jails all over Iowa. It is not Union County's website and nothing from it is used here.
Source: Union County — Union County Jail · checked 2026-09-18
Transparency rating
3/10Closed- ✓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 — not published
- ✗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 built1977 — the County-City Law Enforcement Center opened that year, connected to the Union County Courthouse (Gold Star article on the county's own site)
- Original costNot found
- Paid for byNot found. The facility is described as a joint County-City Law Enforcement Center shared with the Creston Police Department. Iowa county jails run on county property and local taxes; no federal funding is claimed here.
- Beds11 — three single cells and two four-person cells
Since then
- Not found
The Sheriff
Sheriff Brian Bolton
- 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 Union County Jail page sits inside the Sheriff's Office section of the county website.
- 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
- Office302 North Pine Street, Creston, IA 50801; main (641) 782-7717, jail (641) 782-8402, civil clerk (641) 782-7322
- Chief DeputyDan McNeill
- Civil ClerkJenny Wheeler
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Union County — Union 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.
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
- capacity is marked yes on an 11-bed published figure. Union County does not publish an average daily population, but its own jail page states that the jail is generally full to capacity and that it sends people to be temporarily housed in other county jails.
- fees is marked yes, but be precise about which fees. Union County publishes a flat "DAILY JAIL FEES: $75.00" charged to the person in custody, and states that inmates are responsible for medical and dental service fees. It does not publish a telephone rate, a video-visit rate or a commissary price list.
- contracts is marked no. The county says on its own page that it sends people to other county jails when full, which is a real and useful disclosure, but it names no partner county and publishes no boarding rate or agreement. The $75.00 daily jail fee is charged to the person held, not paid by another agency.
- unioncountyiowa.org is not Union County's website. It is a commercial inmate-search farm hosting scraped pages for county jails across Iowa. The county's actual site is unioncountyiowa.gov. Nothing on the .org site is used or cited here.
- 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 elected at-large to staggered four-year terms: Rick Friday (Chair, Lorimor), Dennis Hopkins (Vice-Chair, Creston) and Dennis Brown (Shannon City). The board meets each Wednesday at 9:00 a.m. in the Board of Supervisors Room on the first floor of the Union County Courthouse.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Union 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