The Detention Center
Van Buren County Jail
- Operated byVan Buren County Sheriff's Office
- Address907 Broad St., PO Box 474, Keosauqua, IA 52565 — the county's staff directory calls the building the Law Center
- Beds, population, year builtNot published on the county's site or on the Sheriff's Office site pages that could be opened
- Roster, bond schedule, fee schedule, visitation rulesNot published on any page opened here. The Sheriff's Office site links out to IowaVINE for custody-status lookups; that is a state victim-notification service, not a county roster.
- Inmate hospital billingThe Board of Supervisors agenda for March 24, 2025 carried an item to meet with the sheriff for "discussion and possible action related to a contract proposal for inmate billing with Van Buren County Hospital." The agenda records the item; no contract, rate or outcome is published.
- What was triedThe Sheriff's Office jail page (https://vanburenia.wixsite.com/vbso/vbso-jail) and the county's budget page (https://www.vanburencounty.iowa.gov/government/board_of_supervisors/county_budget___amendments.php) could not be opened here, so nothing from either is cited. The domain given as this county's in the project's directory, vanburencoia.org, returned nothing and could not be opened; the county's working site is www.vanburencounty.iowa.gov.
Source: Van Buren County Sheriff's Office — official site · checked 2026-09-18
Transparency rating
1/10Closed- ✓The jail is named
- ✗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 Brad Hudson
- 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 Sheriff's Office site carries the Van Buren County Jail as one of its own pages.
- 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
- OfficeLaw Center, 907 Broad St., PO Box 474, Keosauqua, IA 52565; dispatch (319) 293-3426 or 800-906-3426, fax (319) 293-7114, sheriff@vanburencountyia.gov
- Chief DeputyGeoff Morris
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Van Buren County Sheriff's Office — official site, linked as the Sheriff's page from the county's own staff directory · 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 yes on the Sheriff's Office site, which names the Van Buren County Jail. That site is hosted on a Wix subdomain rather than a county domain, but the county's own staff directory at www.vanburencounty.iowa.gov designates it as the Sheriff's Office page and publishes the sheriff@vanburencountyia.gov address alongside it, so it is treated here as the sheriff's own first-party site. Readers should know the hosting arrangement.
- The domain listed for this county in the project's source directory, vanburencoia.org, produced no results and could not be opened. Van Buren County's working site is www.vanburencounty.iowa.gov.
- budget is marked no only because the county's budget and amendments page could not be opened here. The county does maintain such a page; nothing from it is cited because nothing from it was read.
- contracts is marked no. The March 24, 2025 supervisors' agenda shows the board taking up an inmate-billing contract proposal with Van Buren County Hospital, which is a medical-services contract rather than an agreement to hold another agency's prisoners, and no rate is published either way.
- 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: Mark Meek (Chairman), Robert "Bob" Waugh (Vice-Chairman) and Dale House. The board meets at the Board of Supervisors' Office, 406 Dodge Street, Keosauqua, IA 52565, at 9:00 a.m.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Van Buren 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