The Detention Center
Warren County Jail
- Operated byWarren County Sheriff's Office
- Detention commandChrissy Mathews — Jail Administrator
- Address115 N Howard Street, Suite 101, Indianola, IA 50125, in the Warren County Justice Center; mail to PO Box 337, Indianola, IA 50125
- Shift patternThe county's 2025 Jailer job description sets a "Panama Schedule — 12hr days 6a-6p & 6p-6a," with jailers working seven days out of a fourteen-day pay period, 182 days a year
- SupervisionJailers report to an immediate supervisor and/or the Jail Administrator; Lieutenant Eric Burrows is listed as a contact in the job description
- Staffing decisions on the public recordThe Board of Supervisors approved Resolution 25-176 on July 1, 2025, granting "a request to hire one jail staff in Sherriff's Office"
- Beds, population, year builtNot published on any county page opened here
- Roster, bond schedule, fee schedule, visitation rulesNot published on the county's own domain. The county links out to Iowa VINE for custody-status lookups; that is a state victim-notification service, not a county roster.
- What was triedhttps://www.warrencountyia.gov/how-do-i/serve/jail-time/ is a live county page titled "Jail Time" but served no jail content when opened. The County Attorney's Programs & Resources page (https://www.warrencountyia.gov/government/county-government/attorney/resources/) carries no bail or bond guidance and refers enquiries to the Clerk of Court. The county budget page (https://www.warrencountyia.gov/government/county-administration/county-budget/) could not be opened. The meetings, agendas and minutes index was opened and lists years 2013–2026 but served no document links; the July 1, 2025 minutes were read in full and contain no inspection, housing agreement or per-diem item.
Source: Warren County — Sheriff · 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 Joe Carico
- 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 Warren County Jail is published on the Sheriff's page with its own phone, fax and email.
- 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
- OfficeWarren County Justice Center, 115 N Howard St., Suite 101, PO Box 337, Indianola, IA 50125; 515-690-9210, fax 515-690-9239
- Jail contact published by the county515-690-9220, fax 515-690-9239, sjail@warrencountyia.org
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Warren County — Sheriff · 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
- Warren County publishes the jail's name, address, phone, fax and email, and a full jailer job description, but no operational numbers: no bed count, no population, no budget line, no fee schedule and no bond guidance appear on any page opened here.
- budget is marked no only because the county's budget page could not be opened here. The county does maintain one at /government/county-administration/county-budget/; nothing from it is cited because nothing from it was read.
- bond_info is marked no. The County Attorney's Programs & Resources page carries no bail or bond guidance and directs enquiries to the Clerk of Court by telephone.
- 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 — five members by district: Brian Arnold (District 1, Chair, term to 2028), Aaron DeKock (District 2, to 2026), Travis DeWitt (District 3, Vice-Chair, to 2028), Stephanie Erickson (District 4, to 2028) and Crystal McIntyre (District 5, to 2026). The board meets on the first and third Tuesday of each month at the Warren County Administration Building, 301 N. Buxton Street, Indianola. The board page gives the two regular meeting times as 9:30 a.m. and 6:00 p.m.; the meetings index page gives them as 9:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. Both figures are as published on the county's own site.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Warren 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