Articles Tagged: Iowa Department of Corrections

The Gazette did a Q&A with prison officials after a seven-month security review by an outside consultant. The public got to see a four-page summary of the 134-page report.

Complaints to the Iowa Ombudsman about unemployment claims tripled in fiscal 2021, with a large share coming from Iowans awarded jobless benefits during the COVID-19 pandemic and then later told they had to repay the money.

A seven-month security review of Iowa’s prison system shows overcrowding and challenges recruiting and retaining staff create potential security risks in Iowa’s nine prisons.

Prison “lifers” Denise Rhode, Gary Bear, Otis Jenkins and Jerry Osborn applied for commutation and cleared the first hurdle when the Iowa Board of Parole unanimously recommended the governor consider reducing their sentences to a period of years, making them potentially eligible for eventual release.

Homes for Iowa, started in 2019, aims to satisfy two of Iowa’s biggest needs — training workers for in-demand jobs and building affordable housing for Iowa communities. The program at the Newton Correctional Facility supports several apprenticeship programs for offenders.

Closures of wood and metal shops have dramatically reduced the opportunities for Anamosa offenders to participate in apprenticeships, shown to reduce recidivism and improve an ex-offender’s likelihood of getting a job on the outside.

Mitchell Stites got 2,200 hours of hair cutting experience as a barber in the Iowa Department of Corrections, using clippers -- no scissors or straight-edges allowed -- to do bald fades and trims to make the men incarcerated with him at Fort Dodge look and feel good.

Last year, the Iowa Department of Corrections and NewBoCo, in Cedar Rapids, started a coding program for women at the prison, funded by a $175,000 grant from the Google Impact Challenge. The pilot project is modeled after NewBoCo’s Delta V program, a 20-week boot camp where individuals with no technical background become Full Stack JavaScript developers.

The leader of the Iowa Board of Parole wants to eliminate crowding at Iowa’s nine prisons over the next two years.

Leo Alan Ray, 34, convicted of conspiracy to commit a felony, willful injury causing serious injury, and second-degree robbery in Linn County, failed to report to the minimum-security Lary A. Nelson Residential Center in Cedar Rapids as required on Friday, teh Iowa Department of Corrections said Saturday.

The officer has returned to work

The identity of the inmate has not been released.

The Iowa Board of Corrections has named new wardens for prisons in Fort Madison, Newton and Mount Pleasant.

The Iowa Department of Corrections has fired two nurses at the Iowa State Penitentiary at Fort Madison after they incorrectly gave 77 offenders overdoses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in April.

The Iowa Department of Corrections will resume in-person visits for incarcerated individuals in early July, provided the offender is vaccinated against COVID-19.