Fort Dodge prison warden resigns suddenly

The warden of the Fort Dodge Correctional Facility resigned earlier this month, just six months after starting the job.

“Kris Karberg resigned from his position as warden of the Fort Dodge Correctional Facility effective September 1, 2023,” Department of Corrections Spokesman Nick Crawford said in an email. “Deputy Warden Don Harris became acting warden effective the same day.”

  Buy Photo

Karberg had been warden at Fort Dodge since Feb. 17, when the Corrections Department transferred him from Anamosa State Penitentiary, where he had been warden since 2021.

Crawford, when asked why there had been this turnover at Fort Dodge, a medium-security facility with about 1,300 male offenders, said:

“The department focuses on giving newer wardens in our system the opportunity to gain additional experience by transferring them between institutions to work with new staff and a new facility.”

The Gazette reached out to Karberg, who declined to comment extensively on why he’d left the Iowa Corrections Department. He said he was likely moving back to South Dakota, where he’d lived before taking the Anamosa job.

Karberg was deputy warden at the Mike Durfee State Prison in Springfield, S.D., for three years before moving to Iowa. Earlier in his career, he spent 10 years providing private security in Southwest Asia, Belize and Afghanistan where he was a contractor for the U.S. State Department, he told the Iowa Board of Corrections in 2021.

“I was the on-site security director for exterior perimeter security at the embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan,” Karberg said at the time. “Basically, 4,000-plus employees and diplomats inside protected area. In 2011, we had an actual terrorist attack while I was working. Twenty-hour siege by some Taliban. We were able to neutralize the threat and no one was able to breach our perimeter.”

Karberg took the helm at Anamosa three months after two offenders there bludgeoned to death Robert McFarland, a correctional officer from Ely, and Lorena Schulte, a nurse from Cedar Rapids, in a failed escape attempt.

Comments: (319) 339-3157; erin.jordan@thegazette.com