Iowa

Iowa’s prisons are run by the Iowa Department of Corrections (Iowa DOC). The agency’s adopted term for a person in its custody is incarcerated individual (older materials still say “offender”), and people are found through the Iowa DOC Offender Search.

This section details nine state prisons, all state-operated — Iowa uses no private prisons and does not hold its people out of state. They are the Iowa State Penitentiary (ISP, Fort Madison), the state’s maximum-security men’s prison; the Anamosa State Penitentiary (ASP); the Iowa Medical and Classification Center (IMCC, Coralville), which is the men’s intake center and the system’s medical and psychiatric hub; the Mount Pleasant Correctional Facility (MPCF), a minimum-security reentry prison; the Newton Correctional Facility, which includes the statewide Correctional Release Center; the North Central Correctional Facility (Rockwell City); the Clarinda Correctional Facility; the Fort Dodge Correctional Facility; and the Iowa Correctional Institution for Women (ICIW, Mitchellville), the only women’s prison.

Where a newly sentenced person enters depends on sex. Men are received and classified at the Iowa Medical and Classification Center in Coralville. Women are received at the Iowa Correctional Institution for Women in Mitchellville, which is also the women’s reception center.

Iowa has no death penalty — capital punishment was abolished in 1965. No Iowa prison holds a death row.

A few features shape how families stay in touch, and several are unusual. Incoming personal mail does not go to the prison — since 2022, Iowa routes it to an off-site vendor, Pigeonly, in Las Vegas, Nevada, which scans each item and sends a copy to the facility; legal mail still goes directly to the institution, and photos can be sent through Pelipost. Phone calls, video visits, and messaging run through Ameelio, a nonprofit communications provider used across all nine prisons and offered free to families. Money is deposited through Access Corrections, JPay, or Western Union. Health care is state-run — Iowa considered privatizing prison medical care in 2025 and decided against it, so there is no for-profit medical contractor. Independent oversight comes from the Iowa Office of Ombudsman, which has an assistant ombudsman dedicated to corrections.

Iowa also supervises about 30,000 people in the community through eight Judicial District Departments of Correctional Services, which run probation, parole, and residential facilities. That community-corrections tier is separate from the state prisons and is not individually covered here.

Use the guides below for the statewide rules, or go straight to a specific facility.