A new report from the Legislative Services Agency shows the number of inmates in Iowa prisons continues to increase. At the end of September in 2009, there were nearly 8,400 inmates in Iowa prison system. A year later, at the end of this September, there were 340 more inmates in state prisons.
The state’s maximum security prison in Fort Madison was housing over a thousand male inmates this fall. That’s about 17 % more than its designed to hold. It costs the state about $40,000s a year to keep an inmate in that maximum security facility. The state prison in Anamosa had about 11-hundred men at the end of September.
Another 1,100 men were in the state’s minimum security prison in Newton and a little less than a thousand were at the prison in Clarinda, which has medium- and minimum-security zones. The medium-security prison in Fort Dodge had nearly 1,200 male inmates this fall.
The women’s prison in Mitchellville is the most over-crowded of the state’s prisons. It’s designed to hold 455 inmates, but houses almost a hundred more women than that. The prison in Rockwell City is the smallest in the state system, with a little less than 500 male inmates there this fall.