Many county jails around Iowa allow well-behaved, and non-violent criminals to participate in work release programs. These programs allow inmates to retain their daily professional lives, while serving their jail term on nights and weekends. Guthrie County Sheriff Marty Arganbright says his department is currently too understaffed to allow such a program to exist, “We don’t have work release. We don’t have enough personnel to be able to book them in and book them out, believe it or not. When they come in to do jail time, we make sure that they know that, and they need to work around anything like that.”

Arganbright admits that the lack of a work release program can become a vicious cycle for some inmates, for example those who are in jail because of missed child support payments, who then lose their job because they are in jail.