1200 E Washington Street is the address on every Iowa visitor application, and a letter sent there is returned to sender. Send letters and photos in minutes.
Send letters and photos in minutes
Iowa routes all non-legal mail for its nine prisons to a single PO Box in Las Vegas, where Pigeonly Corrections opens and scans it, and a four-digit code on the address block says which prison the scan belongs to. Mount Pleasant is 1113. The specific hazard at this prison is that its street address is the most widely circulated prison address in Iowa, because every visitor application in the state is posted there. Families have it written down already, and using it for a letter means the letter comes back.
[Full Legal Name, Offender ID Number]
Mount Pleasant Correctional Facility - 1113
PO Box 96777
Las Vegas, NV 89193
1113 is this prison’s routing code. It tells the processing centre which of Iowa’s nine facilities a scanned letter belongs to.
The codes run in sequence, so a wrong digit does not bounce. It routes your letter to another working prison. North Central is 1112 and Fort Dodge is 1114, one either side of this one. Check the number before you seal the envelope.
Iowa’s correspondence policy requires the legal name on incoming mail, not a preferred one, alongside the offender ID number.
Every Iowa family who has ever applied to visit anybody has written 1200 E Washington St., Mount Pleasant, IA 52641 on an envelope, because that is where the Centralized Visiting Authority receives visitor applications for all nine prisons.
If your person is here, you may also have driven to it on a Saturday.
It is not a mail address. Iowa’s rule is absolute in its own wording: any non-legal mail sent directly to an Iowa Department of Corrections facility will be returned to sender. A letter posted to 1200 E Washington Street falls under that rule, and it will come back with the postage spent and a week gone.
Two different envelopes, then. The visitor application goes to Mount Pleasant. Everything else goes to Nevada.
Iowa’s correspondence policy, OP-MTV-01, names its mail vendor in its own text rather than describing an anonymous processor. The department contracts with Pigeonly Corrections as its approved mail vendor.
The sequence: your letter reaches the Nevada PO Box, Pigeonly Corrections opens all non-legal mail and scans it into a digital colour copy, and that copy is printed and delivered to the right Iowa prison. The paper original is held for 45 days rather than destroyed right away, and the sender can request it back in that window.
Iowa’s timing rule is that letters are held no more than 24 hours and packages no more than 48 hours before distribution, with up to five days where a security review or translation is needed. That clock starts when the mail reaches the prison, not when it leaves your hands.
Iowa counts mail from financial institutions, religious groups, educational institutions, periodicals, private businesses, health care facilities and third parties as non-legal, so all of it goes through the same Nevada box.
Mail from government agencies is a third category. Iowa treats it as non-legal but issues it through the confidential correspondence process instead, which matters at a reentry prison where housing, benefits and licensing letters start arriving before release.
Iowa caps attachments and enclosures at ten pages or pictures.
The photo rules are specific. Female breasts, and the genitalia and buttocks of both sexes, must be substantially obscured or covered by clothing, including swimwear or undergarments, or by another object that is not itself obscene. Lewd display of genitalia, clothed or unclothed, is not allowed.
Duplicates are banned, in the policy’s own phrasing multiple copies of the same or like same photograph. Gang signs are prohibited, and Iowa closes the workaround by naming it: this includes photos that attempt to cover the hand gestures with emojis or similar.
Posted photos are scanned. 4x6, ten at a time, and a colour copy is what arrives rather than the print you sent.
Photos sent through Pigeonly arrive at Mount Pleasant as real colour photographs, taken straight from your phone to print, never copies of a scanned print.
With visits capped at two people, a family of four is always partly on the outside of any given Saturday. What arrives in between is worth getting right.
The original is not destroyed right away. Pigeonly holds it for 45 days, and the sender can request it back for free any time before the last 7 days of that window, so the request needs to go in within the first 38 days.
The parcel goes back only to the address written on the envelope, and the request needs the recipient’s name, offender ID number and facility exactly as they appear on it. It is a one-time request, so a child’s drawing has to be requested on its own, and requested again for the next one.
If the 45 days pass without a request, the original is destroyed and what stays on file is the colour scan already delivered to the facility.
If something is refused, Iowa’s policy gives the sender a route its public pages leave out: the sender is notified by mail or email of the rejection and the reason, and may protest the decision in writing to the warden within 10 days. Rejected mail is returned to sender with the postage charged to the incarcerated person.
Iowa places no cap on the number of letters anybody may send or receive, and keeps no mail list restricting who may write in. Indigent people inside receive not fewer than two envelopes per week so they can reply.
Some people are barred from writing: people under correctional supervision in the community, with exceptions for immediate family and a note that codefendant status alone does not justify denying communication between spouses; former prisoners for six months after release; victims and victims’ households; and minors where the offence involved a minor.
A person under 18 who is not immediate family must give the institution notarized written permission from a parent or legal guardian before corresponding.
Iowa’s own policy names Pigeonly as the processor, which means a letter you post is travelling to us before it goes anywhere near Mount Pleasant.
That transit is where the time goes. A posted letter spends 3 to 5 business days reaching a Nevada PO Box before any processing begins, and the scanning, screening, printing and shipping back to Iowa all follow after that.
Opening a free account at Pigeonly ends the transit stage, and any risk of the letter going to 1200 E Washington Street with the visitor applications. Compose it on your phone and it is made ready under code 1113 where the scanning takes place, with nothing to print and no stamp to buy.
There is a second reason it matters here. With visits capped at two people, a family of four is always partly on the outside of any given Saturday, and letters carry the rest.
The PO Box above is still correct and still works. This is the same destination without the days spent reaching it.
Iowa runs a two-vendor rule rather than a publisher-only rule.
A third party may buy books provided they come directly from Books N Things or Edward R. Hamilton Books, and the sender is somebody the incarcerated person is allowed to correspond with. Money can also go onto the account to buy publications from an approved vendor list, and books received directly from the Human Rights Defense Center are approved and cannot come from a third party.
Where a publication is refused on content, a three-person Publications Review Committee decides within 30 working days, and the person inside has 10 days to say whether it should be destroyed, shipped out at his own cost, or appealed.
Offender email runs through CorrLinks at $0.25 a message. Register at corrlinks.com.
Iowa’s family-facing page caps a message at 13,000 characters or 100 lines, about two pages, while two departmental policies say 14,000. The contradiction is Iowa’s and it has not been resolved.
The department is blunt about privacy: by its nature O-mail is not confidential, and all incoming and outgoing messages may be inspected and read.
6 of 8 questions
The person's full legal name and offender ID number, then the line Mount Pleasant Correctional Facility - 1113, then PO Box 96777, Las Vegas, NV 89193. The 1113 code routes the scan to this prison. Iowa returns to sender any non-legal mail posted to the facility itself.
MailNo, and this catches people constantly because that address is on every Iowa visitor application. It receives applications for all nine prisons and does not handle inmate mail. Iowa's rule that non-legal mail sent to a facility is returned to sender applies to it exactly as it does to any other prison address.
MailIt travels to the Nevada PO Box, where Pigeonly Corrections opens all non-legal mail and scans it into a digital colour copy. That copy is printed and delivered to Mount Pleasant, and the paper original is held for 45 days rather than destroyed right away. Iowa's policy names Pigeonly Corrections as its approved mail vendor, and you can request the original back for free at pigeonly.com/parcel-request within the first 38 days.
MailTen, at 4x6, and Iowa caps attachments and enclosures at ten pages or pictures overall. Duplicates are banned, in the policy's own phrasing multiple copies of the same or like same photograph, and gang signs are prohibited including ones covered with emojis.
MailOnly with paperwork if he is not immediate family. Iowa's rule is that a person under 18 who is not immediate family must give the institution notarized written permission from a parent or legal guardian before corresponding. Iowa places no limit on how many letters anybody sends or receives.
MailYes, and Iowa's public pages omit this. Its correspondence policy says the sender is notified by mail or email of the rejection and the reason, and may protest the decision in writing to the warden within 10 days. Rejected mail goes back to the sender with the postage charged to the incarcerated person.
MailYes, because Iowa's named processor is Pigeonly. A posted letter spends 3 to 5 business days travelling to the Nevada PO Box before processing even begins. A free Pigeonly account removes that leg: you upload the letter or photos from your phone and they are printed and prepared from the processing side. The PO Box still works, this is the same destination without the transit.
MailThrough Pigeonly, yes. Photos uploaded from your phone are printed as real colour photographs and delivered as photographs, and they arrive sooner because they skip the postal leg. A photo put in the post is scanned like every other enclosure, so a colour copy arrives instead.
MailThe legal name spelling the envelope has to carry.
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All information on this page comes directly from official government and facility sources. How we verify information › Last verified September 9, 2026.