Most people here have looked at it a thousand times without knowing what it is.
You have seen the lights. Out past the edge of town, up against the hills, a patch of white glare that burns all night.
It is a prison. It is not ours.
The Nevada Southern Detention Center is a private prison. It is owned and run by CoreCivic, a company based in Brentwood, Tennessee. It holds people in federal custody. Nye County does not run it, does not staff it and does not get paid for it.
We have put the whole record on one page. Here is what we hold on both lock-ups in the county, with every figure linked to the document it came from.
Who runs it
CoreCivic used to be called Corrections Corporation of America. It is a publicly traded company. It runs prisons and detention centres for governments across the United States.
CoreCivic's own page for the facility lists it as medium security. It names the customer as the United States Marshals Service. The warden is John Mattos, in post since July 2025.
The address is 2190 East Mesquite Avenue, Pahrump, NV 89060. The facility phone is 775-751-4500.
What the contract says
The building exists because the federal government asked for it.
The contract required a secure detention facility within 75 miles of the Lloyd D. George federal courthouse in Las Vegas. Pahrump is inside that ring. The award describes a requirement for a facility to house 1,000 beds for detainees, male only.
Of those, 750 beds are guaranteed for payment. That is 75 per cent of the federal bed space. The government pays for those beds whether or not there is anyone in them.
The total amount of the contract is $122,250,660.
The daily rate paid per detainee is redacted. Where the price per person per day should be, the public copy prints an exemption code instead.
That exemption covers confidential commercial information.
The public can see what the whole thing is worth. The public cannot see what the taxpayer pays per person, per day.
Who is held there
Not people serving a Nevada sentence. People in federal custody.
The agreement between the United States Marshals Service and the Office of the Federal Detention Trustee says it allows the Marshals Service, the Bureau of Prisons and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to house detainees at the facility.
That last one matters to a lot of families in this valley, and it is in the agreement in plain words.
The document, and why we copied it
The contract is 99 pages. It is a public federal record. Anyone is entitled to read it.
Getting hold of it is another matter. The Marshals Service copy is slow, and it often just refuses to open.
So we put our own copy on this site. The contract is here, all 99 pages, free, no account, nothing to sign up for.
Government websites get rebuilt and files vanish. If theirs goes tomorrow, ours is still here. That is the point.
One number worth checking
CoreCivic's page tells detainees and their families how to report sexual abuse. It lists a facility line, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement line, and a Justice Department line.
The Justice Department line is printed as 1-280-869-4499, described as a toll free number.
280 is an area code in Alabama. Toll free numbers in this country begin 800, 833, 844, 855, 866, 877 or 888.
The Justice Department's inspector general prints its own hotline as (800) 869-4499, operational 10am to 4pm Eastern. The last seven digits are the same.
Both numbers are on our prison page, each linked to the page it sits on. CoreCivic's press office is PublicAffairs@CoreCivic.com if you want to ask them yourself.
What we still want to know
CoreCivic publishes no assistant wardens, no department contacts and no visiting hours for this facility.
It publishes no current population. Counts from other sources disagree with each other by a wide margin, so we have printed only the figure in the contract and said where it came from.
If you have worked there, been held there, or visited someone there, we would like to hear from you. We publish documents, not rumours, and we protect people who send us things.
Sources
