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Welcome to Nye's Lies

We report on Nye County: the meetings, the money, the water, and what your county government does with all of it.

Everything under Nye County government and resources in the menu is public record, organized so you can actually use it: every meeting and agenda, every bill before the county, water rights, campaign money, what every county employee is paid, and where the budget goes. Dig around. It is all yours.

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The record

The prison in Pahrump

The Nevada Southern Detention Center is a private prison on the east side of Pahrump. CoreCivic owns and runs it under a contract with the United States Marshals Service. It holds people in federal custody, not people serving a Nevada sentence. This page is the plain record of what it is, where it is and who runs it.

Every figure here links to the document it came from. Where the document is hard to get at, we keep our own copy and link that too, so nothing here depends on anyone else keeping a file online.

Nevada Southern Detention Center

Private. Federal detainees. Not the county's.

Where
2190 East Mesquite Avenue, Pahrump, NV 89060
Who runs it
CoreCivic, the company formerly called Corrections Corporation of America. CoreCivic's own page lists the facility as medium security, with the U.S. Marshals Service as its customer and John Mattos as warden since July 2025.
Who is inside
People in federal custody, not people serving a Nevada sentence. The agreement says it lets the U.S. Marshals Service, the Bureau of Prisons and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement hold detainees there.
How big
The contract describes a requirement for a facility to house 1,000 beds for detainees (male only), with 750 beds guaranteed for payment, which is 75 per cent of the federal bed space. CoreCivic does not publish a capacity, and published counts elsewhere disagree, so the contract's figure is the only one we will state.
What it is worth
The award document gives a total contract amount of $122,250,660. The daily rate paid per detainee is redacted in the public copy, under the exemption for confidential commercial information.
Why here
The contract required the facility to sit within 75 miles of the Lloyd D. George U.S. Federal Courthouse in Las Vegas. Pahrump is inside that ring.
The documents
The contract, all 99 pages. We keep our own copy here. Government websites get reorganised and files disappear, and this one is worth having.
The government's copies: the agreement page and the contract PDF. They are slow and sometimes refuse to load. Ours will not.

Where it is

East Mesquite Avenue, on the east side of Pahrump.

Address
2190 East Mesquite Avenue, Pahrump, NV 89060
Coordinates
36.2520145, -115.9770311

Open it on a map: OpenStreetMap, directions on Google Maps, satellite view.
There is no map embedded here. OpenStreetMap's own embed draws the marker, the zoom buttons and the copyright line and then leaves the map blank, checked on their site as well as ours. A frame that loads and shows nothing is worse than a link that works, so these are links, and they also keep the page from calling Google before a reader asks it to.

Who to call

Published by CoreCivic, read 6 September 2026.

Warden
John Mattos, in post since July 2025.
The facility
775-751-4500
Fax 775-751-8763
2190 East Mesquite Avenue, Pahrump, NV 89060
Reporting abuse
The facility's line for reporting sexual abuse under the Prison Rape Elimination Act is 775-751-4504. Immigration and Customs Enforcement runs its own line, 1-888-351-4024.
The company
CoreCivic, 5501 Virginia Way, Suite 110, Brentwood, TN 37027.
615-263-3000, fax 615-263-3140.
Press office: PublicAffairs@CoreCivic.com
Not listed
CoreCivic publishes no assistant wardens, no department contacts and no visiting hours for this facility. If you know them, tell us and we will add them.