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NATCHEZ — Amid a national immigration crackdown, wardens of the Adams County Correctional Facility who oversee its operation are sharing the benefits and challenges of being near max capacity.

Wardens with CoreCivic, the private company that operates the facility, spoke at a Wednesday meeting of the Natchez Rotary Club.

Assistant Warden Krystal Lee and Warden Jason Streeval gave insight about the Adams County Correctional Center and its impact on the county as a whole.

Streeval said he came out of retirement to work at the private prison, which is owned by CoreCivic and currently houses all male U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees. Streeval is nearing his seventh month there, adding to over 26 years of career experience starting in 1998 with the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

It’s true that since the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration, the facility has been at or nearing its capacity of around 2,260 occupants with a current occupancy of around 2,160, he said.

“Those 100 beds won’t be empty long,” Streeval added.

Having a full capacity also means that Adams County sees more payment from CoreCivic.

In addition to around $1.9 million that the company pays the county in property taxes, the prison pays the county 50 cents per person housed at the facility per day.

For just Tuesday alone, the county received $1,100, Streeval said.

Lee, who has been working at the prison since it opened in 2009, described how CoreCivic values its employees.

“We invest a lot in our staff,” she said. “When they first get hired, they have a five-week training — very intense — but it prepares them for the profession when they get out of training classes. Then we have something called CoreCivic University, where we look at those frontline employees who look to become leaders and we send them to our facilities all over the country to gain that experience.

“It’s not just seminars with people just talking to them but reality-based training where they are put into a situation and they gain the real-life skills they need when faced with those situations. When you look at our facility, I call it a city. It’s a city within a city. And in that city, we have so many different opportunities for advancement.”

With other CoreCivic-run facilities all across the nation, the Adams County facility is one of its largest. It currently employs 316 people from Adams and surrounding counties and averages about 320 employees, Lee said.

“We have 24 (employees) getting ready to start in two weeks,” in addition to the 316 they have currently, added Streeval.  “Can anyone guess how much in salaries a staff of 320 makes? It’s about $22 million. That’s $22 million put back into the local economy.”

Food service is contracted out, but other workers, such as detention officers, healthcare workers, business office workers and those who offload supplies are all hired by CoreCivic, he said. In addition, Streeval says CoreCivic relies on local businesses as much as possible to take care of the 15-year-old facility’s maintenance needs.

“I’ve got a $180,000 HVAC replacement project going on right now,” he said. “When we got to update some dryers, water heaters, there’s always something breaking and that is where we reach out to the community. I’m always doing business with local people as much as possible.”

Lee said some of the Rotary’s questions could only be answered by ICE, such as how the detainees came to the facility.

“I stay in my lane,” she said. “We’re just there to take care of the person — making sure their mental health is OK, making sure they eat on time.”

The Adams County Correctional detainees are mostly docile, Streeval said. “We’re not dealing with any medium or high security. Obviously, when you get 2,200 people together, you are going to run into some problems. Seventy-five percent of the time, they’re just arguing over who’s going to use the microwave next.”

He said the average stay is around 60 days, but “it’s continuing to get longer. There are some who’ve been there as long as I have, six or seven months now.”

When CoreCivic previously contracted with the Federal Bureau of Prisons up until 2019, most detainees were of Hispanic ethnicity. That is not the case today with the ICE contract. Streeval said around 700 of the occupants migrated from India. The rest are mostly from China, North Africa and Middle Eastern countries, he said.

Among the challenges of having such a large occupancy are the language barriers, which Streeval said they’ve been able to navigate with technology.

“We have a couple of translators, but they only speak Spanish, and that hasn’t been much help,” he said. “But we use translation devices to communicate where I can say something, and it will repeat it to them in their language.”

There are cases where a resident may come from a tribe with a dialect unique to their tribe and ICE has specific employees to help with that, Lee added.

The facility is also equipped with nearly 50 telephone and video conferencing booths so that the occupants can communicate with their attorneys and the judges from wherever their case is at, she said.