Locked up:

Nevada, facing a shortage of prison beds, will send 200 of its most violent inmates to Eloy, which is home to a private correctional facility run by Nashville-based CoreCivic Inc. The two-year deal comes with a $9.2 million price tag.

Nevada, facing a shortage of prison beds, will send 200 of its most violent inmates to a private correctional facility in Eloy.

The Silver State will pay $9.2 million to Nashville-based CoreCivic Inc. (formerly Corrections Corporation of America) as part of a twoyear deal to house the inmates in the Saguaro Correctional Center.

That medium-security facility opened in 2007 and also houses inmates from Hawaii.

CoreCivic also incarcerates in-

mates for the state of Arizona, the city of Mesa, California and the federal government at prisons in Eloy, Florence and Tucson, according to its website. Arizona heavily relies on private prisons, including those of CoreCivic, to ease overcrowding.

Efforts to reach CoreCivic, which won the bid to take Nevada’s inmates, were unsuccessful.

Brooke Keast, a Nevada prisons spokeswoman, said her state has a shortage of beds and does not have any private prisons within Nevada that it could use. She said the transfer of prisoners will begin in November.

“We don’t have a lot of options with private prisons here,” she said.

Nevada Department of Corrections Director James Dzurenda told The Las Vegas Review-Journal that his agency would send “the most destructive and the most dangerous” inmates to Arizona.

Keast said Nevada would send inmates who “pose issues for us here,” including those in strategic threat groups —

“We don’t have a lot of options with private prisons here.”

meaning gang members.

She said the transfer of inmates would open roughly 370 beds in Nevada’s own prison system. Many cells in Nevada prisons now are being used only by a single violent offender who must be isolated. With the departure of those inmates, the cells can be shared between two less-violent inmates, she said.