By Bob Christie
Capitol Media Services
PHOENIX – Arizona’s first private prison is again owned by the company that built it in the mid-1990s and then sold it to the state in 2013 for $150,000.
Just what Centerville, Utah, based Management & Training Corp. has planned for the shuttered 500-bed prison in Marana is still not known, even though the company paid Arizona $15 million for the facility. MTC had run the prison for the state until Gov. Katie Hobbs ordered it closed at the end of 2023 because the state no longer needed the beds.
MTC Communications Director Emily Lawhead said Monday that the company still isn’t able to say who the customer might be, when the facility will reopen and how many employees it will need to hire to staff it.
But all eyes are on the federal government as the eventual user, with the Trump administration in the midst of a massive increase in the number of immigration detention beds, both public and private.
Terry Rozema, town manager in Marana, said company officials told him months ago that it may use the prison as an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility.
That makes sense, since Arizona doesn’t need the beds for state prisoners and private prison companies are landing a large number of ICE detention contracts. And MTC’s website says it already runs five Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency detention centers, one in California and four in Texas.
State Sen. John Kavanagh had proposed legislation in January for the state to lease the facility to ICE for $1 a year, noting it would be a big win for immigration hawks like him. The proposal passed the Senate but was voted down in the state House the day the Department of Administration announced the deal to sell it to MTC.
The Fountain Hills Republican said Monday that having the Marana prison used as an ICE facility would be “good news.” Although it has 500 beds, Kavanagh said an operator could double the capacity to 1,000.
“I love the idea that we’d have expedited removal in Phoenix,” Kavanagh said. “It’ll be removing illegal aliens quicker and it will possibly scare some of them out of the state.”
A spokesman for ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations in Phoenix, Fernando X. Burgos Ortiz, said the agency’s boosted enforcement has led to significantly more arrests and a need for greater detention capacity. But he said in an email that the agency doesn’t discuss potential new sites until a contract is finalized.
The deal for the prison about 30 miles north of Tucson in northern Pima County closed on July 23, a week earlier than laid out in the April 30 sales agreement with the state.
ICE has a large immigration detention facility in the Pinal County city of Eloy that can house as many as 1,500 detainees. It is run by CoreCivic, another private prison company.
The loss of the private prison was a hit for Marana, both in local jobs and in loss of economic activity by companies that maintained and supplied the prison. At full capacity, the former Arizona State Prison-Marana employed more than 200 people, many of whom lived in the town of about 63,000. It was classified as a minimum security prison.
The town also got increased state shared revenue because prisoners are counted as residents, Rozema said in May. When state prisoners were held there they were hired to do roadside cleanup and other projects that help keep the town ‘pristine.’
Rozema said earlier that he doubted ICE detainees could be used for outside work projects because of the security concerns.
In addition to the five Ice facilities, MTC operates multiple detention or correctional centers in the U.S. and abroad, plus Job Corps training centers and prison medical facilities.
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