Pahrump Valley Times
Dan Prado, former assistant warden at the Nevada Southern Detention Center, has been brought back and named the acting warden, following the sudden departure of Roddie Rushing.
Steve Owen, senior director of public affairs for Corrections Corporation of America, said Rushing turned in his resignation Jan. 16, effective immediately. Owen said Rushing cited personal reasons.
Prado joined CCA in 2000 and worked at CCA facilities in Idaho, Minnesota, Nevada and Kansas in a variety of supervisory and facility management positions.
Most recently, Prado was an assistant warden at the Leavenworth Detention Center in Kansas. Before that, Prado was assistant warden at the Nevada Southern Detention Center in Pahrump, he came to Pahrump from the Idaho Department of Corrections. Prado also served in the U.S. Navy.
CCA is going through its formal process of interviewing and selecting a permanent replacement for the warden job, Owen said.
Rushing was named warden of the Nevada Southern Detention Center in May 2011, following Joe Ponte, the warden who presided over the opening of the 1,072-bed facility in October 2010. Ponte left to take a job as director of the Maine Department of Corrections.
Rushing was a warden at the Northeast Ohio Correctional Center in Youngstown, Ohio for four years before he came to Pahrump, before that he was assistant warden of the California City Correctional Center for two years. He rose in the ranks, beginning his career with CCA as a corrections officer in 1997 when the company ran the Southern Nevada Women’s Correctional Facility.
Prado was run out of Idaho as was the warden, who was demoted and sent to Leavenworth.
The CCA Idaho prison gained national infamy as the “Gladiator School,” where inmates who allegedly informed about guards smuggling to neo-Nazis were allowed to be beaten nearly to death. CCA covered up the beatings by refusing to X-ray prisoners for all the broken bones they received in these beatings.
You can see a prisoner being lobotomized by a skinhead as CCA guards stood idly by, even while the assailant stopped to sit and rest in the middle of the beating, went to get a drink and then returned to his victim to continue kicking him in the head. Here’s the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VW4K9DKgRhI
Prado was notorious for screaming directly in the faces of his subordinates who complained about the mistreatment of the Idaho inmates.
I am so sorry for the inmates and families of those incarcerated under Prado, having been a family member under his thumb in the past it is a horrible place to be. I pray he learned his lesson but fear he has not and never will.