Ed Kemmick/Last Best News
The Two Rivers Detention Facility in Hardin is open for business. The warden allowed photos to be taken in his office, but nowhere else inside the building.
HARDIN — Seven years after it was built, the Hardin jail is finally up and running, with a slowly expanding roster of inmates.
Warden Kenneth Keller said the head count was 56 on Friday, all of them prisoners committed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs or from individual Indian tribes in Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming.
When Last Best News first spoke with Keller two weeks ago, there were 47 inmates in the Two Rivers Detention Facility. Keller said he had 62 employees, about half of them correctional staff. The rest work in the kitchen, in medical and treatment programs and in administration.
Keller came to Hardin in May, two years after retiring from a 26-year career with the Department of Corrections in Wyoming. The jail started accepting prisoners in August.
“I thought it would be a very good challenge to come in and make this facility work,” Keller said.
For years, many people in Hardin and elsewhere in the state wondered if the attempt would ever be made.
The jail was built after a consortium of Texas companies convinced the Two Rivers Authority, the city’s industrial development arm, to construct the $27 million jail using high-interest revenue bonds.
Despite the rosy projections of the companies that built the 464-bed minimum-security jail, Two Rivers Authority and the original operator were unable to sign any contracts to bring inmates to the jail after it was completed in 2007.
The bonds were declared to be in technical default in 2008, and there followed years of sometimes-desperate attempts to find some sort of paying use for the jail. Hardin tried contracting with counties, states, tribal organizations and the federal government, all to no avail.
Ed Kemmick/Last Best News
Ken Keller had a 26-year career with the Wyoming Department of Corrections before signing on as warden of the jail in Hardin.
In 2009, the Hardin City Council supported a plan to use the jail for housing terrorist prisoners from the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. As if that notoriety weren’t enough, later that year a con man who called himself Capt. Michael Hilton took the people of Hardin for a wild ride that made the city the butt of jokes nationwide and the source of outlandish conspiracy theories.
The use of Hilton’s so-called American Police Force was said to be a test case for President Obama’s plan to establish government-funded private police forces across the country. Another rumor, spread by social media and a national radio show, was that the jail would be used to quarantine residents of Hardin who refused to be given an untested swine flu vaccination.
Finally, last spring, a legitimate operator stepped forward — Emerald Correctional Management, based in Shreveport, La. The Emerald Cos. was listed as the entity that was to have operated the prison after it was built in 2007, but that never happened.
It is not clear why Emerald Correctional Management finally got involved this year. Keller referred all questions about the company to Steve Afeman, Emerald’s chief operating officer, but he did not respond to numerous interview requests over the past two weeks.
At any rate, Keller said Emerald has contracts for the Hardin jail with the BIA, plus individual contracts with the Blackfoot, Northern Cheyenne and Crow tribes in Montana, the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation in North Dakota, and the two tribes of the Wind River Reservation* in Wyoming.
Keller said Emerald spent several months getting the facility ready, including upgrades to the mechanical systems and roof. Their goal, he said, was to “get it operational and to the point that it would meet all state and local inspections.”
Some of the prisoners are serving sentences while others are awaiting trial, Keller said. The jail accepts male and female prisoners, who are separated by sight and sound.
Among the workers at the jail, 80 percent are Native Americans, Keller said, a proportion Emerald intends to maintain as the facility becomes fully staffed. If the jail ever reaches its 464-prisoner capacity — “and that is our ultimate goal” — there would be about 150 employees, he said.
The biggest problem so far has been finding housing in Hardin for employees. Because housing is so scarce, Keller said, most of the workers are commuting from Billings, Lame Deer, Crow Agency and other nearby communities.
Keller retired a couple of years ago as warden of the Wyoming Honor Farm, a minimum-security facility in Riverton. Like most everybody involved in corrections, he said, he was familiar with the travails of the jail in Hardin, which is one reason he looked forward to the challenge of making it operational.
He said he has a lot of respect for Emerald Correctional Management, particularly its drug and alcohol programs, which have been shown to work in other states.
“A lot of these individuals are going to end up being your and my neighbors,” he said. “And we want to have good neighbors.”
The jail is still owned by Two Rivers Authority, but it has nothing to do with the operation of the jail.
“We carry it on our books, but we don’t have any control,” said Jeff McDowell, director of Two Rivers Authority.
He said US Bank is the trustee that handles all the financial details for the jail, collecting money from the contracting entities and disbursing money to Emerald and to bondholders.
“And at some point we should begin receiving a modest payment for our efforts,” he said of Two Rivers Authority.
In addition to providing employment, Keller said, “we try to do as much of our business as we can with local businesses. We have a fairly big impact on a fairly big area.”
That’s also why he doesn’t spend much time thinking about the jail’s troubled history.
“It’s all about the future and the impact we’re going to be able to have on the community and all the surrounding areas,” he said.
*Correction: We originally referred to the Wind River Tribe, which was wrong. The Wind River Reservation is home to the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes.
