Nevada Southern Detention Center

It is a federal detention center rather than a prison. CoreCivic operates the facility in Pahrump, and the people held there are federal pretrial detainees and U.S. Marshals Service holds for the District of Nevada, waiting on federal cases in U.S. District Court in Las Vegas rather than serving a Nevada state sentence. That is also why the search works differently: the Bureau of Prisons inmate locator is the federal lookup, but a pretrial Marshals hold often does not appear there until a federal register number is assigned, and until then the U.S. Marshals Service for the District of Nevada is the place to ask. If you cannot get an answer from either, call (702) 857-7197.

Start with Federal Bureau of Prisons inmate locator, then confirm by phone at (775) 727-0010. A booking is not searchable the moment someone is arrested. The record appears only after intake is finished, which commonly takes several hours, so an empty result early on usually means the booking is still in progress rather than that the arrest did not happen.

There is no published guarantee, but intake typically runs several hours from the arrest to a searchable record: transport, medical screening, property, prints, and photos all come first, and a busy night runs longer. If it has been several hours and the name still is not showing, call (775) 727-0010 and ask directly rather than refreshing the search. If you cannot confirm custody anywhere, call (702) 857-7197 and we will locate the booking for you.

Full legal name and date of birth. Search the last name on its own first. Booking records use the name on the government ID, so nicknames, shortened first names, married names, hyphens, and middle names typed into the wrong box are the most common reason a real booking returns no result. If the name is common, the date of birth is what separates the right record from the wrong one.

Often, but not always, and what you see is preliminary. Booking charges are what the arresting officer wrote down; the prosecutor decides what actually gets filed, and that can be more, fewer, or different charges. Federal detention rules apply (18 U.S.C. § 3142). Bail is set by a magistrate judge in U.S. District Court. No schedule applies. Treat anything on a public screen as a starting point and confirm it against the court record.

They were probably booked somewhere else. Southern Nevada has separate city, county, and federal facilities, and only the Clark County jail and the federal locator offer a self-service search, so which one you land in depends on which agency made the arrest and where. Check the other Southern Nevada facilities listed on this page, and remember that federal holds do not appear on any county roster. Call (702) 857-7197 and we will check all of them.