Newly appointed jail warden previously guarded detainees at ‘Gitmo’
The new warden for the Washington County Correctional Facility has on his résumé one of the world’s most notorious prisons: Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, known in military lingo as “Gitmo.”
“The primary mission in Guantanamo is not detention, it’s intelligence,” Fewell said in a phone interview Thursday from his home state.
He described it as series of detention camps, some of which have closed since he was deployed in 2005.
“When I was there, there were approximately 440 enemy combatants, picked up on the battlefield,” he said. The detainees, he said, are relaying what he called “actionable military intelligence to this day.”
Fewell retired from the U.S. Army in 2008 after assignments stateside and abroad.
During the Cold war, as part of the Military Police Corps, he guarded, not humans, but a nuclear ammunition depot, one of five within the NATO ally West Germany.
He described them as being “full of nuclear-tipped artillery rounds and Lance missiles, short-range nuclear weapons, very tactical, very small but very devastating to an advancing Soviet army.
His duty included standing guard in a 60-foot armored tower in a forest … These sites are in the middle of nowhere.”
The power of the nuclear explosion “would wipe out downtown Washington,” he said. “That was the war plan back then.”
With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, Fewell returned stateside and was also assigned in Korea at a small military detention center. After retiring as a first sergeant, he worked as a deputy sheriff in corrections in Olathe, Kan., and then in Wyandotte County, which includes Kansas City, Kan., proper.
Wyandotte, he said, is one of the poorest counties in the state, and its crime rate is second to only that of Wichita.
The Wyandotte detention center, with a $14 million annual budget and 615 beds, has 352 inmates in custody.
“We farm out 52 inmates a day because we don’t have staff to supervise that other 52,” he said, noting that in tougher economic times, more people are willing to work as corrections officers.
At the Washington County Correctional Facility in September, there were 314 inmates, 282 of whom are awaiting trial and/or sentencing. The annual 2020 budget for the jail is $9,023,274.
In 2014 Fewell was named Correctional Administrator of the Year by the American Jail Association.
What enabled him to receive this honor?
“I believe it was how we run a jail on a very, very thin budget,” he said.
Fewell, 53, has not yet visited Washington County in person.
At the Wyandotte detention center, corrections officers work three, 12-hour shifts and one six-hour shift per week, which includes two mandatory hours of overtime pay, a schedule he hopes to implement at the Washington County Correctional Facility.
“We have three unions in Wyandotte, the Teamsters, the Fraternal Order of Police and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. We are very unionized, very blue-collar. We have to collaborate, and we have to communicate.”
Washington County jail guards chose two years ago to change their bargaining unit’s affiliation to the National Correctional Employees Union. Washington County hourly employees are also affiliated with the Service Employees International Union.
After the Washington County Salary Board acted Thursday morning to increase the compensation for the warden’s position to $105,000 from the previous pay, Fewell accepted the job offer.
He said his last day at the Wyandotte Adult Detention Center will be Wednesday.
“I’ve been a transplant my whole career,” he said. “I’m kind of accustomed to not being ‘from here.’ I’m going to do my best to earn people’s confidence and trust.
“We used to open the jail up for tours. We can’t do that now due to COVID, but we can do a virtual tour.”