Federal government gives green light to build new prison in Eastern Kentucky
Plans for construction of a new medium-security federal prison in Letcher County have been approved by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, Kentucky Congressman Hal Rogers announced Monday.
Rogers, who has long pushed for construction of a new prison in Eastern Kentucky, said he was “thrilled” when he got the call from Bureau of Prisons Director Colette Peters Friday. The “Record of Decision” outlining plans for the facility was published Monday.
“Director Peters said the BOP is going to build a new modern, state-of-the-art facility in Letcher County that focuses on safety and wellness,” Rogers said in a statement.
The bureau said a new facility is necessary amid a “growing number of aged and obsolete federal correctional facilities, which are no longer cost-effective or sustainable to operate and maintain.”
The chosen spot for the new facility is on 500 acres of land leveled by mountaintop removal coal mining in Roxana, roughly 10 miles to the west of Whitesburg.
Rogers said design work and property acquisitions will take about a year before construction actually begins. Construction on the facility, estimated to cost more than $500 million, will take about three years. Once built, it will house 1,152 male prisoners in the medium-security section and another 256 in an adjoining minimum-security section.
Plans to build a federal prison in the Eastern Kentucky county have been more than a decade in the making and comes a few months after a final environmental impact review of three proposed sites.
Of the three options considered in the assessment — building at two different sites in Letcher County or not building a prison at all — the bureau chose the option to build in Roxana and said construction would include measures to “avoid, minimize or mitigate environmental impacts to the extent practicable.”
The Bureau of Prisons director initially approved construction of the facility in May 2018 but withdrew the approval in July 2019 after the Abolitionist Law Center sued. They argued the facility would damage the environment and expose inmates at the facility to toxic pollutants at the former mining site.
The proposal has also had its fair share of detractors in the region over the years. The public had a chance to weigh in on the proposal through the bureau’s website, but those comments were not accessible on the bureau’s website Monday.
In a July 30 op-ed written by former state representative Attica Scott, a Louisville Democrat; Artie Ann Bates, a Letcher County psychiatrist and writer; and Judah Schept, author of “Coal, Cages Crisis: the Rise of the Prison Economy in Central Appalachia,” they chided Rogers for championing for years the construction of such an expensive facility, despite the declining federal prison population.
Once built, this newest facility “would be the fourth federal prison Rogers has brought to Eastern Kentucky under the banner of job creation, despite no evidence of this as a successful economic development strategy,” they wrote, and would work to deepen “the region’s dependence on mass incarceration.”
On Monday, Rogers said the new facility would bring 325 permanent workers and $43 million in the way of annual wages and salaries to a region that has “experienced declining populations and slow or no economic growth.”
“The estimated $57 million annual operating budget is also expected to indirectly support additional private sector employment in Letcher County and throughout southeastern Kentucky,” he said.
Since 1990 at least seven prisons — some federal and state, others privately funded — have opened in Eastern Kentucky. Though long promised as economic boons to the region that once flourished economically from the coal industry, that’s often not how they pan out, the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy concluded in a study published last May.
Three counties with federal prisons — Clay, Martin and McCreary — have all experienced continued population loss since prisons opened in those counties, the study said, and poverty rates in those counties have remained high. Median household income in all three counties has remained mostly flat.
The poverty rates in those counties have also remained high. When United States Penitentiary Big Sandy opened in Martin County in 2003, the poverty rate was below 30%. In the two decades since, the county’s poverty rate has spiked above 40% three different times, most recently in 2021.
Still, more jobs is better than fewer jobs, especially in a region still recovering from decimating floods, locals and area officials say.
“We have worked for nearly 20 years to bring these much-needed jobs to Letcher County,” Elwood Cornett, co-founder of the Letcher County Planning Commission, said Monday in a news release.
“Regardless of the decision, our county has benefited from all the improvements that had been made to prepare for this prison,” he added.
This story may be updated.
