63-acre land purchase puts damper on proposed east KY prison project
A 63-acre purchase by a local land restoration group in eastern Kentucky could potentially delay the building of a proposed $500 million federal prison.
The plot is located in a critical portion of a 500-acre prison site, which would be big enough to incarcerate more than a thousand people.
Mitch Whitaker owns neighboring land in Letcher County passed down through generations. He said the prison would essentially be in his backyard and supports the land buy.
“They were actually wanting to come right almost in my back door, off the hill, and the property was bounded pretty good by roads and rivers,” Whitaker explained.
Supporters of the prison argued the project will create local jobs. But data from the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy show counties, including Martin, Clay and McCreary counties, which have been home to prisons for decades, continue to see among the lowest median household incomes in the nation.
Joan Steffen, attorney for the Institute to End Mass Incarceration, represented the Appalachian Rekindling Project, the group purchasing the land, and said they did not buy it just to sit on it.
“They were buying it to do this really amazing land remediation work, reintroducing native species, and their goal is to employ local people,” Steffen outlined.
Whitaker believes his community deserves much more than another federal prison, noting there are already five in the region.
“Here in East Kentucky, these are as pretty mountains as you can have,” Whitaker observed. “They’re like the Smokies. You know, they’re beautiful. I was against it from the start.”
According to the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy, the Commonwealth incarcerates 40% more people per capita than the national average. Critics said the hundreds of millions of dollars planned for the prison could instead be spent on flood resilience, housing, reforesting degraded land, and funding child care and other community needs.
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