The U.S. Department of Justice is seeking to claw back $500 million for a prison in Letcher County, a project that has been subject to stops and starts for nearly two decades.
A Justice Department budget request dated June 13 proposes to rescind construction funding for a medium-security prison in Roxana for the upcoming fiscal year that starts in October.
It’s not the first time a federal administration has tried to ax funding for the proposed prison that Republican U.S. Rep Hal Rogers has worked to bring to Letcher County since 2006.
The first Trump administration killed a plan for a high-security prison on the site, calling the hundreds of millions of dollars earmarked for the project “wasteful spending” at a time when prisoner numbers were declining. A Biden administration budget also proposed canceling funding for the prison.
But in 2022, the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) under the Biden administration switched the plan to a medium-security prison. The bureau moved forward with acquiring land for the project last year after a process to determine its environmental impacts. It’s funding for the medium-security prison that the Trump Justice Department now is seeking to rescind.
Rogers, a long-time advocate for the prison project, in a statement provided to the Lantern, said the Letcher project would address the prison bureau’s need for modernized facilities and that he secured the $500 million in federal funding as a key appropriator in Congress.
Rogers, in his 23rd term, sits on the powerful U.S. House Appropriations Committee and leads a subcommittee overseeing funding for the U.S. Department of Justice that includes funding for federal prisons.
“The people of Letcher County have invested nearly 20 years of planning and preparation for a new federal prison to bring more than 300 much-needed jobs to our region,” Rogers said in his statement. “The proposed prison has surpassed multiple environmental studies and every ounce of red tape that has been doled out. Years of investments have been made in good faith to support this project at the federal, state and local levels, and I will continue working to see it to completion.”
An email requesting comment from the Justice Department about the funding recission was not immediately returned Monday afternoon. The Lexington Herald-Leader had previously reported on the proposed funding rescission.
The proposed prison project has also faced pushback from a coalition of local and national activists seeking to stop the project. The progressive think tank Kentucky Center for Economic Policy has also questioned economic development arguments made in favor of the prison, highlighting other Eastern Kentucky counties with prisons that have seen economic and population declines.
In January, an Indigenous group backed by the coalition of activists announced it had purchased land within the boundaries of the proposed prison project and sought to use the land for other purposes. Rogers had said the move came as no surprise “from a group led by Kentucky outsiders and liberal extremists.”
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Written by Liam Niemeyer. Cross-posted from the Kentucky Lantern.
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