The Letcher Prison Fight - Where We've Been and Where We’re Going

by Kandia Milton, Government Affairs Director 

In the summer of 2021, Dream.Org began a soft launch of an ambitious and hopeful federal prison closure campaign. With conditions in many federal prisons deteriorating, the federal prison population in decline, and with full implementation of the First Step Act and anticipated passage of the EQUAL Act, we expected that population to continue to shrink and reduce the need for federal prisons.

While the campaign generated strong enthusiasm, we struggled to build a coalition that crossed political party lines and many prospective partners hesitated to join, despite aligning with the premise. Without the broad coalition needed to move forward, we made the difficult decision to pause the campaign and continue laying the groundwork to demonstrate why closing some federal prisons is both necessary and inevitable.

In the fall of 2022, as we continued advancing meaningful criminal justice reforms across multiple states and making progress on the EQUAL Act, a group of organizers approached us. They asked us to sign onto a letter urging Congress to rescind funding for a proposed $505 million federal prison in Letcher County, Kentucky, the most expensive federal prison ever built in the United States. 

Given our prior research and the fact that we were seeing the Bureau of Prisons struggling to recruit and retain correctional officers,we felt compelled to fully engage in the effort. We joined as founding members of Building Community Not Prisons (BCNP), a national strategy and organizing effort working in partnership with powerful local groups like Concerned Letcher Countians and Kentuckians for the Commonwealth.

This coalition has already achieved significant wins:

• Defeat of Section 219, an appropriations rider that would have blocked legal challenges to the prison’s construction and operation.
• Defeat of Section 212, which would have restricted all related lawsuits to the Eastern District of Kentucky.
• BCNP founding member, The Institute to End Mass Incarceration, partnered with the Native-led Appalachian Rekindling Project to purchase approximately 68 acres of land within the proposed prison footprint.
• Traveled to Letcher County to submit public comments opposing the draft Environmental Impact Statement.

Our work is nowhere near done. We are still urging the Bureau of Prisons to conduct a new Environmental Impact Study in light of the Appalachian Rekindling Project’s land purchase, which would require significant redesign of the prison’s infrastructure and continuing to press Congress to rescind funding for the project. 

At the same time, we continue to invest in directly impacted leaders across the country who are advancing solutions grounded in evidence, fairness, and justice and remain committed to passing federal legislation while further making the case that the United States has too many federal prisons. 

That is why this fight matters.

Stopping the construction of this unnecessary and grossly overpriced prison is about the future. Every prison we prevent from being built today is one less to close when political will catches up to the reality that we already see.

Sign the petition and tell Congress: Rescind the funding for the proposed Letcher County prison and invest in fixing what’s broken — not building more of the same.