An Eastern Kentucky prison is expanding. Will it bring more jobs to the region?

In a couple years, Kentucky’s second-largest state prison complex will be located in Elliott County, one of the state’s smallest counties by population.

The Little Sandy Correctional Complex, located in the county’s seat of Sandy Hook, has been operating since 2005. State and local officials broke ground this past week on a planned expansion of the facility that will double the capacity of the prison to 1,882 inmates, a press release from the state Department of Corrections said.

State and local officials have touted the job-creation ability of the expanded prison, noting that it would create over 160 local jobs. Experts studying the increasing number of prisons in Eastern Kentucky and in rural America in general have advised caution regarding promised economic prosperity tied to prisons.

The influx of new local jobs would be “immense” for the approximately 7,500-person Elliott County, said Myron Lewis, the county’s judge-executive.

“We don’t want them to just drop in and go to the prison and leave and go back home,” Lewis said. “I would like some of them to want to relocate to Elliott County and raise their family here in our school system, become part of our community.”

Larry Chandler, the prison’s now-retired warden, told the Elliott County Chamber of Commerce in April that the salary for new employees would start at $35,640 and that construction would aim to be finished in 2024.

State officials like Rocky Adkins also touted the job-creation abilities of the prison expansion at the groundbreaking. Adkins is Gov. Andy Beshear’s senior adviser and an Elliott County native,

“Kentucky’s economy is booming, and we have created the largest job growth ever in the commonwealth’s history,” said Adkins, a former statehouse majority leader. “And we are here today creating more good-paying jobs in a community that is ready to work to support themselves and their families and to grow the county.”

Prisons have long been pitched as engines for economic development in rural communities across the country and across Eastern Kentucky. Since 1990, at least seven prisons — a mix of federal, state and privately operated — have opened in a region in need of jobs as coal production has declined.

Has prison development benefited Kentucky towns?

When asked if the small towns and counties where those prisons were built have benefited economically, Judah Schept, a professor in Eastern Kentucky University’s School of Justice Studies, said the short answer is “not really.”

Context matters, and the economic benefit for a community can vary based on the particular location and type of prison being constructed, said Schept. Schept has been researching the growth of prisons and jails in Central Appalachia for years and published a book on the subject this past spring.

State prison jobs may be easier to land than those in federal prisons due to stricter eligibility requirements for federal prisons, Schept said. So a promise of 160 jobs coming to Elliott County “may have more credibility than the same sort of promise if it were to follow a federal prison.”

In Elliott County, Lewis said the county has benefited since Little Sandy first opened in 2005. At the time, the county didn’t really have any other revenue sources aside from the school system, a couple restaurants and medical facilities.

Since then, local convenience stores have done better, new medical facilities have opened and the county’s gained a Save-A-Lot and a McDonald’s.

“I know it sounds a little small,” Lewis said. “But it’s huge to us.”

Nationwide, aggregate data on rural prisons tends to suggest that the facilities don’t bring economic development and can even further depress local economies that might already be distressed, Schept said.

“That’s not uniform necessarily,” Schept said. “But that to me is a very kind of cautionary tale.”

Census data shows that the county population increased by about 1,000 people between the years 2000 and 2010, but then declined by about 500 people by 2020.

In July, the county posted an 8.9% unemployment rate – the third highest in the state at the time – data from the Kentucky Center for Statistics shows. Lewis said he’s hopeful that number will be driven down by the prison’s expansion.

The expansion is an investment of over $100 million, “which is just wonderful” for Elliott County and anyone in a surrounding county who might want to drive in to work, Lewis said. He expressed thanks to the governor’s office and the state legislature for making the project happen.

An expanded Little Sandy will allow the state Department of Corrections to transition inmates away from the Kentucky State Reformatory in La Grange, an aging facility that is earmarked to be eventually closed, the department said.

A trend of more prison beds in Eastern Kentucky

Schept said there’s a real, noticeable trend of prisons opening up in Eastern Kentucky.

“Eastern Kentucky seems to be receiving a really large number of prison beds, even within the state of Kentucky, right, it seems to be shifting even more to Eastern Kentucky,” Schept said. “And I just think that’s a really sobering phenomenon that we should be really cautious about.”

Aside from the Little Sandy expansion, the then-defunct Otter Creek Correctional Center was reopened in 2020 as the 621-bed Southeast State Correctional Complex in Floyd County.

Controversial plans to open an expensive and expansive new federal prison in Letcher County were withdrawn in 2018 in the face of local pushback and a lack of funding. However, this past October, the federal Bureau of Prisons potentially revived those plans by filing a new notice to prepare an environmental impact statement for a new prison in the county.