The Federal Bureau of Prisons is moving forward with plans to build a prison in Kentucky, commissioning an environmental impact study on two potential sites in the southeastern part of the state.
U.S. Rep. Hal Rogers says both locations are in Letcher County. The plan to build a federal prison in Kentucky has been in the works since 2006, when Rogers secured $5 million in Congress to begin the planning process. A recent Congressional Research Service report says the country's federal prison population is almost nine times what it was in 1980, ballooning from 50,000 to 219,000 in 2012.
