By: Jeete Swisher

The Blackburn Correctional Complex, a minimum security Kentucky state prison located
off of Spurr Rd. near Masterson Station, is an incarceration facility that holds violent and nonviolent
offenders alike. It serves as a transitional prison in which inmates who are soon likely to
be released, or a prison where offenders on better behavior are kept.
The interns took yet another field-trip to this state penitentiary, finding it to contrast drastically
from the Fayette County Detention center visited earlier in the summer.
For one, the prison is minimum security. So minimum security, in fact, that the reformatory
doesn’t even maintain fences that could surround the property. The only thing that keeps the
criminals from a much desired escape, is the fear of getting caught and racking up more years to
a prolonged sentence. Estimated to us by our tour guide, an approximate 2-3 inmates attempt
escape every year. Some escapees even make it to the nearby neighborhood of Masterson
Station–a population largely made up of children and senior citizens–my grandmother, included.
However, I repeat that these are non-violent offenders, so not much trouble is stirred up on the
daily. Out of the 594 detainees, our tour guide recounted that only once in his 7 years working at
the correctional complex, did he have to break up a fight. The inmates are largely well behaved
in fear of being downgraded to a higher security holding.
The inmates exercise much freedom on a day to day basis. Being able to freely roam throughout
the prison grounds; as well as enjoy recreational, educational and vocational opportunities; it’s
almost as if the prisoners have obtained better options for having gone to jail in the first place.
Even being able to learn technical trades, such as carpentry and masonry, they get a higher
education for free!
Which is wonderful. It’s wonderful to give those born under difficult circumstances chances they
might not have otherwise received.
However, a serious problem made apparent to us as we toured, were the more-or-less
irresponsible financial allocations. We passed a newly cemented sidewalk that cut through a
grassy area: made so that the inmates wouldn’t be bothered to walk an extra 50 feet around the
area in order to reach their destination. Sidewalks that big and that long are expensive, and
frankly, unnecessary. It’s not a big area.
Another disconcerting financial matter involved the recent construction of the gym’s flooring.
Modeled in the high-tech style of an MBA’s ideal gym, the prison had renovated the indoor
basketball court to fit that description for a mere 50,000 dollars. This renovation was spent on
repairing a gym that didn’t need repairs, when a building close to condemnation was left
untouched and still in use.
Such unjustifiable spending is thought all the more unaccountable when it’s taken under
consideration that those paying for the prison’s new, slightly bouncier basketball-court, are the
taxpayers. The taxpayers, you and I, are avoidably paying for prisoner luxuries–for their
recreation equipment, for their technical college education, for the individual television sets they
have set up next to their bunks–when so many of us cannot afford these indulgences, practical
and otherwise, for ourselves.
All that I can really say about the Blackburn Correctional Complex, is that it’s exactly where I
would like to go if I ever decided to break the law.