I worked in local government my entire life. I have great empathy for the position of the Lincoln County Commission in opposing a planned men’s prison in the county.
The state has made a case that they need another prison and the locals have made a case about the traffic and other negative effects. Yet perhaps the real issues are being ignored.
The case for a new prison is that the number of incarcerated persons has reached the point beyond the capabilities of the current system and it is projected to continue to increase. The driving force seems to be drugs. A large portion of the incarcerated population are there for drug-related reasons: distributors, dealers and pushers as well as users that commit crimes in order to obtain drugs…