Kentucky State Penitentiary
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 Location in Kentucky
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| Location | Eddyville, Kentucky |
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| Coordinates | 37°02′53″N 88°04′35″W / 37.048111°N 88.076387°WCoordinates: 37°02′53″N 88°04′35″W / 37.048111°N 88.076387°W |
| Status | Operational |
| Security class | Maximum, Supermax |
| Population | 856 (as of 2015) |
| Opened | 1889 |
| Managed by | Kentucky Department of Corrections |
| Warden | Randy White |
The Kentucky State Penitentiary (KSP), also known as the "castle on the Cumberland," is a maximum security and supermax prison with capacity for 856 prisoners located in Eddyville, Kentucky on Lake Barkley on the Cumberland River, about 3 miles (4.8 km) from downtown Eddyville. It is managed by the Kentucky Department of Corrections. Completed in 1886, it is Kentucky's oldest prison facility and the only state-owned facility with supermax units. The penitentiary houses Kentucky's male death row inmates and the state's execution facility. As of 2015[update] it had approximately 350 staff members and an annual operating budget of 20 million dollars. In most cases, inmates are not sent directly to the penitentiary after sentencing, but are sent there because of violent or disruptive behavior committed in other less secure correctional facilities in the state.
Former Confederate States brigadier general and Eddyville native Hylan Benton Lyon was the moving force behind the Kentucky State Branch Penitentiary being located in what is now Old Eddyville. A hill overlooking the Cumberland River was chosen as the site for the new prison. Construction of the Kentucky State Branch Penitentiary began in 1884, using massive granite blocks quarried from a site down the Cumberland. Italian stonemasons were recruited to erect the original buildings, which resemble medieval castles. The prison officially opened in 1889. It was the second prison built in the state, the first being the Kentucky State Prison in Frankfort, which was opened in 1798. When the Kentucky State Penitentiary was built, the Kentucky State Prison was renamed the Kentucky State Reformatory. Kentucky State Penitentiary - Kentucky Department of Corrections
Before the penitentiary was built, prison life in Kentucky was horrific. An 1875 study showed that 20 percent of the inmates in the Kentucky State Prison had pneumonia and seventy-five percent had scurvy. The prison was a place of "slime covered walls, open sewage, and graveyard coughs [4]." Approximately seventy of the one-thousand prisoners had died in 1875. Prison life was something that Kentucky officials had really never focused on until Governor Luke P. Blackburn. He was elected governor in 1879 and immediately got the legislature to approve of a new prison.
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