Red Onion State Prison
 Location in Virginia
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| Location | Wise County, Virginia |
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| Coordinates | 37°6′40″N 82°33′00″W / 37.11111°N 82.55000°WCoordinates: 37°6′40″N 82°33′00″W / 37.11111°N 82.55000°W |
| Status | Operational |
| Security class | Supermax |
| Capacity | 848 |
| Population | 713 (as of July 2011) |
| Opened | August 1998 |
| Director | Harold Clarke |
| Warden | Earl Barksdale |
| Street address | 10800 H. Jack Rose Highway P.O. Box 970 |
| City | Pound |
| County | Wise County |
| State | Virginia |
| ZIP Code | 24279 |
| Country | United States |
| Website | www |
Red Onion State Prison (ROSP) is a supermax state prison located in Wise County, Virginia, near Pound. Operated by the Virginia Department of Corrections (VADOC), it houses about 800 inmates. The prison opened in August 1998 and was the primary model for Wallens Ridge State Prison in Big Stone Gap.
Plans were announced in 1992 to build a prison on Red Onion Mountain, with cost of construction estimated at $52 million. 375 acres of land were donated by the Pittston Coal Company, which reserved some rights to mineral extraction. Many residents of Wise County supported constructing the prison because of jobs it would provide and because it would remain relatively isolated. One official said: "It's off the beaten path. You won't even know it's there." The prison was designed by Daniel, Mann, Johnson & Mendenhall, a subdivision of AECOM since 1984.
The final cost of construction was over $70 million, with ground broken in 1995. As of 1999, the prison employed almost 800 people. Many of the corrections officers arrived at Red Onion after being laid off from jobs in nearby coalfields.
Red Onion is one of six new prisons built in Virginia between 1995 and 2000. It thus contributed an increase in capacity to the Virginia Corrections system that allowed the state to contractually accept inmates from outside the state. In 1999, the District of Columbia Department of Corrections was paying the Virginia Department of Corrections to house 69 prisoners at the Red Onion State Prison. These contracts were substantially reduced in 2004, when VADOC announced that it needed more supermax space for Virginians. In 2011, VADOC reported only 15 out-of-state inmates at Red Onion: two from Pennsylvania and thirteen from the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Red Onion is a "supermax" prison, intended to incarcerate "the worst of the worst". Critics of the prison have alleged that many inmates are sent to Red Onion not because they have committed severe crimes but because they broke rules at other facilities. Some 55% of Red Onion's prisoners have sentences longer than 15 years, and 12% have life sentences.
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Wikipedia