The free-market grassroots group Americans for Prosperity today held a news conference outside the proposed location of a new Regional Prisons Museum, for which U.S. Rep. Nancy Boyda (2nd Dist. – Kan.) has requested $1.18 million federal taxpayer dollars.

According to media accounts, the Museum would be built on the grounds of the Lansing Correctional Facility and would feature a fake prison yard with imposing 12-to-14-foot-tall stone walls, two fake guard towers, prison cells and a gallows chamber.  Construction costs are expected to exceed $3 million.  Readers who posted comments on the Leavenworth Times’ recent online article about the project questioned its viability, calling it a “waste of MY money,” a “useless museum,” and writing that it will add “NOTHING in the way of real jobs or useful work.”

“From the Teapot Museum in Sparta, NC, to the Wheels Museum in New Mexico, to the Cowgirl Hall of Fame and Museum in Texas, we’ve visited some of the most questionable museums in the nation, but asking federal taxpayers to build a fake prison and fill it with jail-related memorabilia could take the cake,” said Americans for Prosperity Vice President of Public Affairs Ed Frank.  “It’s just not right to force taxpayers across America to pay a million dollars for this local project – any more than its right to force taxpayers in Kansas to pay millions of dollars to support questionable local museums in North Carolina, New Mexico or Texas. We need to end pork-barrel politics once and for all.”

Americans for Prosperity’s Kansas State Director Alan Cobb, also suggested that if there is truly enough support to build an economically viable prison museum in Lansing, private investors, charitable foundations or other non-taxpayer sources of revenue could be found: “If there is truly a market for a prison museum, people who find it interesting should pay for it – not the 99.9 percent of taxpayers who will never visit it.”

Americans for Prosperity last summer toured the country with its Ending Earmarks Express, visiting the sites of 50 questionable pork-barrel earmarks in 37 states, including the infamous Bridge to Nowhere in Ketchikan, Alaska, and a proposed Teapot Museum in Sparta, NC.  The group’s tour shined a spotlight on the problem of wasteful pork-barrel spending, and helped build momentum for significant earmark reforms.

Photo Credit: Lawrence Journal-World