INDEPENDENCE -- Plans for a state prison in Grayson County got off to a rocky start Thursday, with some 50 sign-carrying protestors greeting the announcement with jeers and slams at local and state officials.

State Sen. William Wampler, R-Bristol, and Del. Bill Carrico, R-Grayson County, touted the 1,024-bed medium-security prison as a boost to economic development with a $6-million-plus annual payroll.

But the crowd that showed up for the announcement was having none of it. Most were upset that the Cox's Chapel site being considered is on New River, a tourist attraction.

"If they needed new prisons in Arizona, do you think they would put them on the Grand Canyon?" said Charlotte Reynolds, who frequently canoes on the river.

Others spoke of farms that have been in their families for a century or more, investments in vacation homes and the potential for river-related tourism as a reason for the prison to go somewhere else.

The board of supervisors asked the state to consider Grayson County sites in 2004, said Chairman Ralph Tuggle. He said its members visited other communities with prisons and renewed its request.

He said Grayson needs the 375 jobs the prison would bring. The county would also benefit from state payments in lieu of taxes on the prison land, and the prison would buy enough water to make a planned regional water authority affordable for residents in and around Independence, which is experiencing water problems.

Harold Ellis, president of Public-Private Infrastructure, which will do the site work, said an engineering study will determine if the site will work. The prison needs about 80 acres, he said, and the site under consideration is in a depression that would hide the prison from people fishing or boating on the river.

He said a bridge across the river would reduce traffic in the Cox's Chapel community and be handy for conveying utilities to the prison. "It just seems to make sense."

Some in the room were veterans of a successful fight some 30 years ago to keep a hydroelectric impoundment off the river. The battle cry then was "The New River, like it is" and that same sentiment was on some of the signs being waved at officials Thursday.

Wampler said there would be many public meetings on the project as it progressed. He said a prison somewhere in the Mount Rogers Planning District must be open by 2010 to help handle Virginia's increasing number of prisoners.

State officials say the need for more prisons has been clear since 2004, when the General Assembly approved funding for two medium-security facilities -- now under construction in Tazewell and Pittsylvania counties -- and money to study a third one in Southwest Virginia.

Although crime has decreased in Virginia over the past decade, the number of people being sent to prison continues to grow.

Currently numbering about 36,000 inmates, the prison population is expected to reach 42,000 by 2012, according to a recent forecast by the office of the Secretary of Public Safety.

Virginia's incarceration rate ranks 15th in the nation, according to the office.

"We have more people coming in the front door and staying longer, so it doesn't take much of a mathematician" to conclude that more prisons are needed, said Clyde Cristman, deputy secretary of public safety.

Since the legislature abolished parole in 1995, the Department of Corrections has been experiencing what's called the "stacking effect," or the backlog of more inmates serving longer sentences, that has grown cumulatively.

At the same time, inmates who were in the system before 1995 and remain eligible for parole are being released at a lower rate, generally because their crimes were what Cristman called "the worst of the worst."

Following a surge of prison building after parole was abolished, the state went through a period of having empty prison cells that were rented out to other states. But the surplus proved to be short-lived, and now the Department of Corrections says its worst overcrowding problems are in medium-security prisons.

paul.dellinger@roanoke.com (276) 228-4752

laurence.hammack@roanoke.com 981-3239