FCI Ashland has been operating since 1940, making it one of the older facilities still active in the federal system. It sits in Boyd County, Kentucky, a few miles outside the city of Ashland, and today runs as a low-security prison with an attached minimum-security satellite camp. The facility's role has shifted over the decades — it originally held men convicted of offenses like bootlegging and postal violations, later served for a time as a federal youth facility for younger offenders, and was redesignated in the 1970s to house adult men in a low-security setting, which is its function today. One notable chapter in its history dates to 1944, when civil rights organizer Bayard Rustin was incarcerated there as a conscientious objector for resisting the draft. Rustin discovered the prison was racially segregated in its housing, dining, and recreation, and led fellow inmates in hunger strikes protesting the practice — he was eventually placed in solitary confinement before being transferred to a different federal penitentiary. Ashland today largely functions as a lower-security, "phase-down" institution for men nearing the end of longer federal sentences, drawing from a wide multi-state region.