USP Lee is a high-security federal penitentiary in Lee County, in far southwestern Virginia near Pennington Gap, roughly 8 miles from Jonesville. Construction wrapped up in August 2001 and the institution began receiving inmates in 2002, making it one of the newer high-security prisons built during the Bureau of Prisons' early-2000s expansion of capacity for its most closely managed offenders. Like several federal penitentiaries from that era, it was designed using updated security modeling intended to minimize vulnerabilities compared to older prison designs. An adjacent minimum-security satellite camp houses lower-risk offenders on the same grounds. The facility sits in an isolated, rural part of Appalachian Virginia, an area that has seen several federal prisons built in past decades partly as a source of local jobs in a region that lost significant coal-industry employment. There have been some reports over the years of archaeological interest in the site's history predating the prison. Overall, USP Lee doesn't carry a long public institutional history the way older federal penitentiaries do — it's a relatively young, high-security facility whose story is still mostly still being written.