Sometimes doing the right thing just requires a little bit of vision and a lot of hard work.

For the citizens of Concordia Parish, fortunately, they received the vision approximately 10 years ago when Sheriff Randy Maxwell led the charge to build a new, state-of-the-art correctional facility in the parish.

We suspect that during the process of convincing state leaders that the plan was a wise one someone, somewhere looked at the plan and said, “You want us to give you money to build a prison in the middle of a field?”

Despite the parish’s somewhat remote location, especially when compared to larger cities across the state, the need for the facility was great.

Inside the courthouse complex, the older jail was simply too cramped and too outdated to meet the parish’s needs.

The result was law enforcement officials frequently had to make a guesstimate of which criminals were the least threatening if they had to be released due to space issues.

That’s a bad situation and one in which no community should find itself.

Today, however, the new facility employs approximately 100 residents and houses nearly 500 inmates. And through the hard work over nearly the last decade, the facility has paid off its construction debt and is thus fully debt-free.

Thanks to Maxwell and his staff, the parish is a better place, all because they had the vision to do the right thing and the work ethic to make it happen.