The Old Idaho Penitentiary: A Hundred Years of Hard Time
Near Boise, Idaho
The Old Idaho Penitentiary sits against the foothills east of downtown, its sandstone walls the same warm color as the rock behind it. That's not a coincidence, the inmates quarried the stone themselves.
Congress authorized forty thousand dollars for a territorial prison in eighteen sixty-seven. The building went up in eighteen seventy on a two hundred thirty-acre site at the base of the foothills. Inmates were put to work cutting sandstone from the Table Rock formation nearby and hauling it to the building site. Much of the stone that went into the walls was cut by men doing time inside them.
The penitentiary operated for a hundred and one years, from eighteen seventy-two to nineteen seventy-three. In that time, it held more than thirteen thousand prisoners, survived over five hundred escape attempts, at least ninety of which succeeded, and was the site of multiple riots. Conditions by modern standards were brutal. Overcrowding was chronic. Cell blocks built for one era held men from the next several. The riot of nineteen seventy-two, one of the most serious in the facility's history, contributed to the decision to finally close the place.
Executions happened here too. The gallows were used for hangings in the early decades; the state later shifted to electrocution. The last execution on the grounds took place in nineteen fifty-seven.
The prison closed in December nineteen seventy-three when inmates were transferred to a new facility south of the city. The site was placed on the National Register of Historic Places the following year. It's now a museum run by the Idaho State Historical Society, the cell blocks are open, the death row cells are open, the execution chamber is open. It's one of only four territorial prisons in the country that the public can walk through.
What you feel walking the yard is something particular to places that held suffering for a very long time: the weight of accumulated years, the sense that the walls absorbed more than anyone wrote down.
