Idaho Prison Blog

In what has become almost common in the recent months, ISCC staff - without notice to prisoners - have canceled laundry services (usually on a Saturday or Sunday) leaving piles of wet, stinking, dirty laundry in the floor of common living areas throughout the main facility for up to 3 days.  Prior to the implementation of the new procedure in August of 2018 under Warden Christensen, inmate laundry was placed in large carts which were collected at or before 6:00 am by workers and wheeled to the laundry area for washing on a daily basis. Laundry considered "darks" (or Greens) and "whites" were washed on alternate days, including weekends and holidays (except Christmas). Because prisoners are not released from their cells until 6:00 am, most prisoners place their laundry in the cart the day or night before after work or showering. Early risers sometimes wait to place their laundry in the cart until morning, taking their chances that the cart will not have been remo...

On October 3, 2018, a handful of prisoners at the ISCC noticed that when saving new emails to the draft folder on their tablet, a new dialogue box appeared: "YOU HAVE 1 DAY TO SEND THIS EMAIL DRAFT, OTHERWISE IT WILL BE DELETED". There was no other prior notice that this "upgrade" to the email app would be implemented. Prisoners who did not save an email to the draft folder on that date had no notice whatsoever of the disaster that was to come in the next few hours.  On the morning of October 4, 2018, thousands of prisoners throughout IDOC woke to find virtually every email draft on their tablet ... gone.  In my case, one hundred fifty three email drafts which had been stored on my tablet for years had been deleted, including unsent legal documents, poems, even a Will - hundreds of hours of typing - gone in an instant, for no apparent, rational reason, as data kept on the tablet does not interfere with, or take up space on the JPay network or servers.  Clearly...