Idaho Prison Blog

On Sunday October 17, 2021 at 6:49 am, after prisoners had picked up their breakfast meal, guards unexpectedly entered Unit F at the ISCC and ordered all prisoners to return to their cells and lock themselves in for the rest of the day due to staff shortage, or "dark day". After all prisoners on the unit were secured in their cells, the doors were opened 17 minutes later (at 7:07 am) - the dark day was cancelled. Frustrations and nervousness on the unit were evident throughout the rest of the day. On May 7, 2021 ISCC Captain D. Martinez issued a memorandum (see entire memo below) introducing "Dark Night", effectively locking (some) prisoners in their cells on Wednesday and Saturday nights from 6 pm through 6 am the next morning so as to reduce the number of staff necessary to cover the posts throughout the facility, including the housing units. From the beginning, these day-certain lockdowns made no sense (even to staff) unless it was known by administrators the fac...

/////// COVID update: We are not out of the woods yet. Early in 2020, when COVID first swept the nation, we all heard the horror stories from other states and we braced for the worst. Projection models anticipated that our hospitals would reach capacity and that death rates would be high. Then, we waited. And, we waited. COVID arrived in waves, but we never had the tsunami that we thought was coming. Our hospitals continued to function normally and, thankfully, state death rates were relatively low. After our peak of cases in December, we saw state numbers decline through July. We were excited about what we hoped was the light at the end of the COVID tunnel, but sadly, that was not the case. The Delta variant of COVID has changed the game. It stormed into Idaho this summer, and quickly overwhelmed our hospitals and thrust us into crisis standards of care. What we know about the Delta variant is that it is more contagious in that it spreads more easily than previous variants and it may ...

Prison administrators can get away with almost anything when they spout "security interests" to the courts or public. Judges simply nod their acquiescence to decisions of wardens regardless of how outrageous the acts, while Joe and Jill Sixpacks cover their eyes and ears, thinking what happens to inmates is well deserved and will never affect those on the outside. They don't know how wrong they are... On Monday September 27, 2021 prisoners on F3 were locked in their cells [quarantined] due to an inmate on that tier suspected of being infected with COVID-19.* On that Monday, prisoner Dale Shackelford finalized a petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus to be filed in the court. Pursuant to policy, Shackelford filled out an Access to Courts (ATC) form requesting the staff paralegal to come pick up the documents, copy them, and send them (along with the filing fee) to the court. It never happened. Because guards are not allowed to touch ATC forms - even to place them in the parale...

9/16/21 Dear JPay Customer, We wanted to provide some tips to ensure you are getting the most out of the JPay Support Ticket system. Please see below. Keep in mind that you can only have one support ticket open at a time. So if you have an open ticket, you must close that inquiry or wait for Customer Service to respond and close the ticket before you can open a new support ticket. Most of the time Customer Service will respond with a resolution or troubleshooting steps that fix the issue, then they close the ticket. However, if the troubleshooting steps DO NOT fix the issue, please open a new support ticket and reference the previous ticket number and issue that was not resolved. IMPORTANT please make sure you submit your support ticket for the correct category. If you submit to the wrong category, your ticket could be closed through bulk closing efforts for common issues that were resolved. These are the categories available to you. Its very important that you select the correct categ...

Many years ago, Randy Blades (who was then Warden of the ISCC) described the facility television system as the best babysitter the prison ever had, and placed priority on maintaining the TV/cable system to reduce violence and other problems. Unfortunately, over the past several months, administrators and maintenance staff have killed the TV system at the ISCC, and at the worst possible time. The television system at the ISCC is, and had been a wreck for years (see SHOULD IDOC REMOVE CRT TVs FROM AUTHORIZED INMATE PROPERTY LISTS? on this site). Most of the equipment is so old there are no replacement parts available, and new ones cannot be sourced. [Before anyone gets their panties in a twist, money for the TV system comes from the Inmate Management Fund, money paid by prisoners through the 25% markup on commissary items, emails and phone calls, not taxpayer dollars]. That money however - thousands of dollars a year - have been squandered. As described in the previous article on televis...

For the last few months all the F Block (consisting of 3 individual "tiers") at the ISCC have cohorted (mingled) in classrooms, crowded hallways - even recreation activities such as playing basketball, lifting weights or just sitting together on a bench or at a table playing cards or talking. Many F Block prisoners for months have worked at jobs throughout the facility, mingling with staff and inmates from other blocks, preparing and delivering meals for the entire population (including guards), doing laundry and entering other blocks, tiers, even cells to perform maintenance. Inmates from all over the prison are jammed into the waiting room in the medical department, waiting together side-by-side, hip-to-hip for hours to be seen by providers - cohorts be damned. On September 20, 2021 Tier 3 of F Block was locked down for quarantine due to what a guard described as a prisoner "having symptoms" of COVID-19. Despite the entire tier being on quarantine status, several ...