Idaho Prison Blog

Recently, I posted an article on this site titled PRISON IS PRISON - BY ANY OTHER NAME. Thinking about this a bit further, I realized it's not only the Place which is objectified and politicized, it's the people as well. In that article, I wrote: "In almost every discussion about prisons in "unfriendly" nations, the dialogue is about "political" prisoners, though the official position in the US is that there are no political prisoners in American prisons - only criminals. Despite the dialogue, the same holds true in foreign lands, with those governments too claiming that only duly convicted criminals populate their prisons." An American female basketball player is caught red-handed with drugs in an international airport and a former US Marine is duly and legally convicted of espionage (and other crimes) in Russian courts, yet the american populace allows the Biden administration and the media to characterize those prisoners as upstanding citizens w...

For more than a decade, Three Oaks [Ministries] has been contracted to provide Volunteer Religious Coordinators (aka, Chaplains) for IDOC facilities around the state - paid for by Inmate Management Fund (IMF) money. According to an email received by IDOC prisoners on September 13, 2022 (presented in its entirety below) the era of 3 Oaks will soon be coming to an end. (NOTE: This information was prophesized in my August 2022 post ISCC REBUKES INMATE RELIGIOUS GATHERINGS WHILE ALLOWING SECULAR GROUPS TO ASSEMBLE on this site.) Before 3 Oaks, IDOC facilities hired individual "chaplains" to serve as coordinators for religious activities. This changed in the early 2000s when some IDOC facilities contracted with the Idaho Chaplains Corp., a fly-by-night business hurriedly formed by a former chaplain who hurriedly resigned from the Idaho Maximum Security Institution (IMSI) (and his friend) once it became known that the IDOC was looking for a company/vendor to fill the facility chapl...

For more than a decade, the television system at the ISCC has been described as a hole into which money, equipment and time seem simply to disappear. With the system outdated and getting worse by the day, someone needs to question where all the money spent on it is going. In an article published on this site in late September of 2021 (THE BABYSITTER IS DEAD - AND ISCC ADMINISTRATORS ARE THE KILLERS) I noted that administrators were telling prisoners that the system was being worked on and upgraded. Since that time, a few of the problem channels have indeed stopped dropping out, though the majority have either not gotten any better, or have actually gotten worse. In a Concern Form addressed to the new Warden at the ISCC (Randy Valley III), I asked when the channels that were still dropping out would be fixed. The reply to the Concern Form, received more than a week later from a secretary, told me that technicians were waiting on parts to fix the problems. Once parts were installed (per ...