Idaho’s largest prison without hot water over Christmas, on shower rotation nearly 2 weeks
Inmates at Idaho’s largest prison were forced to go without hot water as temperatures dropped below freezing over the Christmas holiday weekend, part of nearly two weeks where they’ve had to ration a limited supply, raising health and safety concerns among prisoner advocates.
Since Dec. 17, the boilers at the Idaho State Correctional Center south of Boise have been on the fritz, prison officials confirmed to the Idaho Statesman. The medium-security men’s prison has room for more than 2,100 inmates, making it by far Idaho’s largest population across its nine prisons.
About 1,800 inmates are affected by the prison water system’s ongoing issues, leading to a mandated shower rotation among five of the eight cell blocks, a spokesperson for the Idaho Department of Correction told the Statesman. About 300 inmates in the prison’s other three cell blocks faced issues only when all three boilers went down last weekend. The three boilers date to March 2017.
“This equipment runs around the clock,” IDOC spokesperson Jeff Ray said in an email. “We believe it’s simply bad timing that the boilers went down within a week of each other.”
Two of the boilers have been repaired, Ray said. Parts are on order to fix the third boiler and get the prison back to regular flows of hot water, but those parts could take up to six weeks to arrive, he said.
The ACLU, which advocates on behalf of the nation’s incarcerated population and their rights, criticized IDOC’s pace to remedy the utility disruption. It described the state agency’s delay to provide “basic needs” as “inhumane.”
“IDOC’s lack of prompt action to address life-threatening conditions in its facilities is nothing new,” Aadika Singh, legal director for the ACLU of Idaho, said in a statement to the Statesman. “It should take hours, not weeks, to remedy conditions that threaten access to heat and hot water. IDOC’s failure to ensure basic needs are met is inhumane, to say the least, as are the state’s halting efforts to improve its broken criminal legal system.”
Prison leadership said in a statement that they regretted the strain the hot water outage has caused to inmates, acknowledging that the unexpected failure of the prison’s three boilers over eight days was “more than an inconvenience.”
“Hot water is essential for the secure and orderly operation of a correctional facility,” IDOC said in the statement. “Like all Idahoans, we’re not immune to supply constraints and scarcity of parts that can create delays. We are grateful to our residents for their patience and cooperation. We are also grateful to our frontline staff for their dedication during this difficult time.”
In the interim, IDOC plans to rent two portable shower trailers, each with seven to eight shower stalls, and expects them to arrive Saturday, Ray said. According to an invoice he provided to the Statesman, the cost of the four-week rental is estimated at about $33,600.
“We’ve worked quickly to make repairs where possible and bring in additional resources to ensure basic needs are met,” prison officials said.
This story was originally published December 29, 2022 at 3:01 PM.
