‘We’re human, finally’: A look inside an Idaho prison dorm offering men freedom and agency
Johnny Valenciano has been incarcerated since he was 18 years old. Now 32, he spent the better part of that time in the state’s highest security prison: the Idaho Maximum Security Institution.
For six of those years, he lived in a cell by himself in solitary confinement.
Valenciano told the Idaho Statesman things shifted for him when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. He was locked down in his cell and given 15 minutes reprieves every 36 hours which he used to quickly shower and call family.
“That was a breaking point for me,” he said in an in-person interview. “I just didn’t want to live that way no more.”
Five years later Valenciano lives a very different life. Instead of locked doors that only open with the sound of a buzzer when prison staff click a button. Valenciano has keys. He can wash his own clothes and cook his own meals.
He even takes care of a dog as part of a rehabilitative program: a 9-year-old mini Australian shepherd named Theo.
Valenciano is still in prison but instead of residing at the state’s highest security level prison, he is one of roughly 150 men living at the South Idaho Correctional Institution’s East Dorm, a unique facility that allows incarcerated men access to a normal everyday environment that is unlike anywhere else in Idaho’s prison system.
“It’s not a fairy tale, but it’s a start to creating our own,” Valenciano said during a tour of the facility.
East Dorm focuses on humanizing prisoners
Toward the back of the Idaho Department of Correction’s vast complex south of Boise, the East Dorm’s bright blue, orange and red exterior sticks out amid the South Idaho Correctional Institution’s older red brick buildings.
The 20,500-square-foot, two-story housing unit, which looks and runs more like a college dorm than a prison, opened in June 2023. The goal was to give the men housed there some of their freedom back in the hope that when they reenter society they’ll have more success.
“We hope to return humanity back to the individual as they’re leaving,” SICI Warden Noel Barlow-Hust said.
For Dennis Williams, that’s exactly what living at the East Dorm has done for him.
He told the Statesman that all the humanizing elements of the unit — whether it’s having keys or light switches that dim — have helped him feel acclimated to go back into society.
Throughout the dorm men, like Valenciano and Williams, dressed in jeans and sweatshirts, go about their days with little oversight. They enter the building with keys and walk past a check-in area with one guard. The men have jobs inside or outside the prison and are responsible for their own welfare just like they would be outside of prison.
“The only thing that’s different is that I can’t quite go home yet,” Williams said in an in-person interview.
“We’re human, finally,” he added.
In the 1990s, Norway similarly overhauled its prison system by trying to make life inside the prison as normal as possible with incarcerated people wearing their own clothes, cooking for themselves and having more freedom. The University of California San Francisco Magazine reported that the change dropped the country’s recidivism rate from 70% to 20%.
IDOC told the Statesman it does not track data on recidivism rates for specific housing units like the the East Dorm.
Williams, 32, said he’s been doing and dealing drugs for most of his life, and having the ability to live in the East Dorm and participate in other programs within IDOC, like a peer mentorship program, have allowed him to get his life back on track.
“I realized that the hard s**t I’ve experienced might be a blessing to someone that’s going through that,” Williams said, referencing how he’s been able to give back as a mentor.
Valenciano said that moving from the maximum security prison to the correctional institution has been “night and day,” and he’s now taking classes to get his GED. He said he hopes to go to college and study business management with plans to eventually open his own tattoo shop.
“I never in a million years would’ve thought (about) going to college,” Valenciano said. “That’s where I want to put my focus and just be able to break the cycle in my family, and also show them that people can change.”
