Category Archive: Idaho

This Summer Send the Kids to Jail

If the kids tell you that the house rules make them feel like their in prison, put the Old Idaho Penitentiary on your vacation stop.  No commission of a crime required, just stop by their location in Boise, Idaho. The Old Idaho Penitentiary State Historic Site was used as Idaho’s prison between 1870-1973. The prison was originally a single building, but the growing population brought a need for a growing prison, and several additional buildings were added, all surrounded by a high sandstone wall.  These additions to the prison complex were constructed with sandstone that the prisoners quarried and cut, back at a time when hard labor was a part of prison life. As happened at many prisons in the 1970’s, the over-crowded conditions led to a prison riot, occurring here in Boise both 1971 and again in 1973.  As […]

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