When Kristine Scott boarded a bus in southeast Idaho on April 3, she expected to be transferred to a minimum-security dormitory where she would work at a community reentry center. Instead, she was led with five other women into a segregated housing unit — the “hole.” There were no beds available in the dorms, prison staff told them. For the next five days, Scott was confined to a small cell for 23 hours a day, handcuffed for an hour of outdoor recreation in a cage, and allowed only a 10-minute shower every other day. She had not broken any prison rules.
“They’re treating us like we’re in trouble when we haven’t done anything,” Scott, who is serving a four-year sentence for drug possession, told InvestigateWest in the story distributed by the AP. “I got moved from a work center to be stuck in the hole. So we’re basically being punished even though we’ve had good behavior.”
Scott was one of 15 women transferred that day to the South Idaho Correctional Institution (SICI) in Boise, a facility that combines minimum-, medium-security and community reentry programs. A bed shortage forced six of them into segregation — a unit normally reserved for inmates who pose a safety risk or have violated rules. The women were in “transit status,” a bureaucratic designation the Idaho Department of Correction (IDOC) uses to justify housing inmates in restrictive conditions without calling it segregation. Department policy states such status is “not a form of restrictive housing” and requires inmates to be allowed out of their cells for at least three hours a day, have access to personal property and attend visits. But InvestigateWest found that in practice, those standards are routinely ignored.
Ritchie Eppink, a civil rights attorney at Idaho’s Wrest Collective, said placing inmates in segregation because of overcrowding is a symptom of Idaho’s “addiction to incarceration.” It also violates prisoners’ civil rights.
“The research is clear that this kind of segregation, isolation, putting people in solitary confinement conditions causes long-lasting harm, even over very short periods of time,” Eppink said. “It has mental health consequences that can be long lasting. It impacts people’s anger and ability to cope with the conditions of their imprisonment. And it’s counterproductive for the prisoners, for the staff and for society.”
The IDOC, which declined interview requests, posted on its website in March that it is “operating at over 100% of capacity requiring the department to implement short-term solutions” such as moving hundreds of men to prisons out of state. Women’s prisons, however, remain stuffed: Idaho has capacity for 1,184 women, but on April 22 there were 1,188 in custody, according to a department email. The reliance on segregation cells for overflow housing could grow, the department acknowledged.
Former inmate Tena Bishop spent two weeks in segregation waiting for a bed after she was transferred to the Boise prison in 2023. When she arrived, staff told her there were no beds available in her intended unit. She was forced to surrender her personal belongings — food from the commissary, letters from her daughters, even her sweatshirt and extra underwear — and confined to a cell with a roommate. She ate every meal there, used the bathroom within arm’s reach of her bunkie, and stared out a tiny window in the door.
“It was devastating to me,” Bishop said. “I felt like I was dehumanized. It’s just inhumane treatment.”
The use of segregation for non-disciplinary reasons defies state policy and national reform efforts. The Vera Institute of Justice, which works with prisons to reduce isolation, has found that restrictive housing leads to “unwanted and harmful outcomes for the mental and physical health of those in isolation, the well-being of staff, facility safety, corrections budgets … and the public safety of the communities to which most will return.” A 2020 report from the Prison Policy Initiative warned that isolation, even with a roommate, can produce feelings of hurt, exclusion and loss that linger for months or years. Studies have prompted at least 42 states since 2009 to pass laws limiting how long prisoners can spend in solitary confinement or banning its use for pregnant, mentally ill or LGBTQ inmates, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Idaho is not among them.
Efforts to reform Idaho’s use of restrictive housing began a decade ago after a class action lawsuit and public scrutiny over violence at a privately run prison. In 2016, then-IDOC Director Kevin Kempf said the state had reduced segregation cells by more than 25% and that “the only type of inmate that (we) will still have in a temporary segregation cell, is an inmate that has demonstrated a true threat to other inmates or to a staff member.” Training on new policies followed, limiting time in segregation and its use as punishment for rule violations. But the reforms did not address overflow housing.
The Department of Correction broke ground last fall on a new women’s prison south of Boise that will add 512 beds at a cost of $182.5 million. It won’t be ready until at least the end of 2027. In the meantime, Eppink said, the lack of transparency around which women end up in segregation suggests prison staff know they are doing something they shouldn’t.
“IDOC is trying to deal with a problem that it’s not prepared to properly address,” he said. “And that is when civil rights and human rights abuses begin.”