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By Alisha Ebrahimji, Alaa Elassar, CNN
(CNN) — Idaho’s only maximum security prison could soon be home to Bryan Kohberger, the man who admitted to the 2022 gruesome killings of four University of Idaho students in a remarkable change-of-plea hearing earlier this month.
The Idaho Maximum Security Institution, opened in 1989 to confine the state’s “most disruptive male residents,” has garnered nationwide attention following an aborted execution due to a botched lethal injection and a prisoner-led hunger strike demanding better conditions.
Kohberger, a 30-year-old former PhD student of criminology, admitted guilt for the first time on July 2 to charges of burglary and first-degree murder in the fatal stabbings of Ethan Chapin, Xana Kernodle, Kaylee Goncalves and Madison Mogen in their off-campus Moscow, Idaho, home.
The case reached a bitter resolution after two and a half years of desperately searching for answers when Kohberger, seated behind a table in an off-white button-up shirt and patterned tie, responded to questions from State District Judge Steven Hippler with a series of simple yeses and a neutral gaze, admitting in one-word answers that he planned and carried out the brutal stabbings.
While the plea will allow Kohberger to avoid the death penalty, he could still be in close proximity to the state’s eight male death row prisoners who are also housed in the Kuna, Idaho, facility. Those prisoners include Chad Daybell, who was convicted in the 2019 killings of his first wife and two of his second wife’s children.
Kohberger is expected to return to court in Boise later this week for his sentencing, and could be transferred just over 10 miles down the road to the state’s maximum security prison right after.
Here’s a look at what life inside the Idaho Maximum Security Institution could be like:
There are delays in medical care, vents clogged with feces and urine, prisoners say
The male-only facility, located just south of Boise, is surrounded by a double perimeter fence reinforced with razor wire and equipped with an electronic detection system, according to its website.
It has the capacity to house 549 people, and has a unit for civilly committed psychiatric patients, which has faced backlash from the National Alliance on Mental Illness for using a prison to house people with mental illnesses in need of mental health treatment. The alliance faulted the facility for allegedly denying patients access to prison programs and services typically available to incarcerated individuals.
The prison has also garnered criticism for its harsh treatment of inmates in solitary confinement and for its poor conditions, driving prisoners to organize a mass six-day hunger strike last year in protest of the facility, the Idaho Statesman reported.
Among the ninety inmates who participated in the strike, some complained about delays in access to medical care, long bouts of isolation and recreational “cages,” the newspaper reported. The “cages” were described as “large chain link-like metal boxes each man is placed into, littered with human urine and feces that have soaked into the concrete.”
Men housed in a lower-security section within the maximum-security prison, who are allowed access to an open outdoor recreation area, told the Statesman the space is often littered with trash and bodily fluids, and others said the facility’s HVAC system hasn’t been cleaned in decades because the vents are clogged with garbage, urine and feces.
The Idaho Department of Correction told CNN the “recreation enclosures” are regularly cleaned, and individuals can request vent cleaning in their cells if needed. After the inmates refused their provided meals, the department said it “developed ways to increase vocational and educational opportunities, religious services, and recreation opportunities.”
“Safety is our number one priority for everyone living and working in our facilities,” the department told CNN.
The prison’s strict solitary confinement policies have also sparked concern.
Kevin Kempf, who served as director of the Idaho Department of Correction in 2016, told CNN affiliate KBOI at the time that inmates were confined alone for up to 23 hours a day with little human interaction, received meals in their cells, and were allowed showers only three times a week.
The Idaho Department of Correction implemented a step-down program that gradually transitions inmates from solitary confinement to a more open environment, KBOI reported. This program includes stages such as placing prisoners in cells where they can talk and interact with others, helping them adjust slowly and safely.
In its statement to CNN, the department said, “Long term restrictive housing is not a disciplinary sanction, it is a housing assignment designed to manage specific behaviors.”
A firing squad chamber is being built in the same building
The prison has recently come under scrutiny because it’s equipped with the state’s execution chamber, which was the site of an aborted execution last year.
After Idaho struggled for years to obtain pentobarbital, a single-drug protocol to execute death row inmates, the state’s first attempt to use the lethal injection in 12 years failed. In February 2024, officials were unable to set an IV line on Thomas Creech, forcing them to abort the execution.
Creech, the longest-serving inmate on Idaho’s death row, was sentenced to death after pleading guilty to the murder of another inmate, David Dale Jensen, in 1981, while Creech was serving four life sentences, according to the Ada County Prosecutor’s Office. His second execution was postponed when a federal judge issued a stay in November.
Now, the state is making the firing squad its lead method of execution. Idaho Republican Gov. Brad Little signed into law a bill in March, making his state the only one in the country with the firing squad as its primary execution method beginning July 1, 2026.
Idaho lawmakers first passed legislation in 2023 allowing for the firing squad as a means of execution if drugs are unavailable, or lethal injection is found to be unconstitutional.
All executions and execution-related procedures were suspended until the maximum security prison completes the renovation of the F-Block, the execution chamber, to accommodate both methods – lethal injection and firing squad, the Idaho Department of Correction announced in June. The renovations are expected to take about seven months.
However, executions have been rare in Idaho. Only three executions have taken place in the facility since the state revised its death penalty statute in 1977, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
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