It occurred to me just recently that I neglected to finish posting the photos from my trip out to Idaho last year.  That neglect ends now, mostly because that trip resulted in some great photos.

After our visit to Silver City, our next destination was the Old Idaho Penitentiary in Boise.  As indicated by its name, the penitentiary is enjoying a leisurely retirement, hosting curious tourists and even the occasional wedding at the adjacent warden’s residence.  (No, I’m not kidding.  They were setting up for a wedding when we arrived.)

The old dining hall building has seen better days:

Fortunately, most of the buildings are in considerably better shape than that.  Some of the old rules are still in good shape, too:

I know what you’re thinking, and no, we didn’t loaf in that area.  Instead, we moved on to the old solitary confinement facility.

If it looks unpleasant, there’s a good reason: it was.  We didn’t loaf there either — after all, the prison laundry was waiting.  And keeping the air moving in the laundry was a blower from a familiar city:

Oddly enough, though the company went out of business twenty years ago, there’s still a website for the American Blower Company.

From there we proceeded to one of the more relatively recently-constructed cell blocks.

The accommodations were…uh…spartan.

Several of the cells displayed some of the prisoners’ artwork.  Unsurprisingly, the general theme of the artwork was hopelessness.

Death row and the prison gallows are part of the tour, and on the wall in the facility is a display of some of the prisoners who met their end at the prison.  One such prisoner displayed a surprising sensibility prior to his hanging:

Once outside death row, my dad began to plot his escape:

Since I am a freelance photographer for the local paper, I have regular encounters with the word “deadline.”  However, even as much as my deadlines can loom large if I push them too far, they’re nowhere near as ominous as the deadline at the Old Idaho Penitentiary.

It’s not difficult to imagine how the deadline got its name.  And to enforce the deadline, guards watched over the population from atop the prison’s old stone walls.

Oddly enough, maybe 100 feet from that particular tower is a curious anomaly in the prison’s otherwise unwelcoming personality: a rose garden that was established long ago when the prison was still a prison.

Standing outside the main prison was a smaller facility for the fairer convicts:

The informative display in the women’s ward held one paragraph that made us Michiganders first take note and then scratch our heads in bewilderment:

I’m desperately trying to hold back a flood of Detroit jokes right now.  Desperately.