Idaho should not be placing women with good behavior in “the hole” because the state has run out of prison beds.

Recent reporting from InvestigateWest revealed that women transferred to South Idaho Correctional Institution in Boise have been placed in segregated housing not because they violated prison rules or posed a safety risk, but because there were no regular beds available. Some women described being confined to cells for 23 hours a day, limited to brief showers, separated from normal communication, and stripped of personal belongings such as food, letters, and clothing.

That should disturb every Idahoan who believes in fairness, public safety and basic human dignity.

A prison sentence is already the punishment imposed by the court. Solitary-like confinement because Idaho’s prison system is overcrowded is something different. It turns a management failure into a psychological punishment. It places the burden of failed policy on the bodies and minds of incarcerated women, many of whom are already navigating addiction, poverty, trauma, mental health needs and fractured family systems.

Idaho has the highest women’s incarceration rate in the nation. That fact should force us to ask more honest questions. Are we using prison because it is the safest option, or because it has become the default response to social problems we have failed to address earlier?

This is not about excusing harm. Accountability matters. Victims matter. Community safety matters. But if Idaho is serious about public safety, then we must be serious about what actually reduces future harm. Isolation does not heal addiction. It does not repair families. It does not prepare women to return home with stability, employment, housing and support.

Idaho leaders should immediately end the use of segregation as overflow housing and invest in practical alternatives: treatment, reentry support, community supervision, mental health care and sentencing approaches that reserve prison space for people who truly require incarceration.

Justice is not measured only by whether consequences exist. It is measured by whether those consequences remain proportionate, humane and connected to the possibility of change.

Women should not be buried in isolation because Idaho ran out of beds.

Devon Van Kleek

Boise