What Idaho Buys With Half a Billion Dollars a Year

A practitioner’s view of a system that knows what works but keeps choosing otherwise

I grew up knowing people who went to prison. Then I became one of them.

That experience didn’t make me an idealist about corrections reform. It made me a realist. I’ve seen what these systems do from the inside, and I’ve spent years since then studying what the evidence actually says about what works. Those two vantage points don’t always align neatly. But in Idaho’s case, they tell exactly the same story.

Idaho is spending more on corrections than it ever has. It is getting the same results it has always gotten. And it has consistently chosen that outcome over the available alternatives.

That’s not a crisis. It’s a policy.

The results are in

Idaho currently has the fifth highest incarceration rate in the nation: 490 people per 100,000 residents. When you add jails, immigration detention, and juvenile facilities, that number climbs to 720 per 100,000. That’s higher than any independent democratic country on earth.

The prison population just hit its highest recorded level. Nearly 10,000 people are in state custody, and the system is over capacity. Idaho is spending roughly $51 million a year just to house people out of state (600 of them in a private Arizona prison at $85 per day) because it has run out of room at home.

Recidivism sits between 30 and 40 percent. Idaho’s own Statistical Analysis Center puts the number closer to 40.

The state corrections budget has grown more than 750 percent since 1985. It approaches half a billion dollars annually now. When the Legislature ordered across-the-board budget holdbacks in both FY2026 and FY2027, IDOC was exempted. The budget is protected. The outcomes are not.

To be fair, Idaho tried to change course once. The 2014 Justice Reinvestment Initiative produced real results: shorter stays for nonviolent offenses, more transparency in parole decisions, no measurable increase in recidivism. Then the political winds shifted, and the Legislature quietly walked it back. Idaho has been contracting ever since, not expanding.

That’s the summary of 30 years: one genuine reform, abandoned, and an unchanged recidivism line.

The South Boise Complex near Kuna, hosts 7 correctional facilities

What the money actually buys

I want to be specific about where the money goes, because the budget tells a different story than the rhetoric does.

IDOC’s FY2027 budget grew 35 percent over three years. During that same period, the Medical Services line was cut 3.2 percent. Reentry, the programming most directly tied to whether someone comes back, receives roughly two cents of every corrections dollar.

Meanwhile, Idaho contracts its prison healthcare to Centurion Health, a company with a litigation record that should concern any state administrator paying attention. Centurion has faced lawsuits in multiple states alleging deliberate indifference to serious medical needs. Its ownership changed in 2023 and the new parent company’s identity remains opaque in public documents. The state is spending public money on a contractor it cannot fully account for.

This pattern, visible to anyone who has been inside the system, is not incidental. Medical denial is a cost-management strategy. When healthcare is contracted to a for-profit vendor whose margin depends on minimizing services rendered, the incentive structure points in one direction. You don’t need to allege bad faith. You just need to follow the money.

Corizon Health, which preceded Centurion in Idaho and other states, illustrated this most starkly. A federal jury awarded $307.6 million to Kohchise Jackson, a man who spent years living with a leaking colostomy bag in prison because a surgery estimated at under $1,000 was deemed too expensive. The company that made that call later performed a legal maneuver called the Texas Two-Step: split into two entities, put the assets in one and the liability in the other, bankrupt the shell. It re-emerged as YesCare with a billion-dollar contract in Alabama. As recently as early 2026, YesCare had missed five consecutive monthly payments to the trusts created to compensate personal injury and wrongful death claimants.

He won. The accountability never arrived.

This is what the contracting model produces. Not isolated failures. A structure engineered to profit from neglect and then legally disappear when the bill comes due.

The politics of staying the course

Here is the part of this story that most policy analysis avoids: the failing model is not an accident. It persists because it is useful to people who have power over it.

Construction contracts. County jail revenue that flows from state incarceration agreements. Prosecutorial cultures built around conviction rates rather than outcomes. Legislative districts where tough-on-crime is still a more reliable signal than cost-per-outcome. Advocacy organizations that scrutinize a $424,300 line item for Hepatitis C monitoring while approving a $428 million corrections budget without comment.

That last example is not hypothetical. It is the Idaho Freedom Foundation’s actual budget posture: objecting to a specific healthcare expenditure for incarcerated people while endorsing the full corrections budget. If limited government means anything as a governing philosophy, it should mean scrutinizing a system that has grown 750 percent without producing better results. But that scrutiny never comes when the institution doing the spending is a prison.

The political economy of corrections reform is that the people who benefit from the status quo are organized and funded, and the people who bear its costs are incarcerated or recently released. They don’t have a lobby. They barely have a vote, depending on the state.

In Idaho, they have neither.

What works instead

I am not necessarily making an abolitionist argument here. I am making a public administration argument.

Evidence-based practices exist. They are documented, replicated, and in many cases cheaper than what Idaho is currently doing. Cognitive behavioral therapy programs with fidelity to the model reduce recidivism. Swift and certain sanctions for supervision violations, rather than incarceration for technical violations, produce better compliance. Medication-assisted treatment for substance use disorders cuts reincarceration rates measurably. Housing-first reentry models lower returns to custody. These are not experimental. They are implemented at scale in other states and countries and they work.

Idaho tried one of them (the Justice Reinvestment Initiative) and it worked. Then they stopped.

The staffing crisis offers a window into this same pattern. IDOC published a report claiming it had reduced correctional officer vacancies by 75 percent through a cross-functional recruitment team, digital marketing, and streamlined hiring. What the report didn’t mention: average officer tenure dropped from 5.6 years in FY2022 to 3.22 years in FY2024. And a $2.4 million starting pay increase, the intervention with the most evidentiary support for recruitment and retention, was absent from the narrative entirely. The budget tells a different story than the marketing does.

This is the pattern. Claim credit for what the environment produced. Don’t fund what the evidence says works. Keep the bed count growing.

Why I’m writing this

I left Idaho’s correctional system and eventually made my way into state government in Washington, where I now work at the intersection of civic engagement, state government, and criminal justice. I hold a seat on the Dean’s Council at the Evans School of Public Policy at the University of Washington. I study this field formally and I know it personally.

I write about Idaho because I came from there, and because the people still inside that system deserve analysis that is honest about what is happening to them and why. That’s alrgely absent in Idaho today.

The introduction of possibilities, to borrow a phrase I’ve been sitting with lately, requires that someone name the system clearly before you can imagine building something different. You can’t open a door if no one will acknowledge it’s been locked.

Idaho’s corrections system is not unlucky. It is not underfunded relative to its choices. It is not waiting for a good idea to come along.

It is a half-billion-dollar-a-year decision to keep doing what has never worked, made by people who are insulated from the consequences.

That is the argument. The data is there for anyone who wants to look.

Budget and population data

Idaho FY2027 Legislative Budget Book (contains the IDOC budget detail including Medical Services line): https://legislature.idaho.gov/wp-content/uploads/budget/publications/Legislative-Budget-Book/2026/Legislative%20Budget%20Book.pdf

Idaho FY2026 IDOC Performance Report (recidivism data, population figures): https://stagingdfmmainsa.blob.core.windows.net/dfm-main-website/wp-content/uploads/publications/exec/budget/fy2026/perf-rpt/public-safety/correction_department-of/correction_department-of.pdf

IDOC Research and Statistics hub (for ongoing reference): https://www.idoc.idaho.gov/content/about-us/research-and-statistics

IDOC budget holdback exemption

Idaho Capital Sun reporting confirming IDOC exempted from cuts: https://idahocapitalsun.com/2026/02/03/schools-corrections-state-police-and-medicaid-to-be-mostly-exempted-from-new-cuts-analyst-says/

Governor’s FY2027 Budget Highlights (confirms holdback minimized for IDOC): https://gov.idaho.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/fy27-budget-highlights.pdf

Corizon/YesCare/Jackson verdict

Detroit Free Press via Wood TV (clean news source for the verdict): https://www.woodtv.com/news/michigan/jury-awards-former-michigan-inmate-307-million-after-provider-refused-to-cover-surgery/

Bloomberg Law on missed settlement payments (paywalled but citable): https://news.bloomberglaw.com/bankruptcy-law/prison-medical-units-missed-bankruptcy-deal-payments-trust-says

COCHS weekly update summarizing the payment defaults (open access): https://cochs.org/weekly-update-2026-02-10/

Idaho Freedom Foundation

IFF bill analysis on Hepatitis C line item (Senate Bill 1388): https://idahofreedom.org/senate-bill-1388-approp-dept-correction-addl-2/

Justice Reinvestment Initiative

BJA/Pew original 2014 Idaho JRI report: https://bja.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh186/files/Publications/CSG-IdahoJusticeReinvestment.pdf

Corrections Today staffing article

Derrick, B. and Ascuena-Bolt, W. “How a high-performing team solved Idaho’s correctional officer staffing crisis.” Corrections Today, Spring 2026, Vol. 88, №1, p. 34. American Correctional Association. URL: https://user-3imepyw.cld.bz/Corrections-Today-Spring-2026-Vol-88-No-1/34/

David Lund is the Criminal Justice Specialist for the Civic Engagement Program at the Washington Secretary of State’s Office. He has lived experience with incarceration in Idaho and studies public administration at the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Washington.