Washington State Penitentiary (also called the Walla Walla State Penitentiary) is a Washington State Department of Corrections men's prison located in Walla Walla, Washington. With an operating capacity of 2,200, it is the largest prison in the state and is surrounded by wheat fields. It opened in 1886, three years before statehood. It was the site of Washington State's death row and where executions were carried out, until the Washington Supreme Court ruled the state's death penalty statute unconstitutional on October 11, 2018, thereby abolishing capital punishment in the state. Methods for execution were lethal injection and hanging. Located at 1313 N. 13th Avenue, it is commonly known as "the Walls" among inmates and "The Pen" to the locals. The penitentiary is sometimes known as "Concrete Mama", from a book with the same title by Ethan Hoffman and John McCoy. Elsewhere within Washington, and also to an extent in the surrounding states, the name Walla Walla is a metonym for the penitentiary. The penitentiary was the subject of the song "Walla Walla" by American punk rock band The Offspring.

History

Washington State Penitentiary is the oldest operational prison in Washington state and among the oldest operational prisons in the US. During the 1880s, Washington's territorial legislature sought to build a state prison to satisfy a requirement for eventual statehood. The territory's prison at the time, the privately-owned Seatco Prison, had "poor living conditions" and was nicknamed "The Seatco Dungeon" and "Hell on Earth". Its inmates performed penal labor and manufactured goods while being denied visitation rights and access to clergy. Walla Walla's city government began lobbying for a territory-funded institution, and after Levi Ankeny, a local wealthy business man, donated 160-acres for the site in 1886, the legislators approved the Washington Territorial Prison. On May 11, 1887, the first 10 prisoners arrived from Seatco. Guards were placed on the facility's walls after two prisoners escaped shortly after it was opened, on July 4, 1887. They only made it a few miles before being recaptured. There have been several more escapes since, including a seized supply train in 1891, a riot that left nine dead in 1934, 10 who tunneled under the wall in 1955, and John Allen Lamb, who sawed his way out in 1997. In 1887, the facility had its first incarcerated woman, a housewife who had committed grand larceny, but there were no accommodations suitable for a woman. The prison later converted the hospital quarters to accommodate four women, and later built a separate facility. The remaining Seatco inmates were transferred in 1888, and the facility was shut down, and the town changed its name to "Bucoda". When Washington became a state in 1889, the facility officially became the Washington State Penitentiary, but inmates nicknamed it "The Hill", "The Joint", "The Walls", and "The Pen". The first execution was carried out in 1906, and the final in 2010 of Cal Coburn Brown. Capital punishment in Washington became illegal in 2018. The most notable inmate at Walla Walla is Gary Ridgway, a serial killer known as the "Green River killer," who pleaded guilty in 2003 to the murders of 48 women to avoid the death penalty. He was still incarcerated there as of December 2023. Over a one-year period, starting in March 2002, more than one hundred inmates and staff at the Washington State Penitentiary were infected with Campylobacter jejuni. During this period, five clusters of the infection were identified, and genetic testing indicated that all of the bacteria were indistinguishable from each other. The source of this outbreak is not known, but contamination via pigeon feces, as well as unsafe food handling procedures, were examined. In June 2021, dozens of inmates were subjected to extreme heat when the air conditioning stopped working in the solitary confinement unit. Temperatures rose to over 116 F in the area surrounding the prison.

Notable prisoners

Executed

Organization

The penitentiary has five custody levels:

In Popular Culture