A man who killed four University of Idaho students in 2022 is likely to be housed in the most notorious prison in America, known for its violence, hunger strikes, “biohazard” HVAC, and feces-smeared cages.
Bryan Kohberger, 30, recently pleaded guilty to the 2022 stabbing murders of University of Idaho students Ethan Chapin, Xana Kernodle, Madison Mogen, and Kaylee Goncalves.
He’s expected to be sentenced to face “four consecutive life sentences at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution” (IMSI) when he goes up for sentencing on July 23, according to Vanity Fair magazine.
Bryan Kohberger is expected to spend the rest of his life at Idaho Maximum Security Institution (IMSI), a notorious facility known for housing the state’s most violent and disruptive inmates.
Opened in 1989, IMSI has faced serious allegations, including reports of cages smeared… pic.twitter.com/zsEIG8BfVQ
— 🅽🅴🆁🅳🆈 (@Nerdy_Addict) July 3, 2025
Designed “to confine Idaho’s most disruptive male residents,” according IMSI’s website, the prison is so violent it was reportedly once known as “gladiator school.”
“[V]ideos were released in 2013 showing a violent beating of an inmate, with correctional officers allegedly failing to step in,” Boise station KTVB noted in a 2016 report. “Prisoners sued, saying the facility had become known as ‘gladiator school.’”
Much more recently, last year inmates conducted a hunger strike over the “alarming living conditions” at the facility, according to The Idaho Statesman.
These conditions included “long bouts of isolation; serious delays in medical care; an HVAC system that hadn’t been cleaned; and ‘cages’ IDOC used for recreation time, covered in human feces,” the station reported last August.
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During recreation time, lower-level inmates are allowed to enter a more open area, but even this area “is still covered with trash and bodily fluids, partly because the men said they don’t have access to a bathroom while outside.”
“All we ask is for the right to breathe clean air, to be warm in the winters and cool in the summers,” inmate Shawn Madewell told the paper. “Our cells are some of the cleanest places you could ever find, but what’s in our HVAC system could be classified as a biohazard.”
The Idaho Maximum Security Institution, has earned a grim reputation for its harsh conditions with allegations of abusive guards, violent brawls, feces-covered recreation cages and a dirty ventilation system described as being a biohazard. #Real #prison #stories pic.twitter.com/mJSl3X272t
— Real Prison Stories (@RealPrisonStory) July 5, 2025
Prior to the 2022 murders, Kohberger, an alleged autist, was a graduate student at Washington State University’s Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology.
In addition, he’d been studying criminology under a famous criminologist.
He “took courses by the famed forensic psychologist Katherine Ramsland, whose 68 books include ‘How to Catch a Killer,’ ‘The Psychology of Death Investigations,’ and ‘The Mind of a Murderer,’” The Daily Beast reported in last December 2022.
According to one of his former classmates, he’d been a “very intelligent” and “well spoken” but “seemingly detached” guy.
“He was very leveled and somewhat imposing. There wasn’t much emotion displayed by him. He took care with how he spoke,” the classmate said to The Daily Beast, adding that Kohberger had an “intense stare.”
What remained unclear was Kohberger’s motive, though legendary crime journalist Nancy Grace theorized at the time that it was murder — not theft or rape or whatever else.
“He didn’t go in to steal. He didn’t go in to rape anybody. He went into that home with the intent to kill,” she told Fox News. “Take a look at this guy. Would it surprise you to see him, that face staring in your bathroom window?
“Because it would not surprise me.”
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