Spokane Police captured an escaped Geiger Corrections prisoner Friday morning. The prisoner assaulted a guard and then hid near Lincoln and Boone for more than an hour before being discovered.

BOISE – The warden of a private Texas prison housing Idaho inmates has been "relieved of his duties" after complaints from Idaho. The Dickens County Correctional Center, which houses 125 Idaho inmates, made the change after an Idaho corrections team visited the large, older county jail near Lubbock, Texas, in March and reported "deficiencies."

Ten years of getting tough on crime have left Idaho with some difficult decisions. Money that could go to the state's traditional priority, education, is being swallowed by the overflowing prison system.

Washington's civil-commitment program for violent sex offenders could be moved to the McNeil Island Corrections Center from Monroe, state officials say. "It has the capacity," Mark Seling, director of the Monroe center, said Monday at a court hearing before U.S. District Judge William Dwyer.

An inmate at the Airway Heights Corrections Center tried to escape Thursday night by climbing a 12-foot-high fence topped with razor wire, officials said. John L. Gemmill, 29, was captured after correctional officers spotted the would-be breakout on security cameras at 6:30 p.m., said prison spokesman Cly Evans.

A man suspected of robbing a Spokane Valley shoe store escaped from an Idaho prison on Thursday and is still on the loose, authorities say. Michael Allen Wachholtz, 35, and another inmate who was serving time for murder walked away from the maximum security prison in Boise about 2 a.m.

A man serving a lengthy sentence for murder stole a Washington State Penitentiary employee's truck and rammed it into a fence in an unsuccessful escape attempt, authorities said Wednesday. John Lamb, 31, serving a 50-year sentence for a Clark County murder conviction, was caught Tuesday morning after the truck became undriveable when it hit the prison's interior fence, spokeswoman Mary Christiansen said.

A year after becoming the first state to bring back chain gangs, Alabama has yielded to pressure to end the practice. "They realized that chaining them together was inefficient, that it was unsafe and they ended the practice," said attorney Richard Cohen of the Southern Poverty Law Center, whose lawsuit challenged chain gangs as cruel punishment.

Bert Atwater lists the reasons he just moved his company, Omega Pacific Inc., from the wooded beauty of Redmond, Wash., to a concrete building inside a state prison. Rent-free quarters in Airway Heights, where workers are delighted with the pay - just above minimum wage in the outside world. No workers who don't come in because of rush-hour traffic or sick children at home.

The discovery of some loose screws led officials at the state reformatory here to a tunnel that inmates apparently planned to use in an escape attempt. The inmates chipped through 6 inches of concrete floor and then dug down 11 feet before apparently digging horizontally, prison superintendent Ken DuCharme said. How far the horizontal shaft goes wasn't immediately known, because soil was too loose to send someone down safely. Officials planned to lower a camera to take a look, he said.

Two of three escapees from a minimum-security work crew have been apprehended in Florida after a routine traffic stop, Idaho Correction officials say. Shane Jeffrey McCloskey of Post Falls and William Charles Dorahush were taken into custody in Citrus County, Fla., after a traffic stop revealed they were wanted in Idaho.

Whether Washington prisons are well-managed by Corrections Secretary Chase Riveland depends on the yardstick used to measure success. If it's the price tag, other states look better. Washington spends more than $23,000 a year to keep a prisoner behind bars. That compares to Oregon's average cost of roughly $18,000 a year. The national average is about $19,000, the Criminal Justice Institute says.

Sen. Jim Hargrove, D-Hoquiam, speaks during a Senate debate on prison life. Photo by Associated Press

The city hearing examiner has approved the use of the old Ricardo Building at the southeast corner of Broadway and Monroe for a federal work-release center on the condition that it does not house sex offenders. In a ruling issued last week, Greg Smith placed several other conditions on the use of the building, including the formation of a committee from the neighborhood to screen potential residents.

Mountain Home officials were warned by two judges that their juvenile holding facility was a safety risk, months before two youths walked away from it. Ronald Stiner, 16, and Eric S. Brown, 18, fled from the non-secure trailer in Mountain Home on Tuesday night. They were charged Thursday with first-degree murder in the shooting death of Forest Service engineer David J. Wheeler.