Moscow Report Goes to Jail

The Latah County Jail has been closed for just under half a year. In this special report, we visit with the Sheriff’s department to try and get up to speed on this issue, as well as look at where the future of the jail might be headed. Won’t you join us?

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following text is only a partial transcript of the video. 

Let’s talk about the Latah County Jail.

How’s it going y’all? Aiden Anderson here with Moscow Report. In the basement of the Latah County Courthouse building lies the Latah County Jail. The jail has been closed since October of 2025, and there are a number of questions floating around about why that is, what happened, and what’s being done about the jail going forward. 

In this report, I’m gonna start the process of looking at this topic and answering some of these questions. There’s a lot we could potentially unpack here, so I’m gonna start with the basics, bring you up to speed, and hopefully we can take it from there.

To start, let’s look at the Latah County Website:

“The Latah County Jail is an adult male and female holding facility that was built in 1972. The jail is designed to hold adults being charged with a crime while awaiting trial, and those adults sentenced to local jail time or awaiting transport to the Idaho Department of Corrections. We also hold for other forms of due process. We house adult prisoners for the Idaho State Police, Moscow Police Department, United States Marshals Service, Bureau of Prisons, Idaho Department of Corrections, other various counties and our own agency. The jail has a maximum holding capacity of 38 individuals.”

In the fall of 2024, the jail failed an inspection, which called into concern its fire egress, plumbing, electrical, camera systems, and fire suppression. At the time, Sheriff Richie Skiles made the decision to close the jail and instead use the space as a temporary holding facility, citing repair costs and long-term functionality.

That all took effect in October of 2025. Since then, the jail is no longer a jail, but is instead a temporary court holding and booking facility. It is staffed during court hours on weekdays. It can book and hold inmates during the day, but it does not house inmates overnight. Anyone arrested after hours or on weekends gets transported to the Nez Perce County Jail in Lewiston. Meanwhile, county leadership has been looking for opportunities for funding when it comes to a new jail facility in the future.

Now, the City of Moscow has made use of the Latah County Jail when it comes to those persons which their police detain. When news of the decision to close the jail reached the city back in 2024, let’s just say that city leadership was less than pleased about it… 

…Now, of course it wouldn’t make sense to talk about the jail being closed without looking at the reasons cited for why the jail was closed. To answer that question, I paid a visit to the county  jail myself. Let’s take a look at some of that time…

Touring the county jail certainly helped make the case as to why someone would want to close the facility. For answers to further questions, I turned to a conversation with Sheriff Richie Skiles himself…

…So that is the story so far, and this story is far from over. There are elements of the jail situation that are still in development, especially as the county is still seeking funding for a new facility. 

There are also questions I still have about the history of this whole situation. It seems strange to me that so many components of the jail could be in compliance with jail standards for so long — or at least, acceptable enough to pass inspections — and then all of a sudden, it all has to go. With that in mind, I’d be curious to look more closely at how jail standards in Idaho have changed over time, and how previous administrations of Latah County Sheriff have interacted with them.

Beyond that, the Sheriff’s department is not the only entity affected by the closure of the county jail. The Moscow Police Department has certainly had to make changes to their operations as well. To that end, I’d like to find out more about the perspective of both Moscow PD and city leadership on this whole situation.

Now, what does the average citizen of Latah County do about all this? Well, firstly, the Sheriff has a survey about the jail available on the county website, which they have been encouraging people to take. If you get a chance, give that survey a look.

I’ll also point out that the jail stands as an example of one of those pieces of local infrastructure that we can often take for granted if we’re not paying attention. If the jail is something that you as a citizen value, then that is a good reason to be paying attention to what the county is doing with it, and providing feedback to the county when the opportunity arises, even if something like a closure doesn’t appear to be on the horizon.

A big thank you to the Latah County Sheriff’s Office for their time and their willingness to talk. We’ll have the relevant links posted with this video, and if you have any questions, please reach out. I’m Aiden Anderson with the Moscow Minutes. More on this story as it develops.