United States Penitentiary, Terre Haute

A new United States penitentiary was authorized by President of the United States Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1938 and established in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1940 on of land. The opening of the prison in this city was partly due to heavy promotion by Terre Haute's Chamber of Commerce, which eventually went on to raise $50,000 to pay for the property on which the prison was built. The residents of Terre Haute initially embraced the prison due to the impression that it would provide jobs to local residents in addition to helping Terre Haute's economy while only housing non-violent offenders. E.B. Swope was the prison's first warden. The U.S. Public Works Administration issued a $3 million grant to pay for construction of USP Terre Haute in 1938. ==Facility==

USP Terre Haute is a Care Level 3 facility, which means that any inmate sent to Terre Haute who has serious health problems that are not major enough to warrant hospitalization is sent to the USP. This facility is also a tobacco-free institution. This part of the FCC contains six housing units. One of the six housing units is a faith-based unit that can house 125 inmates. When the inmates are not working, they are partaking in faith-based activities. All of the inmates in the USP are allotted seven visit-days a month and 300 minutes of telephone time, which they have to use in increments of 15 minutes or less. The inmates housed here can work at UNICOR, which is a prison industry that makes towels and other accessories for the military. Inmates employed here earn an average of $6.50 to $7.50 a day and some can make up to $12 a day if they are paid by piece as opposed to by the hour. ==Death row==

On June 18, 1993, the director of the BOP designated USP Terre Haute as the site where executions under federal death sentences would be carried out. The BOP itself established Terre Haute as a death row facility on July 19 of that year, including the establishment of the "Special Confinement Unit", the federal death row for men. The Bureau of Prisons modified USP Terre Haute in 1995 and 1996 so it could house death row functions. On July 13, 1999, the Special Confinement Unit at USP Terre Haute opened, and the BOP transferred male federal death row inmates from other federal prisons and from state prisons to USP Terre Haute. Since 1963, sixteen people have been executed by the United States federal government. All sixteen were executed at USP Terre Haute. Timothy McVeigh, who was convicted for his responsibility for the Oklahoma City bombing, was the first prisoner executed by the U.S. federal government since the national moratorium on the death penalty was lifted in 1976 and the U.S. federal death penalty was reinstated in November 1988. The current method of execution used by the federal government is lethal injection. As of December 2025, three men are on federal death row. Two of them are housed at USP Terre Haute. , due to security concerns, death row inmate Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is held at the United States Penitentiary Florence Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX Florence) in Florence, Colorado. The federal government chose Terre Haute as the location of the men's death row due to its central location within the United States. ==Notable inmates==