OSP contains an intensive management wing, which is being transformed into a psychiatric facility for mentally ill prisoners throughout Oregon.

In 1859, the facility was leased to private contractors (Robert Newell and L. N. English), who instituted a system of prison labor.

[3][4] In 1866, the state officially moved the penitentiary to a 26-acre (11 ha) site in Salem, enclosed by a reinforced concrete wall averaging fourteen feet (4.3 m) in height.

[4] Details about this period can be read in Thirteen Years in Oregon State Penitentiary, a book written by Joseph "Bunko" Kelly.

He describes negligent doctors and a lack of mental health care, and complains that whiskey drinking affects the behavior of the guards.

He also identifies a five-year period in which the warden stopped newspaper deliveries to prevent convicts from learning of pardons.

After 66 of these absconded, Governor James Withycombe announced that he would find a way for them to work jobs within the prison facility.

[12] Seven hundred inmates were involved in a riot on August 1, 1936, in response to a court ruling that made it more difficult for prisoners to be released after serving their minimum sentence.

The plan was foiled by an informant, John Edward Ralph, who was quickly transferred to Folsom Prison for his own protection.

[17][18] Over 1300 prisoners conducted an eight-day hunger strike in August to protest alleged brutality of a guard named Morris Race.

Under instructions from Warden Clarence T. Gladden, guards used tear gas to prevent the prisoners from reaching food supplies.

[30] The hostages were freed after prison officials announced the resignation of Warden Gladden (then 73 years old), as well as immunity for the rioters.

OSP began to recruit African American staff in 1981 in response to pressure from activist black prisoners.

[37] In September 1988, 28 female inmates at the Oregon Correctional Center staged a sit-down protest that prison Superintendent Robert H. Scheidler described as the first of its kind in the facility's history.

Both the sit-down protest and hunger strike were meant to call attention to overcrowding, poor medical care, inadequate education programs and the shortage of showers and laundry machines.

The facility itself consists of ten acres (4 hectares), surrounded by a 25-foot (7.5-meter) wall which is patrolled by armed correctional officers.

The 196-bed self-contained Intensive Management Unit provides housing and control for male inmates who disrupt or pose a substantial threat to the general population in all department facilities.

[42] Conditions in the IMU were the object of public criticism, triggered particularly by multiple suicide of mentally ill prisoners.

[42] Former warden Brian Belleque also expressed doubts about the possibility of rehabilitation in the IMU, saying: "We realize that 95 to 98 percent of these inmates here are going to be your neighbor in the community.

[41] In 2010, ODOC began to convert the IMU into a psychiatric facility, which will serve mentally ill prisoners from across Oregon.

[46] OSP was the site of death row in Oregon and contained the lethal injection chamber where prisoners were executed.

[50] Since the US Supreme Court reaffirmed the death penalty in Gregg v. Georgia (1976), Oregon has executed only two people: Douglas Franklin Wright, in 1996, and Harry Charles Moore, in 1997.

The current incarnation of the hospice began in 1999, and won "Program of the Year Award" from the National Commission on Correctional Health Care in 2001.