The institution that would become Taipei Prison was established in 1895 as the Taihoku Penalty Institute. The name Taihoku was the Japanese rendering of Taipei; the year marks the beginning of Japanese colonial rule following the Treaty of Shimonoseki, which ceded Taiwan from China to Japan. The facility inherited and remodeled infrastructure from the preceding Qing Dynasty administration — an early example of the way Japan's colonial project in Taiwan built on existing foundations even as it transformed the island's institutions. By 1902, the prison had been rebuilt on a new site southeast of Taihoku City, in the area now known as Aiguo East Road. The original structure was gone, but the institution persisted, growing to serve the expanding colonial capital.

The executions of fourteen Allied airmen at Taihoku Prison in June 1945 represent one of the most specific and documented episodes in the facility's wartime history. These were men from US Army Air Forces and naval aviation units who had been shot down over or near Taiwan during the American air campaign against Japanese military and industrial targets. Tried by military tribunal and convicted on charges of bombing civilians, they were executed weeks before the war's end. Their deaths were part of a broader pattern of Allied POW mistreatment across Japanese-occupied Asia during the final, desperate months of the Pacific War. The men deserve to be remembered as individuals whose lives ended far from home, caught in the machinery of a conflict they had not started. Their ashes, placed at a local shrine, were a small human gesture in circumstances that allowed for very few.

When Imperial Japan surrendered in August 1945, the Republic of China took administrative control of Taiwan. The prison received its current name — Taiwan Taipei Prison — in October of that year, a renaming that marked the transfer of authority without interrupting the institution's operation. The postwar years were turbulent. Taiwan's political situation remained fraught, and the prison population swelled as the island passed through the upheavals of the late 1940s and the decades of martial law that followed. By the late 1950s, the old facility was inadequate and overcrowded. The Ministry of Judicial Administration acquired land in Guishan District and began planning a new complex. Groundbreaking took place on October 11, 1961; the new facility was completed by the end of December 1962.

The current Taipei Prison sits in Guishan District, Taoyuan City — outside Taipei proper but still considered the city's primary detention facility for the north of the island. It can hold up to 2,705 people and houses those convicted of serious crimes and sentenced to at least ten years, as well as foreign nationals serving sentences in Taiwan. Three affiliated detention centers — the Taipei Detention Center, the Shilin Detention Center, and the Sindian Detention Center — handle shorter sentences. Among its most prominent recent residents was former President Chen Shui-bian, who served time at Taipei Prison as Inmate 1020 following his corruption conviction. The institution has been, across more than a century, a place where Taiwan's political and social history has been played out at close quarters — sometimes in ways that make history, sometimes in ways that history prefers not to examine too closely.