Brief-Supermax

(6.2.06) What is Supermax: It is the harshest and most secure federal prison in the country. The triangular, two-story facility is carved into the side of a mountain about 90 miles southwest of Denver. Officially known as Administrative Maximum United States Penitentiary, or ADX Florence, Supermax was opened in 1994 to hold the nation’s most dangerous or escape-prone prisoners. Inmates are subjected to frequent, random searches, and every move they make is caught on remote cameras and microphones. The most hardened inmates are kept away from the others, emerging from their cells under guard for just an hour of solitary exercise daily. For the other 23 hours of every day, they are kept locked inside soundproof cells, totally isolated from other human beings.

What are the cells like: They are 7-by-12-foot boxes of poured concrete. Each one has a sabotage-proof concrete bed covered with a thin, green mattress. There is a concrete desk and a concrete stool. The sinks operate with buttons, so prisoners can’t break off the taps and use plumbing parts to make shivs. The cells have toilets with automatic shut-offs, to prevent inmates from flooding their cells. Cells are equipped with showerheads and drains, so prisoners can bathe without leaving solitary confinement. With good behavior, a prisoner can earn a 12-inch black-and-white TV that plays nothing but a closed-circuit menu of religious services from the prison chapel, psychological self-help lessons, and educational programs.

Don’t the inmates go stir-crazy: Indeed they do. Christopher Boyce, a convicted spy, said just three years at Supermax almost destroyed his mind. “You’re slowly hung,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “You’re ground down. You can barely keep your sanity.” Even the most hardened criminals fear doing time in Supermax. When Latin Kings gang leader Luis Felipe was convicted of murder and sentenced to life at Supermax, he flew into a rage. “You’re killing me,” he screamed at the judge. “You have sentenced me to die a little every day.”

Was he exaggerating: No. Prolonged periods of solitary confinement—which at Supermax can last years—are “strikingly toxic to mental functioning,” said former Harvard Medical School psychiatrist Stuart Grassian. Prison psychology expert Craig Haney said that the isolation can cause prisoners to become “extremely depressed and lethargic—sleeping, lying on their bunks, staring at the ceiling, declining to go out and exercise.” Many suffer panic attacks. “It’s not the dungeons of old,” said Jamie Fellner, head of Human Rights Watch in the U.S. “There are lights and it’s clean. But it’s still not humane.”

Why was such a prison created: It started with a bloody incident at another prison. On Oct. 22, 1983, two inmates killed two guards at the federal prison in Marion, Ill. Both prisoners had been handcuffed, but they thrust their hands into the cell of accomplices, who freed them with stolen keys. They then grabbed handmade knives from their accomplices, and stabbed the guards. At the time, the Marion facility was used to house the nation’s toughest criminals, a distinction it assumed when California’s Alcatraz was shut down in 1963. Norman Carlson, then the director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, seized on the Marion incident to make the case for a new, $60 million high-tech prison that would isolate the most dangerous prisoners from one another and—as much as possible—from the prison staff. There was no other way, Carlson said, “to control a very small subset of the inmate population who show absolutely no concern for human life.”

Who is sent to Supermax: Most of the 398 prisoners are murderers who are deemed high risk to murder again behind bars. (About 80 of the inmates have killed other inmates elsewhere, and others have attacked guards.) Other prisoners are so famous that their own lives would be at stake in a normal prison, such as former FBI agent and Soviet mole Robert Hanssen, and notorious Mafia hit man Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso. But Supermax has become best known as the warehouse for the nation’s terrorists, including Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry Nichols, failed shoe-bomber Richard Reid, and Ramzi Yousef, the architect of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Is it wise to put them all in one place: Prison officials say it is, because Supermax is designed to minimize contact and permit constant surveillance. The terrorists lumped together at Florence almost never see one another. Their only regular human contact is with the two guards who escort them, handcuffed, to an enclosed exercise area known as the “dog run,” for one hour a day. For some prisoners, these trips offer their only chance to chat with their fellow terrorists. In 1999, when Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was in Supermax awaiting execution, the solitary confinement section became known as “bomber’s row.” McVeigh occasionally went to the yard at the same time as Kaczynski and Yousef. McVeigh and Yousef had to shout to be heard from their separate wire enclosures, Dennis Hartley, one of McVeigh’s lawyers, told Time. They would mostly talk about programs they had seen on the prison’s closed-circuit TV, or just make small talk. “Nobody’s crazy enough to talk about escape,” Hartley said.

The Real Alcatraz: The nation’s first attempt to create an escape-proof prison for the most dangerous criminals was Alcatraz, on the site of an old military brig on an island in San Francisco Bay. Federal officials built Alcatraz during the crime wave of the 1930s. The isolation of the island—and the frigid waters that swirled around it—made escape nearly unthinkable. To make security even tighter, officials built towers for armed guards. They installed tear-gas canisters in the dining-hall ceiling, and even put newfangled metal detectors at the doors to make sure nobody made off with cutlery that could be fashioned into weapons. Alcatraz, or “the Rock,” opened for business in August 1934, and began receiving the most hardened criminals in the federal prison system, including Al Capone, George “Machine Gun” Kelly, and Doc Barker of the Ma Barker gang. The prison was closed in 1963, because it was deemed too expensive to operate. Over 29 years, 36 men tried to escape. Of those, 23 were caught; six were shot and killed; two drowned; and five disappeared, and were listed as “missing and presumed drowned.”