At the foot of the Rockies and the edge of the Colorado plains lies one of the world’s most secure prisons: Supermax, Fremont County, Colorado.
The Administrative Maximum is all built on sensory privation
, according to Allen Rexford, a correctional officer at Supermax and vice-president of the prison branch of the American Federation of Government Employees.
Photos © Philippe Brault
Letter from the Federal Bureau of Prisons in Washington refusing the Prison Valley crew access to Supermax. The only occasion the media were allowed in was September 11, 2007 and even then only a select group.
sensory deprivationand especially tough. How much freedom can you take away from someone?
Supermax’s official name is United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility, Florence
, which has given it one of its nicknames, ADX Florence
, its other one being the Alcatraz of the Rockies
. Supermax is a high security facility run by the US Federal Government. It is located to the south of Florence in Fremont County, Colorado. Of the four facilities belonging to the huge Florence Federal Correctional Complex
(FCC), Supermax, its flagship, is furthest from the road. Over 20% of its (roughly) 400 inmates are accused of having tried to kill another prisoner in another prison.
Supermax was opened in 1994 (its construction cost 60 million dollars) and was designed to house the prisoners the Department considered the most dangerous in America. The US’s main terrorist convicts are imprisoned there. Several heads of gangs with nationwide operations, a few mafia bosses, serial killers and white supremacist
leaders are serving life sentences there. The only human contact the highest security prisoners are entitled to is with their wardens. They spend up to 23 hours a day in isolation in their cells that measure 10 feet by 6 and are completely soundproof.
According to lawyer Colleen McGuire, who we interviewed for Prison Valley, Sensory deprivation techniques are barbaric practices which the U.S. government has exported from U.S. maxi-max prisons to Guantanamo.
In 2007, Amnesty International wrote: Inside ADX Florence, the only Supermax (level 6) federal prison in the United States, the prison population is allowed to participate in recreational groups at each of the three security levels; the prisoners in the High Security Area (HSA) of ADX Florence are entitled to televisions and radios and can do manual activities in their cell, unless this right is removed for disciplinary reasons. The isolation cells in ADX Florence have a view onto an outside recreation area.
Cruel and inhuman: Conditions of isolation for detainees at Guantánamo Bay [PDF]
To try and calm down rising criticism, the Federal Bureau of Prisons in Washington arranged a restricted Supermax Tour
in 2007 for some of the country’s most influential media – the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, Fox News, CBS’ 60 Minutes programme and two local papers. That was on September 11, 2007, exactly six years after the attacks on the World Trade Center, which provided just the right backdrop to the media visit and the prison itself. That was when a former warden described the area as a clean version of hell
, an expression we quoted at the beginning of the film Prison Valley
.
CBS News
Several unions have also stressed the lack of personnel. When it was opened, Supermax had 372 wardens for 265 prisoners; in 2001 there were 331 staff for 386 prisoners. In 2005, two prisoners died in jail.
In 2009, Supermax was suggested on several occasions as a place where prisoners from Guantanamo might be held when that camp was disbanded. Those plans have apparently been shelved, but they had local people worried for a while.
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