Prison, to the max

FLORENCE, Colo. - The most secure federal prison in America has the polished tile corridors of a modern regional high school and the empty stillness of summer break.

The marquee inmates - including Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker; "shoe bomber" Richard Reid; Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber; FBI agent-turned-traitor Robert Hanssen; and Terry Nichols, convicted of the Oklahoma City bombing - wait out their days in cell blocks the warden leads reporters quickly past on the first media tour since the Florence "supermax" opened 13 years ago.

"You say Moussaoui. You say Kaczynski. That's the smallest part of my population," warden Ron Wiley said. "My major mission is inmates who were disrupting the population in other federal prisons."

Yet extremes define the Florence supermax. Conceived after two guards were slain in a single day at the federal prison in Marion, Ill., the original successor to Alcatraz, the administrative maximum-security institution, or ADX, does double duty as a punishment in its own right. Its 475 inmates account for just one-fourth of 1 percent of the 200,000 inmates in the federal prison system, but they are confined to single cells for at least 23 hours a day in sterile isolation and permanent lockdown.

"To paraphrase the poet T.S. Eliot, you will die with a whimper," U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema told convicted Sept. 11 plotter Moussaoui last year, as she dispatched him directly to this prison.

"Just like any other place," said Daniel B. Graham, his tattooed arms crossed over his chest, as he stood in a wire exercise cage known as a dog run. He had arrived chained, shackled, and escorted by two guards who took him out of his cell only after every other inmate was locked in.

The rules are even stricter in the 78-cell "control unit," where Graham, convicted on a firearms charge, said he twice had been sent for assault. The unit houses the inmates who are barred from any contact with the outside world.

"If you thought the other units were quiet, that unit is super quiet," Wiley said. "Super quiet."

The entire prison is aboveground, except for a subterranean corridor that links cell blocks to the lobby. But down a flight of stairs the feeling of being hermetically sealed sets in. Fastened to the wall of the first "sally port," the space between a green steel gate that must slide shut before the gate in front opens, are two items: a fingerprint scanner and a digital clock that reports the weather outside the windowless maze that lies ahead.

"I still get lost," said Michael Nalley, Bureau of Prisons regional director.

Down the long tunnel and to the left, the first door is marked "Visiting Room." Past that and another sally port lies G-Unit, one of four "general population" units, with 64 inmates per unit.

Each cell contains a bunk, desk, stool and shelf, all concrete. The stainless-steel sink and toilet evoke an airliner bathroom. The black-and-white TV has a clear plastic housing to leave its electronics visible. All inmates get closed-circuit programming on education and mental health; most also see cable news and entertainment channels.

Critics argue that, with their enforced isolation, supermax prisons, "like the sensory-deprivation environments that were studied in the '60s, tend to induce psychosis," said Terry Kupers, a psychiatrist at the Wright Institute in Berkeley, Calif., who has examined scores of prisoners in state supermaxes.

Those inmates "are, on average, the most severely psychotic people I have seen in my entire 25 years of psychiatric practice," Kuppers once testified.

At Florence, 65 inmates take medication to control mental illness, said Paul Zohn, one of two resident psychologists. The medicine is prescribed by a Bureau of Prisons psychiatrist in Springfield, Mo., who examines the inmates by video link.

Medical care is problematic. Only two of five physician slots are filled at Florence, to serve an inmate population that, with the three other prisons in the Florence complex, totals 3,200 inmates.

Those on the cusp of transition to the nearby maximum-security prison live in K-Unit. It includes an exercise yard with basketball hoops, a sweat lodge, and steel cables overhead to deter escape by helicopter.

Inside, Rudolf Rivera Rios loitered with fellow inmates at tables anchored to the floor between two stories of cells in what looked like a traditional prison.

"I hijacked a plane," said Rios, a native of Puerto Rico who diverted a Pan American flight to Havana in 1970. Now 65, he said he had "had trouble" in other prisons, including a bad fight in a Texas facility. But the supermax, he said, was under control.

"It's locked down, eh? No problem."

The Florence, Colo., "supermax" prison is home to

some of the most high-profile criminals of the last

decade, including:

Theodore Kaczynski, "Unabomber" mail bombings; incarcerated since 1998.

Ramzi Yousef, bombing World Trade Center in 1993; incarcerated since 1998.

Robert Hanssen, spying for Russia; incarcerated since 2002.

John Walker Lindh, working with Taliban; incarcerated

since 2002.

Richard Reid, attempting to detonate shoe bomb; incarcerated since 2003.

Terry Nichols, bombing Oklahoma City federal building; incarcerated since 2004.

Eric Robert Rudolph, bombing Centennial Olympic Park

in 1996; incarcerated since 2005.

Zacarias Moussaoui, conspiring with al-Qaeda; incarcerated since 2006.

EndText