The Last Worst Place / The isolation at Colorado's ADX prison is brutal beyond compare. So are the inmates

Michael Taylor, Chronicle Staff Writer

Monday, December 28, 1998

Florence, CO-- This is it. The end of the line. The toughest "supermax" prison in the United States.

If you make it here, the odds are you'll be an old man when you get out of custody -- if you get out.

ADX-Florence -- government-ese for "administrative maximum" -- is the place where the federal government puts its "worst of the worst" prisoners, mainly felons sent from other federal prisons after they killed their fellow inmates, or on occasion, their guards.

Among its current 400 residents, the ADX also houses a handful of high-profile prisoners, among them Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski, serving four life sentences plus 30 years. But the criminally renowned -- less than 5 percent of the ADX population -- are just a sideshow to the real raison d'etre of this place: to try and extract reasonably peaceful behavior from extremely violent career prisoners. Here, rehabilitation is hardly an issue. The goal is to release inmates to a less restrictive prison to serve out the rest of their days.

The ominous objective might seem an odd match for the arid surroundings of Florence, population 4,000, in what was once cattle and coal country, south of Colorado Springs.

But today, this is prison country. There were already nine state-run lockups in the county when eager Florence residents bought 600 acres and gave the land to the federal government, which used it to build four correctional facilities, including the ADX.

Unparalled in America, it is the only prison specifically designed to keep every occupant in near-total solitary confinement, rarely allowing inmates to see other prisoners.

The worst behaved men could serve an entire sentence -- decades -- in isolation. And for some, it doesn't matter.

They are the men, former Warden John M. Hurley says, who have "decided that life is inside the walls of a prison. They don't think about what's going on in Colorado Springs or Detroit. . . . They're not motivated in trying to be a better citizen. If you're 42 years old and your release date is in August 2034, you're not thinking about getting out and getting a job."

Prison psychology experts, like Dr. Craig Haney of the University of California at Santa Cruz, say this long-term solitary confinement can have devastating effects. "That's what is new about these so-called supermax prisons," he said, "of which Florence is the most extreme example."

Indeed, Florence is the leader in a nationwide trend toward supermax prisons: in the past few years, 36 states have built strongbox facilities to house their most dangerous inmates. In California, the most notorious are the Security Housing Units at Pelican Bay and Corcoran, already the subjects of numerous lawsuits and investigations into alleged cruel and unusual punishment, as well as the staging, by guards, of deadly fights among inmates.

In state facilities, though, isolation cells are just one segment of a large, general population prison. At Florence, isolation is all there is.

The ADX has a three-year program that keeps inmates in their cells 23 hours a day for the first year, then gradually "socializes" them with other inmates and staff. In their last year, prisoners can be out of their cells from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. and eat meals in a shared dining room, rather than having food shoved through a slot in their steel cell door.

"We have the agency's most violent and dangerous offenders," said Hurley, shortly before he retired after nearly 30 years in the world of corrections. "It is something we emphasize to our staff day in and day out."

More than half the inmates have murdered somebody in or out of prison, said Blake Davis, Hurley's assistant. A third of the men are in prison gangs, including the well-known

Aryan Brotherhood, Black Guerrilla Family and Mexican Mafia, as well as lesser known but just as deadly outfits such as the Dirty White Boys. The average sentence is 36 years.

It is spent, typically, in a 12-by-7- foot cell. Beds, desks and stools are made of poured concrete. Toilets have a valve that shuts off the water if an inmate tries to flood his cell by stopping it up. Sinks have no taps, just buttons -- inmates used to unscrew the taps and use the plumbing parts as shanks.

A 42-inch window, 4 inches wide, looks out on a one-man concrete recreation yard, which prisoners with good behavior can eventually use.

When prison guards unlock a cell door they quickly cover their key with an aluminum shield. Some inmates, said prison research analyst Tom Werlich, can glance at the key, memorize the configuration and size of its teeth and later duplicate it from materials picked up around the prison.

"They have a lot of time to figure these things out," said a guard who preferred to remain anonymous, lest he begin to get threats from inmates' friends or relatives.

Out of reflex, the guard on a recent tour walked to a cell shower and thumped the drain with his baton. "They tie a weapon to a piece of string," he said, "then drop it down the drain to hide it."

The ADX goes to great lengths to bring everything into the cells -- books, food, television -- so that inmates never need to leave. A 12- inch black-and-white TV in each cell shows closed-circuit classes in psychology, education, anger management, parenting and literacy. Religious services of numerous denominations are piped in from a small chapel, where prison officials display for the video-camera the religious objects appropriate for a given faith.

The harsh quarantine is rooted in equally harsh reality: a single, deadly day 15 years ago gave birth to the ADX.

On Oct. 22, 1983, two handcuffed inmates at the federal prison in Marion, Ill. killed two guards in separate incidents.

In the first, "The inmate was walking down the hall, with his hands cuffed in front of him," Werlich said. So fast and practiced was the prisoner, he "was able to suddenly turn and shove his cuffed hands into the cell of a friend, who quickly unlocked the cuffs with a stolen key, handed his friend a knife and the inmate turned around and killed the guard." Later that day, another inmate used the same lethal tactic.

Up until then, Marion -- the place where the Bureau of Prisons formerly sent its worst offenders -- was an old-style, open population prison. When trouble broke out, the prison was locked down and all inmates kept in their cells until a few days later, when it would open back up. And then the killings and assaults would resume.

For Norman Carlson, then director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the deaths of the two guards was the turning point.

"I decided I had no alternative but to bite the bullet and do it" -- institute a permanent lockdown at Marion -- "and hope the courts would understand," Carlson said.

"There is no way to control a very small subset of the inmate population who show absolutely no concern for human life," he said. "These two characters (who killed the two guards) had multiple life sentences. Another life sentence is no deterrent."

Carlson, now retired, persuaded the government to build a new and different prison that would effectively isolate prisoners from each other and, for the most part, from prison staff. The result was Florence, which opened four years ago.

Since then, to the government's credit, the $60 million ADX has not drawn the same kind of withering criticism as its state cousins, such as Pelican Bay.

"The Bureau of Prisons has taken a harsh punitive model and done it as well as anybody I know," said Jamie Fellner, an attorney with Human Rights Watch, the largest U.S.- based human rights organization. Fellner was recently given a tour of the prison. "What I'd like to see is more debate within the BOP to see how we can minimize the need for supermaxes," she said.

Haney, the Santa Cruz psychologist who has testified as an expert witness in cases involving supermax confinement, said the effect of isolation in places like Florence is dramatic. Prisoners "become extremely depressed and lethargic -- sleeping, lying on their bunks, staring at the ceiling, declining to go out and exercise," he said. They begin to lose memory, can't concentrate and suffer severe panic attacks, he said, or become uncontrollably enraged over insignificant things.

Haney and others suggest that prison officials pay more attention to the individual needs of supermax inmates rather than spending so much time and money on high-tech prison gadgetry and oppressive controls.

But Davis, the warden's assistant, says extreme control, for some prisoners, is the only way to save bloodshed.

"Behavior puts them here," Davis said, repeating what has become the prison motto. "And behavior gets them out."

IMFAMOUS INMATES

Among the prisoners at Colorado's ADX-Florence:

-- THEODORE KACZYNSKI, 56, the Unabomber, serving four consecutive life sentences.

-- TIMOTHY McVEIGH, 30, sentenced to death for the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building which killed 168 people.

-- TERRY NICHOLS, 43, McVeigh's accomplice, is now serving life in prison.

-- CHARLES HARRELSON, 59, the father of actor Woody Harrelson, is serving two life sentences for the murder of a federal judge.

-- RAYMOND LUC LEVASSEUR, 51, member of a U.S. radical group, serving 40 years for bombing buildings and attempted bombings in the 1970s.

-- EYAD ISMOIL, 27, serving 240 years for driving the rental van holding the bomb in the World Trade Center attack.

-- YU KIKUMURA, 46, Japanese Red Army terrorist, serving 30 years for transporting bombs in preparation for an attack on a Navy recruiting center.

-- LUIS FELIPE, 35, leader of New York's Latin Kings gang, who ordered the murders of six gang members from his jail cell and is serving a life sentence.

-- RODNEY HAMBRICK, 33, serving a 68-year sentence on bomb charges.