El Chapo likely headed to top security jail
Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the Mexican found guilty in a US court of running a criminal enterprise that smuggled drugs into the United States, is likely headed to a “supermax” prison where repeating his past escapes would be nearly impossible.
No one has broken out of Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX) in Florence, Colorado, since it opened in 1994 to house the most dangerous inmates in the US prison system.
“ADX is the kind of jail that was designed for a high-profile inmate like El Chapo,” Larry Levine, a former federal inmate who is now the director and founder of Wall Street Prison Consultants, said on Tuesday.
Guzman, 61, the leader of the Sinaloa Cartel who escaped twice from maximum security Mexican jails before his most recent capture in 2016, faces a possible life prison sentence at a hearing scheduled for June 25 in New York.
US authorities have been tightlipped about where Guzman will be imprisoned but it has been widely anticipated that, if convicted, he would be sent to ADX Florence.
“For someone like Guzman, the chances of escape from a facility like that are nil,” said L. Thomas Kucharski, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.
ADX Florence, located in a complex of prisons in a remote area 185km south of Denver, is nicknamed “Alcatraz of the Rockies” after the prison in San Francisco Bay that held gangster Al Capone in the 1930s and other notorious criminals.
Inmates are held in specially designed “control units” that function as prisons within prisons.
“It’s like a self-contained area within a self-contained area within a self-contained area,” Levine said.
Prisoners are confined to singleperson cells for 22 or more hours a day, depriving them of virtually all contact with the outside world.
ADX Florence’s most infamous inmates include Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York; convicted Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, according to the US Bureau of Prisons website.
Special restrictions are designed to ensure that some inmates have no means of exerting influence or threats beyond prison walls, which is useful for US authorities to control those with sway over militant groups or criminal enterprises.
About 90% of the over 400 inmates are there due to discipline issues, according to a report released last October by the District of Columbia Corrections Information Council.
The most highly guarded inmates have a television with content designed to provide them with education, psychological help and religious services, the report said.
Each cell has a narrow window, 107cm tall and angled toward the sky. Inmates cannot see each other from inside their units. — Reuters