The Pros And Cons Of Super Maximum Prisons

Super maximum prisons are made for “super criminals” that has to be cut off from the rest of the world. To name a few criminals that has been removed from the world is the “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski and the Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Some of these criminals in super max prisons are usually have long sentences or death sentences. On any given day, there are about 80,000 inmates that resides in Supermax institutions in the United States. In the 1980s there was a critical upping in prison violence, riots, and staff murdered by prisoners housed in supermax prisons. The government prison in Marion, Illinois, considered by numerous to be the main supermax prisons, experienced huge prisoner violence, which brought about the death of two prison guards in 1983. Originally, they were not 23 hours lock down prisons until the actions that took place during

the 80s. The most secured prison in the nation is the United States Penitentiary Administrative-Maximum Facility located in Florence, Colorado. The Supermax prisons are guarded with heavily armed prison guards. The landmarks in the prison that keeps the prisoners inside are the gun towers and enormous walls with razor wire on the top of them. Some maximum prisons like the one in Florence, Co also uses geographical barriers such as mountains. The former warden of the facility said being in the prison is much worse than death. He said, “The Supermax is life after death.” A usual day inside of the prisons have a strict agenda that the people of the prison follows.
There are more than 400 inmates and they spend 23 hours a day alone in 7 by 12 foot concrete cells. The meals are slid through small holes in the doors. The beds are a concrete slab dressed in a thin mattress and blankets. Some cells have small windows in them to give natural lighting. The cells also have unmovable stools and desks made of concrete. The solid walls also prevent prisoners from communicating with each other. Hood said that the architecture of the building is the control. What he meant by that he is saying that this is how you can control the prisoners inside of the Supermax. If you allow the prisoners more freedom on the inside the less control the prison will have. Inmates have little contact outside of guards and prison staff. They must wear leg irons, handcuffs and stomach chains when taken outside their cells and to be escorted by guards.  Years of isolation, with no direct unrestrained contact with other human beings leave some ADX inmates particularly those with serious mental illness with a fundamental loss of even basic social skills and adaptive behaviors.
Some cells have radios, televisions, offering religious, educational and general interest programs.

Mail and conversations are observed always, the current ADX warden, John Oliver, testified at Tsarnaev's sentencing hearing. Inmates at some point may be able to get prison jobs, such as cleaning the bathing area, or move into the general population, Oliver said. The amount of rights a prisoner such as Tsarnaev would possess is really determined only by the justice department and the agencies that investigated and prosecuted him, not the prison staff.

Tsarnaev will likely join other terrorists in the Special Security Unit, also called the H-Unit. These cells are reserved for inmates with DOJ-imposed Special Administrative Measures intended to firmly limit all communications with the outside world. Only members of a prisoner's legal team and immediate family are permitted to visit. Prisoners sit on the other side of a glass window. They speak over telephones that are monitored. All personal conversations are monitored, but legal conversations and correspondence with attorneys are considered privileged and

private.

Prisoners in the H-Unit rarely have access to less-restricted general population areas, according to Amnesty International. In 2008, the prison introduced a step-down program for the H-Unit consisting of three phases lasting a minimum of one year with each step offering limited privileges. "If you're the Unabomber and you have an advanced degree or if you know multiple languages, you're going to sit there and read most of the day" Hood stated. Kaczynski, who has been described by associates as bright. Many of the inmates do not have the managing skills. The ADX inmates do not have the ability to read. They do not have the ability to be controversial. There is no outlet; that's most likely the inmate who is going to throw feces at you or cause problems for staff. Prisoner supporters have found that some inmates, despite good conduct, spend years in H-Unit without progressing to the next phase because the Special Administrative Measures were not improved.
During the sentencing phase, Oliver, portrayed the Supermax prison in the best light possible, describing how inmates in the special security units can mail letters to whoever they chose, workout in their cells, and also talk on the phone for up to 30 minutes a month and even write books about anything that the inmates choses to. This gives the prisoners a little gateway to freedom but it is still restricted.
One infamous inmate at the prison, Ramzi Yousef is serving two life sentences plus 240 years for his role in two terror attacks, including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that killed six people. He has stayed in solitary confinement for 15 years. He resides in the H-Unit under Special Administrative Measures. Also, Yousef has spent more than two years on step 2 of the step-down program, according to Amnesty International. 
The terrorist, who has had a good behavior for at least five years, has worked as accordingly, which allows him out of his cell a few hours a week to clean other cells. Still, he has been denied access to step 3, and his Special Administrative Measures are renewed each year, the rights group said. Yousef is described as civil but he’s still a terrorist at the end of the day.
Travis Dusenbury, a 46-year-old from Lexington, North Carolina, who was incarcerated in ADX for ten years, got his walking papers. He had much to say about the structure and the infamous people he says he met there, including the "Unabomber" and the "shoe bomber."  Dusenbury, a self-described "righteous black power type”. He first went to prison at the age of 16 for aggravated assault. He has been in and out ever since, for multiple reasons from provoking riots to firearm charges. In 2005, he was doing time in a federal prison in Florida when he assaulted a correctional officer who, he said, had been picking on Black and Latino inmates. That got him sent to the ADX as a risk, where he stayed until January 2015. 
When he first arrived at the prison he said his first impressions were that It wasn't like any of the prisons he had been to. He goes on to say that he had been to numerous of prisons. He states that he has been locked up in some isolated, rural places, but at least at those places I could always see a highway, see the sky. Dusenbury said at the ADX, you cannot see anything, not a highway out in the distance, not the sky. He says you know the minute you get there you won't see any of that, not for years and years. “You're just shut off from the rest of world. You feel it. It sinks in, this dread feeling” Dusenbury states.
When asked about the correctional officers and the interactions that he had with them he says that there were no black people in rural Colorado. The staff were all white, all lower-class, and they could be more easily influenced by white inmates than by black inmates. The white inmates could get them to bring in contraband, but the black inmates could never do that. He said that they even sometimes called the white inmates "brother."
Some inmates have delusional conversations with voices they hear in their heads. Others spread feces, other human waste and body fluids throughout their cells or hurl it at correctional officers. When you see a person unclothing, throwing feces at a staff member going by is that mental illness? Is that an issue where they are self-destructing? Being in a cell for 23 hours in solitary will destroy the strongest man. The prisoners become mentally ill overtime as they spend the rest of their lives in prison. The reason Supermax prisons are built is for the most violent criminals and convicted terrorists. I think that the Supermax prison system should be changed drastically. It turns criminals into helpless mentally ill patients. That should not be the point to turn a criminal into a mentally ill person the purpose should be to make them realize that they have to pay for their crimes and while having a clear conscience and mind.
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