Here's what life would be like for 'El Chapo' if he gets sent to America's toughest prison
It's widely considered America's toughest prison.
Every inmates at the prison, also known as the ADX or the "Alcatraz of the Rockies," spend roughly 23 hours a day in solitary confinement, The New York Times reported in an in-depth feature.
The ADX was designed for "a very small subset of the inmate population who show absolutely no concern for human life," Norman Carlson, the former director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, has said, according to The Times. The facility houses 406 inmates, including some of the world's most infamous names, like the Unabomber.
The Times described their daily life like this:
Inmates spend their days in 12-by-7-foot cells with thick concrete walls and double sets of sliding metal doors (with solid exteriors, so prisoners can't see one another). A single window, about three feet high but only four inches wide, offers a notched glimpse of sky and little else.
Each cell has a sink-toilet combo and an automated shower, and prisoners sleep on concrete slabs topped with thin mattresses. Most cells also have televisions (with built-in radios), and inmates have access to books and periodicals, as well as certain arts-and-craft materials. Prisoners in the general population are allotted a maximum of 10 hours of exercise a week outside their cells, alternating between solo trips to an indoor "gym" (a windowless cell with a single chin-up bar) and group visits to the outdoor rec yard (where each prisoner nonetheless remains confined to an individual cage).
All meals come through slots in the interior door, as does any face-to-face human interaction (with a guard or psychiatrist, chaplain or imam). The Amnesty report said that ADX prisoners "routinely go days with only a few words spoken to them."
"This place is not designed for humanity," Robert Hood, the warden from 2002 to 2005, told the Times. He also described the facility as a "cleaner version of hell" to "60 Minutes" back in 2007. Built for $60 million on 600 acres of land donated by Colorado residents, the ADX succeeded another Supermax facility in Marion, Illinois after a wave of guard killings shut it down.An Amnesty International representative toured the facility in 2001 and allowed Business Insider to reprint her photos.