‘El Chapo’ likely heading for ‘supermax’ jail
Print Edition
Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the Mexican found guilty in a US court on Tuesday 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 prison that was designed for a high-profile inmate like El Chapo,” Larry Levine, a former federal inmate who is the director and founder of Wall Street Prison Consultants, said by phone.
Guzman, 61, the leader of the Sinaloa Cartel who escaped twice from maximum-security Mexican prisons before his most recent capture in 2016, faces a possible life prison sentence at a hearing scheduled for June 25 in New York.
Authorities have been tight-lipped about where Guzman will be jailed. But it has been widely anticipated that, if convicted, he would be sent to ADX Florence, ever since his extradition to the US in January 2017.
“For someone like Guzman, the chances of escape from a facility like that are nil,” said Thomas Kucharski, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.
Officials from the US Bureau of Prisons could not be reached for comment on Tuesday.
ADX Florence, located in a complex of prisons in a remote area about 185 kilometers 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.
ADX Florence 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.
The prisoners are confined to single-person 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; Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, according to the BOP website.
Special restrictions are designed to ensure 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.
Not all of the facility’s prisoners are famous for their crimes. Some were moved there because they attacked guards or inmates elsewhere, Levine said.
In fact, about 90 percent of the more than 400 inmates are there because of discipline issues, according to an official report released last October.
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
-
RSS - |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证：沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证：31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证：0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证：沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证：沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.
