The Alcatraz of the Rockies': Why No One Ever Escapes From ADX Florence

 'The Alcatraz of the Rockies': Why No One Ever Escapes From ADX Florence https://people.howstuffworks.com/adx-florence.htm?utm_medium=share&utm_campaign=hsw_share&utm_source=twitter via @HowStuffWorks

What Solitary Confinement Does to the Body and Mind

Reiter says that doctors have known since the 1960s and 1970s that solitary confinement and sensory deprivation have immediate and lasting effects on the brains and bodies of prisoners, as evidenced by the experiences of American POWs in Vietnam.

"We know that locking someone up in solitary confinement can cause all kinds of psychological problems within days, if not hours," says Reiter. "With Supermax prisons, we've essentially been running a mass experiment on the effects of long-term solitary confinement for the last two decades."

For ADX prisoners, their only regular contact with other human beings are the brief interactions with guards who bring them meals and escort them to the yard. A 2014 report by Amnesty International found that ADX prisoners "routinely go days with only a few words spoken to them."

The effects of long-term solitary confinement range from depression and anxiety to full-on hallucinations and psychotic breaks. The New York Times tells the disturbing story of an ADX inmate named Jack Powers, jailed for robbery and sent to ADX after escaping from another prison. The isolation sent Powers spiraling into insanity. He cut off his earlobes, chewed through a finger and smashed his head open in order to inject his brain with "bacteria-laden fluid."

"It's just the harshest place you've ever seen. Nothing living, not so much as a blade of grass anywhere," said Travis Dusenbury in an interview with the Marshall Project. He spent 10 years at ADX for assaulting a guard at another prison, before being released. "It's so claustrophobic in there ... It got to the point where absolutely anything that changed, like if I saw snow falling outside, was what allowed me to survive."

ADX has six different levels of security, and inmates can move from restrictive to less restrictive housing and possibly to other prisons. But even when released from solitary, the effects of isolation linger. In 1993, a doctor named Stuart Grassian described a condition called "SHU syndrome" (solitary confinement facilities are also called Security Housing Units) that's characterized by paranoia, panic attacks, aggression and psychotic symptoms.

Are Supermax Prisons Unconstitutional?

The Eighth Amendment of the Constitution prohibits "cruel and unusual punishment," and given the known psychological effects of solitary confinement, shouldn't prisons like ADX be outlawed?

"Legally the conditions inside Supermax prisons are constitutional," says Reiter. "They have been challenged extensively and no court has held that keeping someone in solitary confinement for any specific period with any specific degree of deprivation is unconstitutional."

There is increasing pressure, however, from the international legal community to end the practice of long-term solitary confinement in America. The United Nations, for example, has established the "Mandela Rules" governing the treatment of prisoners, which prohibits the use of "prolonged solitary confinement" (defined as 22 hours or more per day) and equates it with "torture."

There have been some small victories for prisoner rights at ADX. In 2016, the Bureau of Prisons settled a class-action lawsuit with 100 mentally ill ADX inmates who were denied antipsychotic medications and left to languish in awful conditions. The settlement led to the transfer of some of the most disturbed inmates to special federal facilities where they can receive better psychiatric care.

For the rest of the ADX inmates deemed mentally fit, they are still in their cells serving life sentences in near-absolute isolation.