Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is incarcerated at America’s harshest maximum security prison, likened to hell on earth by former wardens and rights activists, until his transfer to death row.
The former college student is locked up at least 22 hours a day alongside some of the world’s most dangerous criminals and convicted terrorists.
They include 9/11 convict Zacarias Moussaoui, would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad, “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski, Egypt’s Ramzi Yousef, who bombed the WTC in 1993, and British shoe bomber Richard Reid.
Tsarnaev, register number 95079-038, was sentenced to death by a federal judge on June 24, and is on the list of prisoners at ADX Florence maintained by the Federal Bureau of Prisons. He joins 417 male inmates in the wilds of Colorado’s Rocky mountains, incarcerated in individual cells measuring seven by 12 feet with a four foot by four inch window. It is a punishing life of isolation in a facility dubbed the “Alcatraz of the Rockies.” Most have small television sets in their cells. But meals are eaten alone, delivered on trays through at flap at the bottom of their doors.
When they do leave, they are shackled with wrists and ankles attached to a belly chain and waist belt, and accompanied by at least two guards.
The only outdoor recreation is alone in cages, placed in a concrete yard with high walls, and a chain-metal roof that Amnesty International says gives “no view of the natural world other than sky.” An indoor alternative, again in solitary, is in a windowless room equipped with a pull-up bar. Time out of their cells for exercise is limited to 10 hours a week, according to a July 2014 Amnesty report called “Entombed, isolation in the US federal prison system.”
The London-based rights organization called the conditions at ADX “unacceptably harsh” and said they “breach international standards” for the humane treatment of prisoners. Prisoners are deprived “meaningful social interaction” for years on end and the failure to provide “suitable, daily outdoor exercise” falls short of UN minimum rules for the treatment of prisoners, the report said.
Robert Hood, a warden at ADX Florence from 2002 to 2005, has described a jail as “a clean version of hell.” “It’s far much worse than death,” he has told American media. The description resonates with Jamie Fellner, a specialist in US prisons who works for Human Rights Watch in New York who has visited twice. “It’s a high-tech version of hell.” “ADX is a modern, clean, quiet, well-run facility, you walk down the hall, it’s all very shiny,” she said. All prisoners she met were strip searched before and after leaving their cell, and kept behind plexiglass the entire time. He will be allowed two telephone calls a month of 15 minutes each, a former federal prisons official Mark Bezy told his trial.
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AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE
