'El Chapo' Will Join These Notorious Prisoners At 'Supermax'
(CBS) -- Notorious drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman is expected to join a roster of infamous inmates when he begins serving his sentence at United States Penitentiary -- Administrative Maximum (ADX) at the federal correctional complex in Florence, Colorado, known as the "Alcatraz of the Rockies." Guzman was convicted this week on criminal conspiracy and drug trafficking charges.
Prosecutors expect Guzman will be sentenced to serve life without the possibility of parole at the maximum-security "Supermax" facility in a remote mountainous region south of Denver. It houses prisoners including Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski and Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry Nichols.
ADX Florence, opened in 1994, houses more than 400 of the federal Bureau of Prison's "most violent, disruptive and escape-prone inmates," according to the BOP. Guzman, known for his dramatic prison escapes, will likely be held in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day and kept under constant camera surveillance, former ADX Florence warden Bob Hood told Inside Edition.
"No one has [escaped] so far, since 1994 when they opened," Hood told Inside Edition.
While many housed at ADX Florence are foreign or domestic terrorists, gang leaders or spies, others are there because of escapes or attacks on correctional officers or fellow prisoners at other facilities. Richard McNair, serving a life sentence for murder, escaped three times from other prisons-- once using lip balm to squeeze out of handcuffs and in another instance slipping out of a prison with bags of mail.
Not all at ADX Florence are serving life sentences -- Joseph Konopka, otherwise known as "Dr. Chaos," is set for release this year. Konopka, 42, was convicted in 2003 for hiding cyanide near the Chicago subway system, and pleaded guilty in 2005 to damaging computers, power plants and radio towers in Wisconsin through a network of young followers he recruited, according to the Wisconsin State Journal.
Travis Dusenbury told the Marshall Project he was imprisoned at ADX Florence for 10 years after assaulting a correctional officer at a federal prison in Florida in 2005. He described being in a concrete cell for 23 or 24 hours a day, and being allowed outside in a fortified recreation cage for one to two hours a day. In the most restrictive housing unit, he said, his only contact with other inmates came from "finger-handshakes" through fencing in the recreation cages and a makeshift communication channel with neighbors using pipes and toilet paper rolls.
