Where El Chapo Could End Up: A Prison 'Not Designed for Humanity'

[kentuck]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/15/nyregion/el-chapo-prison.html

<snip>
Opened in 1994 on a barren stretch of semiarid desert 40 miles south of Colorado Springs, the ADX for decades has served as the final destination for a roll call of prominent criminals.

Terry L. Nichols — Inmate No. 08157-031 — who acted as an accomplice in the Oklahoma City bombing is imprisoned there. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev — No. 95079-038 — is also at the prison, awaiting execution for his role in the Boston Marathon bombings. Other renowned offenders who were once in the headlines are held there, too: Theodore J. Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber; Robert P. Hanssen, an F.B.I. agent who spied for the Russians; and Ramzi Yousef, who attacked the World Trade Center in 1993.

Eric Robert Rudolph, who carried out a spate of bombings in the ’90s, including one at Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park, wrote of the ADX in an essay in 2008 that even when its prisoners were let outside their cells, the surroundings were severe.

“No mountain, bush, tree or blade of grass is visible from the yard, just the sky,” Mr. Rudolph wrote. “The cages have just enough room to do aerobic exercises. Other than the opportunity to breathe fresh air and feel the sunshine on your skin, the outside cages are just cells that are open to the sky.”

more at link...

[stonecutter357]

1. good !

[2naSalit]

2. Well, it is a place for

those who are not fit to be among humanity so...

[Blues Heron]

3. Seems excessive

Why lower ourselves to their level? Why applaud cruelty? Vengance is so petty.

[Iliyah]

4. t-rump and crew want those billions . . .

El Chapo as of this date refuse to give them that information. He is plotting right now on how to escape.

[zipplewrath]

5. Overly Cruel

The place is amazingly cruel. Besides the abject isolation that most of them experience, they often are denied mental health medications if they aren't necessary for maintaining order.

BOP justifies this in Orwellian fashion: it discontinues the prisoner's medication, thereby making the now non-medicated prisoner "eligible" for placement in the Control Unit. Then, when this newly eligible prisoner requests medication needed to treat his serious mental illness, he is told that BOP policy prohibits the administration of psychotropic medication to him so he should develop "coping skills" as a substitute for medicine being withheld.

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/06/an-american-gulag-descending-into-madness-at-supermax/258323/

[Bettie]

6. These people do need to be removed from society

however, our constitution does not allow cruel and unusual punishment.

This type of prison is exactly that. We can behave with decency even in the face of indecency.

[liberalmuse]

7. How does that make us better than him?

The US does love its vengeance and retribution. This does not speak well for our society. El Chapo has done some horrific things, but a civil society does not find an excuse to engage in cruelty. You know prisons like this will be filled with people who scare the white oligarchs (is; people of color who’ve committed petty crimes).