ABCNews.com profiles the Florence, Colo., “supermax” prison, home to some of the most dangerous and notorious criminals in the country. There are 31 similar state prisons, but the Florence facility is the only federal supermax. Most of its 500 inmates have been transferred from other facilities, where they were deemed too violent or prone toward escape attempts. No one has ever escaped from the prison since it was built in 1994.
There in the shadow of the Rocky Mountain, inmates tick away the hours in solitude, with little sunlight, spending 22-plus hours a day in their cells and no access to the bucolic world just outside the prison walls. The prison is home to a who’s who of criminals. “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski, “Shoe Bomber” Richard Reid, and John Walker Lindh, the man known as the “American Taliban,” who was convicted of aiding terrorists in Afghanistan during one of the bloodiest battles of the war there after 9/11.