Guzman likely to go to ‘Alcatraz of the Rockies’
In the world of corrections, there are inmates who pose security risks, and then there’s “El Chapo”.
Drug lord Joaquin Guzman has an unparalleled record of jailbreaks, having escaped two high-security Mexican prisons before his ultimate capture and extradition to the US.
So with Guzman convicted on Wednesday of drug trafficking and staring at an expected life sentence, where will the United States imprison a larger-than-life kingpin with a Houdini-like tendency to slip away?
Experts say Guzman seems the ideal candidate for the federal Government’s “Supermax” prison in Florence, Colorado, also known as ADX for “administrative maximum”. The facility is so secure, so remote and so austere that it has been called the “Alcatraz of the Rockies”.
“El Chapo fits the bill perfectly,” said Cameron Lindsay, a retired warden who ran three federal lockups, including the Metropolitan Detention Centre in Brooklyn. “I’d be absolutely shocked if he’s not sent to the ADX.”
Located outside an old mining town about two hours south of Denver, Supermax’s hardened buildings house the nation’s most violent offenders, with many of its 400 inmates held alone for 23 hours a day in 2.1m-by-3.7m cells with fixed furnishings made of reinforced concrete.
Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, September 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui and Oklahoma City bombing accomplice Terry Nichols are among those who call it home.
Guzman, set to be sentenced in June for smuggling enormous amounts of narcotics into the US and having a hand in dozens of murders, has an almost mythical reputation for breaking out. That includes a 2015 escape from Mexico’s Altiplano prison. On that occasion, he slipped into an escape hatch beneath his shower, hopped on the back of a waiting motorcycle and sped through a 1.6km-long, hand-dug tunnel to freedom.
Bribery is widely believed to have enabled that jailbreak, as well as a 2001 escape in which Guzman was smuggled out of another topsecurity Mexican prison in a laundry basket.
“There had to be collusion from within,” said Mike Vigil, a former US Drug Enforcement Administration agent who worked undercover in Mexico. “There is no doubt corruption played a role in both of his spectacular escapes.”
Could that happen at Supermax? Not likely. Prisoners at Supermax spend years in solitary confinement and often go days “with only a few words spoken to them”, an Amnesty International report found.