‘Alcatraz’ awaits drug kingpin

‘EL CHAPO’: ‘SUPERMAX’ JAIL WILL PREVENT ESCAPE

Guzman has beaten maximum security prison system twice before.

Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the Mexican found guilty in a US court on Tuesday of running a criminal enterprise that smuggled drugs into the US, is likely headed to a “supermax” prison where repeating his past escapes would be nearly impossible.

No one has broken out of Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX) in Florence, Colorado, since it opened in 1994 to house the most dangerous inmates in the US prison system.

“ADX is the kind of prison that was designed for a high-profile inmate like El Chapo,” Larry Levine, a former federal inmate who is the director and founder of Wall Street Prison Consultants, said.

Guzman, 61, the leader of the Sinaloa Cartel who escaped twice from maximum-security Mexican prisons before his most recent capture in 2016, faces a possible life prison sentence at a hearing scheduled for June 25 in New York.

US authorities have been tightlipped about where Guzman will be imprisoned. But it has been widely anticipated that, if convicted, he would be sent to ADX Florence, ever since his extradition to the US in January 2017.

“For someone like Guzman, the chances of escape from a facility like that are nil,” said L Thomas Kucharski, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

Officials from the US Bureau of Prisons could not be reached for comment.

ADX Florence, located in a complex of prisons in a remote area about 185km south of Denver, is nicknamed “Alcatraz of the Rockies” after the prison in San Francisco Bay that held gangster Al Capone in the ’30s and other notorious criminals.

ADX Florence inmates are held in specially designed “control units” that function as prisons within prisons. “It’s like a self-contained area within a selfcontained area within a self-contained area,” Levine said.

The prisoners are confined for 22 or more hours a day.

ADX Florence’s most infamous inmates include Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centre.