Inmate Population
ADX Florence houses about 490 male inmates, each assigned to one of six security levels.
The facility is best known for housing inmates who have been deemed too dangerous, too high-profile or too great a national security risk for even a maximum-security prison. These include the leaders of violent gangs who continued to issue orders to their members from lower security facilities, including Larry Hoover of the Gangster Disciples, and Barry Mills and Tyler Bingham of the Aryan Brotherhood. ADX also houses foreign terrorists, including the only person convicted in civilian court of the September 11 attacks, Zacarias Moussaoui, and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing mastermind Ramzi Yousef; as well as domestic terrorists, including serial bombers Ted Kaczynski and Eric Rudolph. Timothy McVeigh, who carried out the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, was housed at ADX before he was sentenced to death in 1997 and transferred to the United States Penitentiary, Terre Haute, which houses federal death row inmates. McVeigh's co-conspirator, Terry Nichols, is currently serving a life sentence at ADX. Robert Hanssen, the former FBI agent who betrayed several spies to the Soviet Union and Russia, is serving a life sentence at ADX for his crimes. The prison also houses inmates who are a high escape risk, including Richard McNair, who escaped from a county jail and two other prisons before being sent to ADX.
However, the majority of inmates have been sent there because they have an extensive history of committing violent crimes against corrections officers and fellow inmates in other prisons, up to and including murder. Inmates are kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day for at least the first year. They then can be let out for longer periods depending on their conduct. The long-term goal is to transfer them to a less restrictive prison to serve out the remainder of their sentences.
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Famous quotes containing the words inmate and/or population:
“The homely Nurse doth all she can
To make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man,
Forget the glories he hath known,
And that imperial palace whence he came.”
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850)
“The paid wealth which hundreds in the community acquire in trade, or by the incessant expansions of our population and arts, enchants the eyes of all the rest; the luck of one is the hope of thousands, and the bribe acts like the neighborhood of a gold mine to impoverish the farm, the school, the church, the house, and the very body and feature of man.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)