The 10 Worst Prisons in America: ADX
"If you can't do the time, don't do the crime." So goes the old saying. Yet conditions in some American facilities are so obscene that they amount to a form of extrajudicial punishment.
Doing time is not supposed to include being raped by fellow prisoners or staff, beaten by guards for the slightest provocation, driven mad by long-term solitary confinement, or killed off by medical neglect. These, however, are the fates of thousands of prisoners every yearmen, women, and children housed in lockups that give Gitmo and Abu Ghraib a run for their money.
The United States boasts the world's highest incarceration rate, with close to 2.3 million people locked away in some 1,800 prisons and 3,000 jails. Most are nasty places by design, aimed at punishment and exclusion rather than rehabilitation; while reliable numbers are hard to come by, at last count 81,622 prisoners were being held in some form of isolation in state and federal prisons.
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While there's plenty of blame to go around, and while not all of the facilities described in this series have all of these problems, some stand out as particularly bad actors. We've compiled this subjective list of America's 10 worst lockups (plus a handful of dishonorable mentions) based on three years of research, correspondence with prisoners, and interviews with reform advocates concerning the penal facilities with the grimmest claims to infamy. We will be rolling out profiles of the contenders over the next 10 days, complete with photos and video. To start off, let's travel to Florence, Colorado, to visit the "Alcatraz of the Rockies."
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http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/05/10-worst-prisons-america-part-1-adx
Outdoor recreation cages at ADX. From Bacote et al. v. BOP