Boston bomber’s super-max jail likened to ‘Hell on Earth’

Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is incarcerated at America’s harshest maximum security prison, likened to hell on Earth by former wardens and rights activists, until his transfer to death row. The former college student is locked up at least 22 hours a day alongside some of the world’s most dangerous criminals and convicted terrorists. They include 9/11 convict Zacarias Moussaoui, would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad, “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski, Egypt’s Ramzi Yousef, who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, and British shoe bomber Richard Reid.

Prisoners are deprived “meaningful social interaction” for years on end and the failure to provide “suitable, daily outdoor exercise” falls short of UN minimum rules for the treatment of prisoners.

A London-based rights organization criticized the conditions in a recent report.

Tsarnaev, register number 95079-038, was sentenced to death by a federal judge on June 24, and is on the list of prisoners at ADX Florence maintained by the Federal Bureau of Prisons. He joins 417 male inmates in the wilds of Colorado’s Rocky mountains, incarcerated in individual cells measuring seven by 7.7 square metres (12 feet) with a 121 centimetre by 10 centimetre (four foot by four inch) window. It is a punishing life of isolation in a facility dubbed the “Alcatraz of the Rockies.” A London-based rights organisation called the conditions at ADX “unacceptably harsh” and said they “breach international standards” for the humane treatment of prisoners.

It’s a a clean version of hell. It’s far worse than death.

Robert Hood, a warden at ADX Florence

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