Inside Bomber Row

By MARYANNE VOLLERS

Highway 50 runs straight as a pool cue from Pueblo, Colo., through 23 miles of rangeland and pinon flats before offering an exit to the scruffy little city of Florence (pop. 3,795). Like Flint, Mich., or Orlando, Fla., Florence is a company town. The industry here is prisoners, and the company is the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Twenty years ago, the people of surrounding Fremont County ponied up $160,000 to buy some open land outside Florence, hoping to entice the bureau to build a prison complex as a way to boost the town's economy. Corrections had long been a mainstay in Fremont County; the high desert valley was already home to more than half a dozen prisons. But in the end, Florence got a little more than it bargained for.

The 600-acre Federal Correctional Complex, which was completed in 1994 on the outskirts of town, is a virtual theme park of penal experiences, ranging from a minimum-security camp for inside-traders and small-time pot dealers to the concrete fortress that was built to be the most secure prison in the country: the Administrative Maximum U.S. Penitentiary, or ADX for short. The inmates in ADX Florence include drug kingpins, gang leaders, hit men, snipers and, lately, more and more, international terrorists, including al-Qaeda shoe bomber Richard Reid; mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing Ramzi Yousef and at least seven of his accomplices; and four men convicted of involvement in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa. There are American terrorists too. Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, spent time there before being transferred to Indiana, where he was executed in 2001. His accomplice, Terry Nichols, is still at ADX, as is Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber. The common thread running through the crimes committed by these men accounts for the nickname given to the highest-security section of the prison: Bombers Row.

Until now, almost nothing has been written about the inner workings of the ADX. Since 9/11, journalists have been routinely denied access to the facility, its staff and inmates. But Eric Robert Rudolph, who is serving life without parole at the prison for the fatal bombings at the Atlanta Olympics and an abortion clinic in Alabama, has written letters to me, the author of a book about his case, and to his mother Patricia Rudolph, who has shared them with me. These missives offer a unique first-hand account of life on Bombers Row.

"It is Ramadan now and the Muslims are fasting," Rudolph wrote in the fall of 2005, three months after he arrived at ADX. "The call to prayer echoes through the halls five times a day giving this place a decidedly otherworldly feel." Although the inmates are isolated in gloomy one-man cells the size of a small bathroom at least 23 hours a day, their chambers aren't soundproof. In fact, the prison is noisy. Rudolph's housing unit resonates with the constant mechanical whir and clank of electronic gates, punctuated by the sound of inmates praying, wailing and shouting conversations in English and Arabic through the walls and vents between their cells.

There are eight cells in Rudolph's "range," and another eight on the level above him. For security reasons, he is not allowed to name his fellow prisoners, but he says there is one American who never comes out of his cell; according to sources outside the ADX, the silent American is Kaczynski. Rudolph says the rest of his neighbors are such nationalities as Egyptian, Sudanese and Palestinian. He writes that his area of the prison is "where they house the political offenders, what they call 'terrorists.'" There are many such men at ADX. The list of Arab inmates reads like a Who's Who of the international jihad. Apart from the bombers already mentioned, there are, among others, Zacarias Moussaoui, the sole individual convicted of involvement in the 9/11 attacks; Ahmed Ressam, arrested at the Canadian border with explosives he had planned to use to bomb the Los Angeles International Airport; and Abdul Hakim Murad, convicted in Operation Bojinka, a 1995 al-Qaeda scheme to blow 12 planes, 11 of them U.S.-bound, out of the sky during a 48-hour period.

A correctional officer at ADX told me that inmates are placed on the same range based on their compatibility. Another clue as to why jihadists are housed together comes from Bureau of Prisons director Harley Lappin's 2003 testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee. He said that his department's strategy was to ensure that "inmates with terrorist ties do not have the opportunity to radicalize or recruit other inmates." They are kept at ADX because, he noted, it's "our most secure facility."

But is it secure enough? For the first decade after the ADX was built, the citizens of Florence weren't worried much about the secretive compound, which is only conspicuous when the sun goes down and its banks of light towers glow against the dark horizon. But when Moussaoui, the crazed 9/11 wannabe hijacker, arrived to considerable media fanfare in May 2006, some locals started to feel as if they were living beside a tempting terrorist target. People weren't so much concerned that someone would break out of the fortified ADX, but rather they wondered what would prevent an al-Qaeda squad, perhaps a suicide attacker, from breaking in. At the same time, they were hearing rumors about internal security problems at the Supermax, as the prison is sometimes called. "There's a lot we should be scared about in this little town, with those individuals up there," said Cindy Cox, the mayor of Florence. "Some think that since they're in prison, they're not terrorizing anyone anymore. But what about their friends?"

The federal complex is located only a couple of chip shots away from a combined golf course and housing development. While the two higher-security prisons there have walled yards, the entire campus is separated from the community by only a single barbed-wire cow fence. State representative Buffie McFadyen, a two-term Democrat whose district includes the prisons in Fremont County, has pressed members of Congress, to no avail, to appropriate funds to build a solid wall around the complex, along with a central guard tower to better protect the center from outside attack. The Bureau of Prisons has already failed four times to squeeze money into its budget to upgrade security. McFadyen has also campaigned to remedy what a federal arbitrator has called dangerous understaffing at the ADX. "The threat comes from both inside and outside the prison," McFadyen says.

Like an anthropologist dropped into an exotic village, Rudolph seems fascinated by the Arab inmates. "They're an extremely fatalistic people," he wrote. "This time must be very rough on them for they have little interest in anything other than the Middle East, President Bush and Islam. But at least they have each other and rattle on endlessly in Arabic."

Rudolph is getting his neighbors to teach him their language. He picks it up one phrase at a time. He wrote his mother, who lives in Sarasota, Fla., that "Kyfa ta Kool," which he spelled out phonetically, means "How do you say ...?" Sometimes the other inmates are eager to communicate with Rudolph, other times they are "sulking or buried in some Arabic hell of depression."

In ADX, the spartan cells are designed to keep inmates from hurting themselves--and their guards. Each 7- or 8-ft. by 12-ft. space contains a molded concrete bunk, stool and desk; a steel shower, sink and toilet, and a small black-and-white TV encased in Plexiglas to prevent tampering. At one end of the cell is a solid steel door, and a small vestibule--for the use of guards when they enter--separated from the living quarters by steel bars. There is one 4-in. by 4-ft. window. Rudolph's is over his bed, looking out on the prison yard. "Through the slit window one can see the sky, but other than this and the few small birds that roost on the prison roof, there are no signs of the natural world."

The inmates have almost no physical contact with other people. Food, mail and laundry are delivered through a slot in the steel bars. Prisoners have a choice of two kinds of meals: the regular plan consists of typical American food: casseroles, hamburgers, blue-plate specials. The alternative is a diet conforming to almost all religious restrictions. It contains no pork and incorporates lots of beans and vegetables. Muslims get special mealtimes during the month of Ramadan, when the observant do not eat during daylight hours.

Prison staff sit in control booths from which they operate the doors and surveil the corridors using sound monitors and cameras. To keep the inmates occupied, they offer crossword puzzles, bingo and Jeopardy competitions through flyers or through a closed-circuit TV channel. "The Muslims are obsessed with the games, they chatter endlessly about the possible answers," Rudolph wrote. The winners are rewarded with a candy bar or a picture of themselves. Being a Westerner puts Rudolph at an advantage in the trivia games, and his foreign neighbors depend on his help. "Moments after they post the questions on Monday morning, the yelling begins. 'Areek, what the answers? Who is President in the War of 1812?'"

Television is another distraction. ADX sources say inmates get basic cable service, although nothing as fancy as HBO, and can choose what to watch, though these privileges can be taken away as punishment for rules violations. Rudolph says he gets 60 channels, including music-radio stations and local news. A special prison channel offers educational shows, courses in anger management and a smorgasbord of religious programs dealing with faiths ranging from Catholicism to the Nation of Islam and even Asatru, the ancient Norse religion favored by Aryan supremacists.

According to Bureau of Prisons policy, the high-risk inmates in Rudolph's unit are allowed visits and phone calls only from their lawyers and from a list of approved contacts often restricted to immediate family members. All communications by such prisoners are supposed to be monitored by correctional staff. But a report by the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General released last month faulted the bureau for not properly screening inmate mail and phone conversations at ADX Florence and other facilities. It confirmed reports that after 9/11, Mohammed Salameh, one of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers, wrote a letter praising Osama bin Laden that was published in Arabic newspapers. Salameh and two of his accomplices, also at ADX, mailed out at least 90 unmonitored letters between 2002 and 2004. The recipients included Islamic extremists with links to suspects in the Madrid train bombings; one letter was sent to Mohamed Achraf, alleged leader of a plot to blow up the National Justice Building in Madrid.

Investigators discovered that at the time the letters went out, there was only one part-time Arabic translator on staff at ADX to handle mail checks, which were done at random. The bureau has since hired three full-time Arabic translators for ADX but claims that more funds are needed to fully monitor the communications of all high-risk inmates, particularly non-English speakers.

To cut costs, the Bureau of Prisons in 2005 instituted a policy of shifting staff around within prisons and filling only the most critical positions. The union that represents correctional workers at the ADX charged that this resulted in the facility's being staffed far below the bureau's minimum safety standards. In spring a federal arbitrator heard testimony from ADX staff that some housing units had been left unattended for entire eight-hour shifts. Union officials also charged that posts in what they call the "terrorist unit" were routinely left vacant. According to the union, staff shortages meant that inmates weren't getting meals on time, scheduled phone calls were delayed or canceled, and exercise hours were cut because there was nobody to supervise them.

The inmates, correctional officers say, often turn hostile and dangerous when their basic needs are unmet or their routines are disrupted. "When you start tinkering with staffing levels, you start setting that system off balance, so you start seeing a lot of things popping up in terms of increased inmate assaults and increased threats," says Mike Schnobrich, a union representative who works at ADX. The union documented that since the new staffing policy began in 2005, two ADX inmates have been murdered by fellow prisoners, after 10 years without a killing at the facility; threats to staff increased, from 55 in 2005 to 110 in 2006; and assaults on correctional officers increased nearly a third over the same period, from 30 to 38 incidents.

The federal arbitrator sided with the union and in October ordered the Bureau of Prisons to reduce the hazards to correctional officers. Traci Billingsley, a spokeswoman for the bureau, disputes the arbitrator's findings and denies there has been any problem with staffing at the ADX, saying in a written response to questions from TIME that the facility "continues to operate safely and efficiently." She said that 60 new correctional workers have recently been added to the staff of the Federal Correctional Complex. Union representative Schnobrich maintains that despite those hires, staffing at ADX is still dangerously low.

Rudolph's letters over the past year have reflected increasing frustration with prison conditions caused by staff shortages. He has complained about cold food, delayed mail and calls missed because there was no one available to bring a phone to his cell. When he first arrived at ADX in 2005, the inmates in his range were let out of their cells four or five times a week for indoor exercise and once a week for a break in the yard. More recently they have been lucky to get outside once a month. Rudolph has joined other inmates in filing a complaint with the Bureau of Prisons over deteriorating conditions, but he doesn't hold out much hope that they will be corrected.

It's not easy to unnerve the citizens of Fremont County. Prisons have been part of the landscape since before Colorado was a state--the Colorado Territorial prison dates back to the 19th century, and people are accustomed to the occasional disturbance or inmate escape. In Florence, most folks still don't lock their doors at night. Many have grown up listening for three short blasts from the fire whistle--a signal that a prisoner is loose in the valley. When that happens, some residents simply fill up their car with gas and leave the keys in the vehicle. "It's better than having a fugitive break into your house and take you hostage," says Bob Wood, publisher of the Florence Citizen, with a shrug. "All they want to do is get out of town." Even though he doesn't live in fear, Wood says he's increasingly concerned about problems at the federal prison complex. And he's not alone.

On the weekend before Halloween, 50 people crowded into a community forum in Florence with Colorado's Democratic Senator Ken Salazar, who had just toured ADX to investigate the security situation. A few days later, Republican Senator Wayne Allard made the same trip. Fremont County sheriff Jim Beicker, who is still waiting for a Homeland Security grant to upgrade his department's radio system, expressed his concerns about the flimsy fence surrounding the prison complex and staffing shortages at ADX. "I want to see these issues fixed," he said. "I don't want to have to lay awake at night and worry about problems at the prison spilling over into my jurisdiction."

State representative McFadyen was encouraged that both Allard and Salazar promised to bring up the issue of security in the area in the next Congress. "The correctional officers at ADX work on the front line in the nation's war on terror, and they deserve our support, just like the troops overseas," she said. "Fremont County helps keep the country safe. Now the country should keep Fremont County safe."

From Eric Rudolph's point of view, the ADX is locked down very tight. The procedure to leave one's cell for a rare opportunity to exercise outside, for instance, is an ordeal. Two guards enter the vestibule and order the inmate to strip. After a cavity search, he dresses again and his hands are cuffed through an opening in the bars that separate the vestibule from the rest of the cell. The guards then march him down the corridor, a steel-tipped baton at the ready. When all the prisoners are lined up, they are led to an outdoor recreation area enclosed by 25-ft. walls. If they look straight up through the chain mesh that encloses the top of the yard, they can see a patch of the blue Colorado sky.

The prisoners are placed in chain-link enclosures called "dog runs," one per cage. Their cuffs are removed through a door slot. This is the only time the inmates actually see and interact with one another. "It is awkward adjusting my voice from the necessary yell of the cell block to the face-to-face conversation in the yard," Rudolph writes. "Unlike me the Arabs don't adjust the volume." Rudolph describes how his neighbors pair up in their separate runs and then "walk the length of the cage in unison, back and forth, yelling as they go. If you've ever seen big cats at a zoo, this is what they do as well. They pace back and forth, rhythmically, like a pendulum. Across the yard, this is what one sees: seven pairs of inmates pacing together, all the while yelling in loud Arabic." The words Aiwa, aiwa echo across the yard. Yes, yes.

"When the hour is up, the slow process of moving us back to the cells begins in reverse," Rudolph writes. "And then we sit in our darkened cells for the rest of the week, staring out at the empty sun-drenched yard."