"El Chapo" Guzmán will go to ADX Supermax Colorado, "Prison Prison"

In the prison world, some prisoners present particular risks. And then there is the "Chapo", which is a separate case.

Joaquín Guzmán has an unprecedented history of escape, including two maximum-security Mexican prison escapes before a new capture and extradition to the United States.

Therefore, after his sentence Tuesday and his almost certain life sentence, many wonder where this all-powerful trafficker, accustomed to making leaks worthy of a Houdini, will be housed.

Experts have little doubt about where "El Chapo" will serve his sentence: the "ADX" Supermax "in Florence, Colorado, home to some of the country's best-known criminals. It is such a safe and secluded facility that it is called "the Alcatraz of the Rocky Mountains".

The "Chapo", convicted Tuesday for leading one of the world's largest drug trafficking networks, "fits perfectly into this prison," said Cameron Lindsay, director of three prisons today. retired. "I would be very surprised if it was not sent to the ADX."

It is located in an old mining town about two hours south of Denver and home to the country's most violent criminals. Some 400 inmates spend 23 hours a day alone in 2.1 x 3.7 meters (7 x 12 feet) cells with non-removable cement furniture.

Ted Kaczynski, known as Unabomber, and the 9/9 conspirator, Zacarias Moussaoui, are among his detainees. Guzman, whose sentence will be known in June, would stand out from everyone by the magnitude of their crimes and their escape from the past, who have acquired almost mythical contours.

In 2015, he escaped from the maximum security prison of Altiplano, in central Mexico. He communicated with his accomplices for weeks via a mobile phone and went through a breach under the bathtub. He arrived on a motorcycle that was waiting for him and went through a tunnel of a mile and a half, for freedom.

It is badumed that he paid many guards to close his eyes, as he would have done during a 2001 escape in which he had been taken from prison, hidden among dirty clothes.

"There is surely a collaboration from within," said Mike Vigil, a former Drug Enforcement Administration (aka DEA) officer who worked secretly in Mexico. "There is no doubt that corruption has facilitated these two spectacular leaks."

Can he escape Supermax?

Scarcely Supermax detainees spend years alone and are often whole days "almost without speaking to anyone," an Amnesty International report said.

A former prisoner, questioned by the Boston Globe, called the site a "high-tech hell version, designed to neutralize any sensory perception."

Most of the Supermax prisoners have a television. His only contact with the outside world is a small window of 10 centimeters (four inches). The design of the windows prevents you from getting an idea of ​​where they are in the penitentiary. Contact with others is minimal. They receive food in their cells, where they eat a short distance from the toilet.

The prison is protected by barbed wire with blades and watchtowers, armed patrols and dogs.

"There's a leaky prison, that's the one in Florence," said Burl Cain, longtime director of a maximum-security prison in Angola, Louisiana. "This is the prison of all prisons."

Guzmán's stay in New York pending his trial, which lasted three months, was surrounded by significant security measures reflecting the risk he represents. He was lonely in a high security lodge at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, home to terrorists and gangsters.

The authorities closed the way to the Brooklyn Bridge every time they transferred the "Chapo" to the Brooklyn court where he was tried. Special SWAT units, ambulances and helicopters participated in the operation. Armed agents and explosive detector dogs patrolled the field. It was even forbidden for Guzman to take his wife in his arms.

In the Supermax, this would be no problem, because all visits are made without physical contact and there is still a thick plexiglbad panel between the detainee and the visitor.

"With the exception of the guards, it can take years without the prisoners coming in contact with another human being," according to the Amnesty International report.