"El Chapo" will probably head to Colorado Prison, where no one has escaped

Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, the Mexican recognized in a US court Tuesday for leading a criminal drug smuggling operation in the United States, will probably head to a "supermax" prison where it would be almost impossible to repeat his past escapes .

Since it opened in 1994, no one has managed to get rid of ADX (Administrative Maximum Facility) in Florence, Colorado, to accommodate the most dangerous inmates in the US prison system.

"ADX is the kind of prison that was designed for a prominent inmate like El Chapo," said Larry Levine, a former federal inmate who is director and founder of Wall Street Prison Consultants, during a phone interview .

Guzman, 61, Sinaloa's cartel leader who twice escaped maximum-security Mexican prisons before his last capture in 2016, faces a life sentence at a hearing scheduled for the 25th. June in New York.

US authorities have been embarrbading as to where Guzman will be imprisoned. But it was widely expected that, if convicted, he would be sent to ADX Florence since his extradition to the United States in January 2017.

"For someone like Guzman, the chances of escaping from an institution of this type are nil," said L. Thomas Kucharski, a professor at the John Jay Criminal Justice College in New York.

Read | El Chapo was once the most sought after in Mexico. Now he is old news.

"ALCATRAZ OF ROCKIES"

Officials from the United States Prisons Bureau could not be contacted on Tuesday for comment. ADX Florence, located in a jail complex in an isolated area about 185 km south of Denver, is nicknamed "the Alcatraz of the Rockies" after the San Francisco Bay Jail that had housed the gangster Al Capone in the 1930s and other notorious places. the criminals.

Florence's ADX detainees are held in specially designed "control units" that function as jails in prisons. "It's like an autonomous zone in an autonomous zone in an autonomous zone," said Levine.

Prisoners are confined in single-person cells for 22 hours or more a day, which deprives them of contact with the outside world.

Among the most famous inmates of Florence ADX, we find Ramzi Yousef, the brain of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York; Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Ted Kaczynski, one of the bombers of the Boston Marathon, were found guilty, according to the BOP website.

Special restrictions aim to ensure that some detainees have no means of exerting influence or threats beyond the walls of the prison, allowing US authorities to control those who dominate militant groups or criminal enterprises.

All the prisoners in the establishment are not famous for their crimes. Some were transferred there because they attacked guards or detainees from other institutions, Levine said.

In fact, about 90% of the more than 400 inmates are on site because of discipline issues, according to a report released last October by the Columbia District Correctional Information Council.

In their cell, the most guarded inmates have a television with content designed to provide them with education, psychological help and religious services, according to the report.

Each cell has a narrow window, 107 cm (42 inches) high, facing the sky, and detainees can not see each other inside their units, he said.