page_title: Supermax prison
section_title: United States
hierarchical_section_title: Supermax prison / History / United States
caption_attribution_description: Alcatraz Island and lighthouse in San Francisco Bay, California, at sunset. Digitally enhanced illustration created by the uploader (Centpacrr) on January 26, 2004 from an original digital photograph taken by the uploader on December 31, 2003. The uploader is the creator and copyright holder of all elements of this digital illustration and has released and licensed it under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 as a 707 × 452 pixel, 314 KB size jpeg format file. Digital Document ID xmp.did:0180117407206811B1A4C72DECC8C330
context_page_description: A super-maximum security or administrative maximum prison is a "control-unit" prison, or a unit within prisons, which represents the most secure levels of custody in the prison systems of certain countries. The objective is to provide long-term, segregated housing for inmates classified as the highest security risks in the prison system and those who pose an extremely serious threat to both national and global security.
context_section_description: The United States Penitentiary Alcatraz Island, opened in 1934, has been considered a prototype and early standard for a supermax prison. A push for supermax prisons began in 1983, after two correctional officers, Merle Clutts and Robert Hoffman, were stabbed to death by inmates at Federal Penitentiary in Marion, Illinois. Norman Carlson, the director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, argued for a new type of prison to isolate uncontrollable inmates who "show absolutely no concern for human life". USP Marion became the first "supermax" prison where inmates were isolated for 23 hours in their cells. By 1999, the United States contained at least 57 supermax facilities, spread across 30–34 states.
  In recent years a number of U.S. states have downgraded their supermax prisons, as has been done with Wallens Ridge State Prison, a former supermax prison in Big Stone Gap, Virginia. Other supermax prisons that have gained notoriety for their harsh conditions and attendant litigation by inmates and advocates are the former Boscobel (in Wisconsin), now named the Wisconsin Secure Program Facility, Red Onion State Prison (in western Virginia, the twin to Wallens Ridge State Prison), Tamms (in Illinois), and the Ohio State Penitentiary. Placement policies at the Ohio facility were the subject of a U.S. Supreme Court case (Wilkinson v. Austin) in 2005 where the Court decided that there had to be some, but only very limited, due process involved in supermax placement.
  There is only one supermax prison remaining in the United States federal system, ADX Florence in Florence, Colorado.  It houses numerous inmates who have a history of violent behavior in other prisons, with the goal of moving them from solitary confinement for up to 23 hours a day to a less restrictive prison within three years.  However, it is best known for housing several inmates who have been deemed either too dangerous, too high-profile or too great a national security risk for even a maximum-security prison.  Residents have included Timothy McVeigh, perpetrator of the Oklahoma City Bombing who was executed by lethal injection at the Federal Correctional Complex, Terre Haute on 11 June 2001; Terry Nichols, McVeigh's accomplice; Theodore Kaczynski, a domestic terrorist otherwise known as the Unabomber, who once attacked via mail bombs; Robert Hanssen, an American FBI agent turned Soviet spy; Richard Reid, known as the "Shoe Bomber", who was jailed for life for attempting to detonate explosive materials in his shoes while on board an aircraft; Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the "Underwear Bomber"; Richard Lee McNair, a persistent prison escapee; Charles Harrelson, a hitman who was convicted in 1979 of killing Federal Judge John H. Wood Jr.; and Vito Rizzuto, boss of the "Sixth Mafia Family", released on 5 October 2012. The Boston Marathon Bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is housed there. Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán was also sent here. Deprivation of social contact and the isolation of inmates have some unintended positive and negative effects.
  However, many states now have created supermax prisons, either as stand-alone facilities or as secure units within lower-security prisons. State supermax prisons include Pelican Bay in California and Tamms in Illinois. The USP in Marion, Illinois was recently downgraded to a medium-security facility.  Some facilities such as California State Prison, Corcoran (COR) are hybrids incorporating a supermax partition, housing or having housed high-security prisoners such as Charles Manson.
caption: Alcatraz Island is a historical prototype of the supermax prison standard.
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