El Chapo's life sentence is likely going to be served at one of the world's most locked-down "Supermax" facilities – both for punishment and protecting against his escape – The New York Times reported.
Experts expected Joaquín Guzmán Loera to be assigned to the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility, ADX, in Florence, Colorado, which is known as "Alcatraz of the Rockies" and currently detains Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols, and Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
"This place is not designed for humanity," former warden Robert Hood once told The New York Times. "It's not designed for rehabilitation. Period. End of story."
Inmates are restricted to their cells 23 hours of the day, eating their meals there, although most get a TV and a 4-inch window, according to the report. Once outside, there is not much in the Colorado desert, 40 miles south of Colorado Springs.
"No mountain, bush, tree, or blade of grass is visible from the yard, just the sky," Atlanta's Centennial Olympic Park bomber Eric Rudolph wrote in a 2008 essay, per the Times. "The cages have just enough room to do aerobic exercises. Other than the opportunity to breathe fresh air and feel the sunshine on your skin, the outside cages are just cells that are open to the sky."
El Chapo has twice escaped prison, so he will require the maximum security environment, which he was also given in lower Manhattan awaiting and during his trial.
"It's very antiseptic and silent compared to what you expect in a prison," Tsarnaev public defender David I. Bruck told the Times. "People are just locked away behind these solid steel doors, and there's very little going on, very little movement, very little activity. It's a lot of nothing."
Rudolph called it "long-term solitary confinement" in his essay, per the Times.
"The purpose is to gradually tear a person down mentally and physically, through environmental and physical deprivation," he concluded, the Times reported.
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