Some famous inmates at these places are Richard Reid (the shoe bomber), Ted Kaczynski (Unabomber), and Robert Hanssen (Soviet spy).
Are these guys so dangerous that a normal prison cannot house them safely (as in, they cannot escape)?
I am not at all saying these guys don’t deserve to be in prison (they certainly do). I question that they are so dangerous that we need super-expensive Supermax prisons to hold them.
Some of this is surely for show, to say “your crime has been deemed so awful we will do the equivalent of putting your head on a pike at the city gate.” For “deemed so awful” we might read “garnered a lot of publicity.” And I expect you’re right: they are not escape risks that require such terrible conditions to ensure they stay put. Nor have they exhibited behaviours in prison that would make such imprisonment necessary.
One wonders if it is also about silencing them. Not to say they were justified, but to say without much chance of being heard, they can be vilified far beyond their actual crimes.
Little Nemo has actual experience with the system and so must be given credence in this discussion. Yet the descriptions of Supermax prisons are pretty frightful (see the cite above in the OP, e.g.) and I can’t help but wonder if the safety of prisoners can’t be guaranteed in other ways.
The consequences of a murderer or terrorist or a spy escaping are much higher than those for an escape by the types of prisoners at a lower security level prison.
Some prisoners like el Chapo, will escape in a prison break-out or other means, could be very bad. The Unibomber was very smart and could have gathered chemicals or who knows what if he were in a normal prison population.
There are reasons why they don’t let the high security prisoners even see the sky. 23 hours in your mostly concrete room and 1 hour in an enclosed exersize yard.
If the goal was to keep them isolated from the prison populace and treat them otherwise decently, good bet the result would look nothing like Supermax. OTH, it might be cheaper to do what they do than to create a decent but still separated environment for them.
Plus of course the general cruelty that runs though US prison design & provisioning.
Their mass shooters live in better conditions than most of our middle class workers, lol.
He killed tons more people than the Unabomber and now lives rent-free in luxury house arrest.
There’s nothing inherent to a penal system that says the prisoners must be treated cruelly. That’s just an American thing (relative to some other countries). There are worse too, of course. I’d hate to be in an even minimum security prison in, say, Russia, the Middle East, Thailand, North Korea, China…
Isn’t that reason “cruelty”? Some people might like to think that we have a correctional system but a penal system seems more accurate. (In some cases at least.)
America has the fifth highest incarceration rate in the world and regularly uses tactics that the UN has deemed to be torture. We need Superman prisons because America is an oppressive state and oppressive states need lots of prisons.
Not that I know anything about it, but my guess is that of all the bad guys in prison right now, he’s probably the one most likely to engineer an escape… should he want to. My guess is that he might not. He’s probably got it much better now than when he lived in that plywood shack - minus the freedom, of course.
Speaking of, I watch true crime shows and the thing that gets me about these prison escape types, is they spend years, sometimes, planning the actual escape, but not any plans on what to do after they get out and so get apprehended pretty quickly. Mind boggling.
My state (WI) got a supermax prison because the Republican state politicians (who were in complete control at that time) wanted one. The state Dept. of Corrections didn’t want it, but had to deal with it. It’s been a headache for the DOC ever since; tough to staff since it’s in a super rural area, unused cells because even with relaxed criteria for being sent there, few inmates are that bad, lots of expensive lawsuits and remodeling costs to improve the facilities when the state loses the lawsuits, and on and on.
I never worked there, but the physicians and nurses and psychologists I know who did pronounced the place horridly dysfunctional and more likely than max security prisons to make both inmates and staff psychologically damaged and morally compromised. All because of the damn politicians catering to the voters eager to punish “those bad people”.
I doubt it; the people most likely to be able to escape are organized crime figures since they can reasonably hope for outside assistance. And who are also the people who can be best be justified as belonging in a “supermax” as far as the security aspects go.
Possibly, like I said not my area of expertise but my anecdotal notion is, from watching a lot of true crime TV, is that it is always engineered by low level cons who are just very clever - that and they’ve got shit-tons of time on their hands.
Mafia types usually rely of their lawyers to get them out.
It’s Norway. They probably consider it a human rights abuse if the government doesn’t provide him with 3 other willing players when he wants to play the Xbox.
Or who knows, maybe it’s reverse psychology just to remind him how empty his life in solitary is. You see these nice sofas? You know who will be in them with you? NOBODY! Ever again! Now sit down and think about what you did.