No Houris for an Indeterminate Duration
If there’s one good thing about the Moussaoui verdict, it’s that he’s on his way to Florence, Colorado, a “supermax”, or “control unit” federal prison. Control unit prisons are all solitary confinement, with cells typically measuring six by eight feet, wherein the prisoner spends 22 to 23 hours of each day. There’s no congregating of any kind between prisoners, not for meals, not for work, not for religious services. USP Florence was “purpose built” as a control unit lockup to replace the one at Marion, Illinois, where the Bureau of Prisons had made it a practice to send its most difficult prisoners, those causing the most disruption to operations elsewhere in the system, and one fairly notorious for prisoner abuse. Florence is modelled on California’s Pelican Bay “Security Housing Unit,” and has as a primary feature a high level of automation to reduce direct prisoner-guard interactions. In other words, ol’ Zach’s going to spend the rest of his life in the most appropriate temporal conditions to his crimes, although with no further consideration of his evident insanity than that he won’t be executed.