Black Holes
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The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing was a 2010 bestseller by Marie Kondo. She also went on to do a hit Netflix series on the same premise, Tidying Up with Marie Kondo. I’m being reductive, but the underlying premise was to only keep those belongings in your life which “spark joy” and getting rid of the rest.
Another self-help book released in the early 2010’s was 168 Hours by Laura Vanderkam. Its premise was that by prioritizing and allocating time well, it is possible to achieve a lot every single day.
What’s common among these books?
They were both part of an Amazon order for Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. But the order was never delivered to him. The fault wasn’t Jeff’s, but SAM’s. Umar, 37, is currently a native of ADX Florence.
The son of a Nigerian banker, Umar was radicalized by Anwar al-Awlaki, aka, “the Bin-Laden of the internet”. On 25th December 2009, Umar attempted to detonate a bomb concealed in his underwear, while on board Northwest Airline Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit, USA. He was overpowered by other passengers, and his attempt failed. Post sentencing and a brief stay in two other prisons, he arrived in Florence in early 2012.
ADX Florence was opened in 1994 and has been featured in The Guinness Book of World Records as one of the most secure prisons in the world. It was designed and built from the ground up to incarcerate and isolate criminals who were just too dangerous for your average prison.
“Isolate” is a key word here. In prison movies, isolation is portrayed as the worst punishment – usually an outcome of violence by the inmate (or vendetta by the jailer, in a certain kind of film). At Florence, isolation is where you start. New inmates spend 23 hours a day in their cells for the first year. The hour outside is usually spent alone, in shackles, handcuffs, or both.
Exercise consists of walking in what is described as an empty swimming pool – ten paces end to end, thirty if you walk in a circle. Cells have windows, but they are high up to prevent inmates from orienting themselves within the complex. The cells themselves are 7 ft by 12 ft and consist of a desk, stool and bed made of poured concrete. If the inmate has displayed good behaviour, a black and white TV with restricted programming may be placed in the cell.
Each cell has a toilet, some have a shower. This is not a luxury, but a way of preventing unnecessary movement of the really dangerous inmates – the ones under heightened security restrictions, innocuously called Special Administrative Measures, or SAM.
Newspapers have a 30-day cooling off period before inmates have access to them. The reasoning? To prevent incitement of emotions pertaining to current events, especially for some notable inmates. The whole idea of the prison is not rehabilitation- the US government has deemed them incapable of that. Florence serves only to clinically remove them from society and, if possible, to extinguish their life force while keeping them alive. This is the black hole the US government throws its worst eggs into.
Notable current and former inmates include Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, Abu Hamza al-Masri, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Ramzi Yousef and Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán. Charles Harrelson, father of past Internet Stuff guest Woody Harrelson, was also housed here until his death in 2007. Apart from the terrorists and mafia lords, most other inmates are there for assaults and violent crimes committed in other prisons, while being held for other crimes.
There has been a class -action lawsuit alleging abuse and mistreatment of undiagnosed mentally ill inmates. There have been at least eight documented suicides at the facility. It is a matter of record that hunger strikes in protest are forcibly ended, by forcing food down inmates’ throats. In one instance, the pipe delivering a semi-liquid diet was shoved down Umar’s trachea, causing him to be virtually waterboarded.
The isolation and sensory deprivation get to almost everyone. So horrific are the conditions, that ADX Florence and the threat of SAM’s was explicitly one of the reasons a UK judge refused the extradition request of Julian Assange (of Wikileaks). An appeal was allowed to be filed on the understanding that Assange will not end up in Florence or be placed under SAM’s.
I’m supposed to share something from the internet, so here’s the entire Wikipedia entry. Go from intrigued to fascinated to horrified, as the US takes another idea and supersizes it beyond redemption.
A closing thought, and a variant on the classic “marooned on an island” question: What book or genre would you read, if you were an inmate at ADX Florence?
Devastating writing.