What is Florence Colorado Super Admax Penitentiary?

What is Florence Colorado Super Admax Penitentiary?

It is an American federal supermax prison for male inmates located in Fremont County, Colorado.

It is known as ADX Florence, Florence ADMAX. To many it is the Alcatraz of the Rockies. It Opened November of 1994. Population is unofficially 927 (408 supermax, 519 camp). Part of the Florence Federal Correctional Complex is operated by the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), a division of the United States Department of Justice and houses male inmates in the federal prison system who are deemed the most dangerous and in need of the tightest control. ADX also includes an adjacent minimum-security camp that, as of March 2014, houses more prisoners than the supermax unit.

The BOP does not have a designated "supermax" facility for women. It is reported that women in the BOP system who are classified as "special management concerns" due to violence or escape attempts are confined in the administrative unit of Federal Medical Center, Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas.

Why was Super Admax penitentiary in Florence Colorado built?

In October of 1983, within a high security penitentiary facility in Marion, Illinois, two correction officers were stabbed to death in two separate incidents. As a response, USP Marion went into "permanent lockdown", with the facility transforming into a "control unit" prison for the next 23 years which required inmates to be in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day. This meant no communal dining, no exercise, and no religious services. Marion became model for the construction of ADX, a facility designed from the ground up as a control unit prison. It was reported that building such a prison was the only way to handle inmates who "show absolutely no concern for human life."

DLR Group and LKA Partners, were the two leading architecture firms to build the penitentiary in Florence Colorado from ground up.