Tag: Supermax

It’s distressing enough that a 29-year-old prisoner at the federal supermax in Florence has been spending his days face against a wall, making sculptures of his feces and smearing it on his body and his hair.

By law, you get 15 minutes to argue in the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. The rules are the rules but this one comes across as painfully ironic in this case.

As weeks go, the first one of September was especially tough for Fremont County Coroner Carlette Brocious.

About two weeks before his death, Evan Ebel -- suspect in last month’s murders of pizza delivery man Nate Leon and Colorado corrections chief Tom Clements -- wrote a suicide note to a longtime friend who says Ebel was unhinged by his abrupt release from solitary confinement and seeking revenge for years of humiliation and torture behind bars.

Dirk Horne refused to participate in a race riot at the high-security U.S. Penitentiary in Florence in April 2008. As a result, he was...

Erin Rosa at her fab new immigration blog, Gabacha.com, makes a very prescient point riding under the radar in the political pundit gabbing about transferring Guantanámo detainees to federal Supermax prisons.

While the guards are up to the task and are confident in their abilities to get the job done, there also needs to be additional funding to the facility in order the guarantee the safety of not only the workers, but also the inmates that would be transferred there.

ColoradoSenateNews.com is at it again. The partisan communications operation of the Republican Colorado Senate Minority office issued a gleeful press release Monday applauding "Ritter's change of tune on Gitmo detainees." The release includes an audio clip that appears to represent Gov. Bill Ritter suggesting Guantanamo Bay prisoners should be sent to Pakistan rather than housed at the Supermax federal detention facility in Florence. Except that's not what Ritter said on a radio broadcast Monday morning, and the audio clip included on the ColoradoSenateNews site -- while presenting itself as a seamless statement from Ritter -- edits out a lengthy discussion that narrows the topic considerably while also criticizing the Bush administration for bungling the cases against many of the Gitmo detainees.

Politicians in Colorado are split over the chance detainees from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, could be imprisoned at the Supermax federal detention facility in Florence -- some say Supermax can handle Gitmo suspects just fine, others warn it's too dangerous. But the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado said in a statement to the Colorado Independent Friday afternoon that moving Gitmo detainees -- including many only suspected of crimes -- to the country's most secure prison "is simply another form of torture, one which makes a mockery of 'innocent until proven guilty.' "

While civil libertarians and former CIA agents cheered news President Barack Obama plans to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, some Colorado politicians are crying foul at the prospect detainees could be shipped to the federal Supermax prison in Florence.

Colorado Confidential's own Erin Rosa was tapped with a rare honorable mention award by the Newspaper Guild-CWA's David S. Barr Award -- only the...