Super Maximillian

Aren't prisons for those people who have actually committed crimes?

You can hit a golf ball from the Bear Paw Golf Course into the federal prison complex outside Florence, state Rep. Buffie McFadyen says.

It'd be a heckuva poke, maybe 400 yards. But McFadyen's point is made: the Florence Federal Correctional Complex, 40 miles down the road from Colorado Springs, is not in the middle of nowhere, as Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California said the other day during debate over what to do with war-on-terrorism detainees at the Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

To many in this country and abroad, the Gitmo operation is a symbol of how far former President George W. Bush bent America's legal and moral values after 9/11. In one of his first acts as president, Barack Obama gave the Pentagon 12 months to shut it down.
A debate has been simmering ever since, and it sharpened last Wednesday with a vote by the U.S. Senate to deny the administration the $80 million it sought to close Gitmo.

The debate offers ample proof that at least one American value is still intact - NIMBYism. Nobody wants the 240 detainees in Gitmo to wind up in their backyards.

A lot of Coloradans are getting their backs up when ADX Florence - aka Supermax - enters the conversation. Supermax, the toughest of the Florence prisons, is home to America's worst inmates. McFadyen called it "the most maximum-security federal penitentiary in the country, if not the world."

Other sites mentioned by military officials as possible locations for Guantanamo inmates include the Army prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., the Marines' Camp Pendleton, Calif., and the Navy's brig in Charleston, S.C. All are military operations, so the detainees would not have to be transferred from the military justice system to the civil system.

"Military detainees should not be transported to and held at Supermax because it is not a military facility," said Sen. Michael Bennet. Colorado's other U.S. senator, Mark Udall, also opposes such transfers. A spokeswoman said "his strong preference would be for detainees to stay within the military prison system."

But the military-civil technicality seems to have been eclipsed in the current debate, which is focusing on the supposed threat that the detainees would pose to guards and residents of nearby communities.

When Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee, said Wednesday that Supermax was suitable for Gitmo detainees in part because "it isn't in a neighborhood, it isn't in a community," U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn pounced.

"I resent the fact that Senator Feinstein would be so dismissive of the nearly 20,000 people who live in Florence and nearby Cañon City," Lamborn, R-Colorado Springs, said in a news release.

He opposes any transfer of detainees to Supermax. Opinion in Fremont County, where the detainees could bring more corrections and construction jobs, is more nuanced.

"The Bureau of Prisons could handle it if they had to, but we'd have to have the funding, the training," said McFadyen, a Democrat from Pueblo West whose district includes the prison complex.

Of chief concern is a lack of space. Capacity at Supermax is about 490, and there was only one empty bed on Thursday, federal Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman Traci Billingsley told the Associated Press.

Even if a decision was made tomorrow to build a new unit, it would be years before it was ready to receive prisoners.

It would be possible to transfer some inmates out of Supermax to make room for Guantanamo detainees, but it's quite unclear whether the detainees are any more dangerous than the prisoners's they'd replace.

Supermax already is home to a slew of Islamic terrorists, including plotters of 9/11 and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; leaders of the Mafia and the nation's bloodiest street gangs; several drug lords for whom murder was part of the trade; and a variety of racial supremacists, white and black.

Not to mention Theodore Kaczynski, the "Unabomber"; Eric Rudolph, the Atlanta Olympics bomber; and Terry Nichols, who plotted the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. His co-conspirator, Timothy McVeigh, called Supermax home before he was executed in 2001.
Supermax guards are used to dealing with dangerous prisoners. And no one has ever escaped from there.

But some locals are worried that the presence of detainees will make Supermax a higher-profile target for terrorists bent on liberating their jailed colleagues.

McFadyen also said corrections officials in California have intercepted messages from the Supermax cells of leaders of Nuestra Familia, a street gang, to their minions out West. If gang leaders can circumvent a system intended to prevent inmates from operating from their cells, imprisoned terrorists may be able to do the same.

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