END OF THE LINE

The complex consists of four prisons, each more forbidding than the last. Levasseur was driven past a minimum-security honor camp--a shiny, postmodernist dorm with a well-manicured lawn--then a medium- security prison. He knew he was nearing his destination when he passed the high-security prison, with its barren grounds, multiple fences, guard towers and razor wire.

Finally he reached a red-brick bunker hunkered low against the hard, rocky prairie like some top-secret defense plant. This was it, the belly of the beast, the end of the line for the entire federal prison system--the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility, better known as ADX.

Levasseur's introduction to ADX was wildly disorienting. Although the prison is two stories above ground, one enters by going down, through a wide subterranean passage built to avoid a break in the fence line. After his initial processing--"little more than jackshit posturing by muscle heads with clubs," he later wrote--he was escorted through a maze of interior corridors, past steel doors and grills operated electronically from glass-encased control centers. Each center was equipped with closed-circuit monitors and panels of winking lights worthy of the starship Enterprise.

The shackles weren't removed until he was inside his double-doored, seven-by-twelve-foot cell. Left alone at last--as he would be from now on, for an average of 22 hours a day--Levasseur checked out his surroundings.

There wasn't much to check out. A concrete slab with a mattress. Concrete stool and desk, stainless-steel sink and toilet. A recess in the wall for igniting cigarettes, similar to a car lighter. A small black-and-white TV.

A narrow window looked out on a high-walled exercise yard and a small patch of sky, visible through steel mesh. There was a slot in the door for delivering meals and a telephone-booth-sized shower in the corner. To prevent prisoners from flooding their cells, the shower sprayed water in ninety-second bursts. Levasseur felt like a houseplant.

But the eeriest quality was the sense of utter entombment. Despite the humming and clanging of the electronic doors (more than 1,400 in all, along with 180 video cameras), this was the quietest prison Levasseur had ever been in. A riot could break out in another wing and he'd never hear it. And with the outer steel door closed, every sound inside the cell was magnified. A cough, he noted, "sounds like a racquetball carom."

Levasseur was no stranger to hard time. Forty-eight years old and a professed revolutionary, he'd already served ten years of a 45-year sentence for a series of bombings of military targets in the Northeast conducted by a group known as the United Freedom Front. He'd spent the past five years in the notorious federal penitentiary at Marion, Illinois--which had replaced Alcatraz as the U.S. Bureau of Prisons' highest security penitentiary and was now being replaced by ADX.

But even at Marion, which has been locked down since 1983, prisoners had a certain amount of mobility, as well as the ability to communicate with each other. They could have casual conversations through the bars. They could exchange magazines or save food from their trays for trading with other prisoners later. They left their cells for showers. At ADX the only contact Levasseur had with other prisoners, the only time he even laid eyes on them, was during outdoor recreation periods in the caged courtyard, scheduled just three times a week.

"Isolation appears to be the cornerstone of ADX," he wrote a friend a few days after his arrival. "One underlying purpose is to inflict enough psychological pain and sensory deprivation to have prisoners desperate for transfer elsewhere. It won't work for any constructive end, but that's beside the point."

Opened last winter amid considerable fanfare--including a ribbon-cutting ceremony by U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno and press tours of empty cellblocks--ADX represents a $60 million investment in a growing corrections practice: the almost total lockdown of prisoners considered dangerous, escape risks or otherwise incorrigible. More than thirty states, including Colorado, now operate some form of "control unit" or "supermax" prison, where "predatory" inmates are held in solitary confinement for up to 23.5 hours a day. ADX, though, is the first federal facility specifically designed for such a purpose--and it's the most sophisticated of them all, in both design and mission.

"What's different about this is not the external security but the internal controls," says ADX associate warden John Vanyur. Most prisoners are routinely shackled and searched every time they leave their cells, even if they're only walking ten feet to an indoor recreation area (a room the size of a walk-in closet, containing a chin-up bar). Mail and visitors are severely restricted. Law libraries are located on each wing to further minimize movement.

"What we wanted to do," Vanyur explains, "was reduce the amount of hands-on, staff-to-inmate contact, because any time that inmate's outside of his cell, that's when you're going to have problems."

Even by the standards of the booming prison industry, the Hannibal Lecter approach is an expensive proposition. The cost per inmate at ADX is expected to be around $32,000 per year, compared to an average of $20,000 a year in more conventional prisons--and that's assuming operation near its 484-bed capacity (another 78 cells are described as a short-term "special housing unit" for disciplinary cases). At present the prison is only half full, with roughly 250 inmates and almost as many staff.

Still, Bureau of Prisons (BOP) officials insist ADX is necessary, particularly in light of rising violence throughout the federal system. According to Vanyur, 92 percent of the transfers to ADX "have proven they can't function within an open-population environment." One out of four has committed murder while in prison. Three out of four have been involved in assaults on staff or other inmates. Roughly half have tried to escape.

And the other 8 percent? Vanyur says ADX now has about twenty inmates who are there because of "special security needs" based on the nature of their offenses, not their behavior while in prison. These include organized crime figures (reportedly slated for transfer, John Gotti has not yet arrived), cocaine kingpins, white supremacists, "possible" gang leaders and persons convicted of high crimes against the United States government.

Raymond Luc Levasseur fits into the last category. He is one of a handful of ADX residents whom the government considers terrorists but who describe themselves as political prisoners. "My jacket [file] has `sedition' written all over it," Levasseur says.

Critics of ADX, including Levasseur's outside supporters, argue that the criteria used to send prisoners there isn't as clear-cut as it seems. Behind the talk of predators and "security needs," they say, is a sophisticated behavior-modification program aimed not only at controlling violence but at controlling radical beliefs.

"People love this idea, a prison for `the worst of the worst,'" says Edelle Corrine, a Boulder prisoners'-rights activist who's helped to organize demonstrations outside the gates of the ADX complex. "But not all the prisoners there are violent offenders. In fact, there are probably more violent prisoners elsewhere who don't end up at ADX, for any number of reasons."

Although no one is leveling charges of physical brutality, as they do in the cases of Marion and California's Pelican Bay supermax, Corrine believes the ADX regimen of extreme isolation amounts to a form of psychological warfare. "I don't think it's designed to drive people crazy, exactly, but to break them," she says. "You make them totally dependent on their captors."

BOP press materials stress that the new supermax meets all "legal and constitutional requirements" and reflects "sound correctional practices" as well. The 23-hour-a-day Marion lockdown was held constitutional, too, despite widespread condemnation by Amnesty International and other human-rights groups. Those same groups will study ADX closely; already reports have surfaced of episodes of sleep deprivation, excessive shakedowns and strip-searches, and other head games.

Yet the biggest questions surrounding ADX have to do not with which inmates are sent there or conditions once they arrive, but how they are supposed to get out. BOP envisions that prisoners who demonstrate "positive adjustment" will work their way through a series of "step-down" units--each slightly less restrictive--over the course of three years, until they reach the "pre-transfer" stage, at which point they will be allowed to move unshackled outside their cells and eat with other prisoners in a real dining room.

Veterans of Marion tend to scoff at the carrot-and-stick approach. Marion was supposed to be an intensive, well-defined program, too, but some prisoners spent eight or nine years there.

"This place was built to incapacitate, not to rehabilitate," says Oscar Lopez Rivera, a Puerto Rican nationalist serving 55 years for seditious conspiracy. "I haven't been told what criteria they'll use to allow a prisoner to complete the program and transfer, but my experiences in Marion tell me that the decisions are completely arbitrary."

For men like Lopez Rivera and Levasseur, sworn enemies of the federal government, completing a program of "positive adjustment" poses special problems. They have to deal with not only the catch-22s of BOP policy but the long-term effects of solitary confinement, about which little is known--none of it good.

"If I lock you up in your bathroom for 22 hours a day," says Levasseur, "you're not going to get into too much trouble. But when they let you out, you're going to get into trouble you would never have seen before. I have never met anyone who's been exposed to isolation and abuse whose attitude didn't harden."

Sitting in a small, sealed cinder-block booth in the visitors' room, speaking through a telephone, Levasseur can see me through the glass but hardly anything else. He can't see his friend Lopez Rivera, who is five feet away from him, talking to a visitor on another telephone. Levasseur's eyes keep darting to the view behind me, straining to catch a glimpse of the guards.

"Look at this guy at the desk," he says. "Check him out...When I leave here, he is probably going to come over and want to look under my balls. Why? Are you going to pass me something? It serves no security purpose. It's control, humiliation, pressing in your face all the time. That's the kind of asshole I've got looking up my ass."

He nods at a passing prison official. "Ask him if I'm one of the predators they're talking about," he says. "Ask him if I'm one of the disciplinary transfers. He knows damn well it's not true."

Asked about how isolation has affected him, Levasseur stops rubbernecking and stares into space for several moments. His reply is slow in coming.

"If I told you the kind of thoughts it's produced in me," he says, "I could probably be indicted."

On October 22, 1983, a Marion inmate named Thomas Silverstein managed to shake the federal prison system to its core. Returning to his cell from his weekly shower, handcuffed and escorted by three guards, Silverstein paused outside the H-unit cell of another inmate, Randy Gometz. In the flash of an eye, Gometz reached through the bars, unlocked Silverstein's cuffs with a hidden key and passed him a "shank"--a homemade knife.

Silverstein broke away from two of his captors and cornered the third, Officer Merle Clutts, who'd been distracted by another prisoner. By the time Silverstein was subdued, Clutts had been fatally wounded, stabbed more than forty times.

Later that same day, another H-unit inmate, Clay Fountain, performed a similar handcuff trick, killed another guard and stabbed two others. Like Silverstein, Fountain was already serving three life terms for the murders of other inmates. Both men were reputed members of the Aryan Brotherhood, with a pathological hatred of corrections officers; both had virtually nothing to lose. Prison legend has it that Fountain didn't want Silverstein to "get ahead" in the body count.

The murders triggered a lockdown of the entire prison--a lockdown that, with few modifications, persists to this day. In testimony before Congress and in media interviews, BOP officials still invoke the deaths of the two guards as ample justification for their policies regarding predatory inmates.

Yet critics of Marion, and now ADX, claim the official explanation of the lockdown is misleading. They point out that both murders occurred in what was already Marion's most restricted area, its long-term control unit; they say the deaths merely accelerated plans that were already in the works to convert the entire prison into a control unit.

Marion opened in 1963, the same year that Alcatraz closed. It was supposed to be not just a replacement for "the Rock" but an improvement, with a more open design and modern rehabilitation programs. In the late Sixties the prison began experimenting with solitary confinement as part of a program known, ironically, as CARE (Control and Rehabilitation Effort).

H-unit was officially designated a control unit in 1973. Because court rulings and corrections standards severely limit the amount of time a prisoner can spend in isolation for disciplinary reasons, placement in H-unit was described as being for "administrative" rather than punitive purposes--a practice since widely emulated by state prisons and even some local jails.

In 1978 BOP revised its classification system, and Marion became the system's only level-six (maximum-security) prison. By that time, it had already become the most violent prison in America and a dumping ground for hard-to-manage inmates. In the four-year period leading up to the lockdown, the prison logged 81 inmate assaults on other inmates and 44 on staff; thirteen prisoners were killed. After a series of work strikes, officials shut down what was once a thriving prison industry. BOP reports issued in 1979 and 1981 proposed turning the entire facility into a "closed-unit operation"--a notion finally realized in the wake of the 1983 murders.

The lockdown didn't solve Marion's problems, however. Reports proliferated of reprisals by guards, including vicious beatings, forced rectal searches and the use of "four-point spreads"--chaining a prisoner to his bed, naked and spread-eagled, for hours at a time. In 1988 a federal judge threw out a lawsuit seeking an end to the lockdown, saying that inmates' accounts of staff brutality were simply not credible. Yet human-rights groups continued to hammer away at BOP, denouncing Marion for alleged violations of the United Nations' minimum standards for treatment of prisoners.

The BOP response to such claims has been to deny use of excessive force and to defend the "deterrent effect" of the lockdown. "If you were to look at violence statistics for a five-year period after [the lockdown], we actually saw a decrease in the amount of inmate and staff assaults system-wide," says ADX's Vanyur. "I'm sure Marion is not the sole factor, but any correctional officer will tell you that Marion and ADX decrease the level of violence in other prisons."

Prison activists dispute this, arguing that official BOP assault figures are subject to manipulation. "No litigant or reporter has ever been given access to the documents that the government uses in making that claim," declares Jan Susler, a Chicago attorney who's been involved in legal action against Marion and is currently representing Levasseur and other prisoners at ADX. "Even if they were right, it still isn't justification for what is basically a form of torture."

In fact, any deterrent effect of Marion or ADX is difficult to discern. Testifying before Congress last month, BOP director Kathleen Hawk noted that assaults by inmates system-wide had increased more than 12 percent over a thirty-month period ending in mid-1994. The figures for assaults on staff are even more dramatic: 175 in 1991, 529 in 1992, 906 in 1993. The rising violence has been blamed on everything from increased gang activity to massive overcrowding: Thanks to harsher sentencing and stricter parole policies, the federal prison population has nearly tripled, from 36,000 to nearly 99,000, in the past decade.

"In response to this more aggressive and volatile population," Hawk testified, "we are modifying existing facilities and building new institutions using more secure design features."

The most secure of all, of course, is ADX. Since Marion wasn't built to be a control-unit prison--and was, in any case, becoming a public-relations problem of international proportions--BOP decided several years ago to build a facility specifically designed to house what Vanyur describes as the "one-half of 1 percent" of federal prisoners who are truly dangerous.

"This is the kind of facility we'd rather not operate," Vanyur says. "But we have inmates here who haven't learned basic rules of behavior. That's what this place is all about."

Florence and surrounding Fremont County, already home to nine state prisons, campaigned mightily for the new federal complex, donating the 600-acre site to the government. In 1991 a BOP spokesman told Westword that ADX would be "a more humane environment" than Marion. Inmates and staff would be safer, he suggested, because they would have less contact with each other. Vanyur concedes that prisoners might perceive the isolation as a negative, but he also ticks off various ADX improvements over the cells at Marion, such as air conditioning, natural light and the in-cell showers.

Susler views ADX as "upping the ante" from Marion. "Every human-rights group that went into Marion reported that it was a human-rights nightmare," she says. "How can you turn around and escalate the isolation and the sensory deprivation?

"It's what I call `boys with toys'--they never could implement the programs they wanted to at Marion. It wasn't designed to be the kind of facility they wanted it to be. ADX allows them to polish all their torture techniques."

Susler has filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking clarification of the placement criteria that lands prisoners at ADX--particularly prisoners like her client Levasseur, who went directly from trial to Marion without any record of penal misbehavior. By the bureau's own rating system, Levasseur argues, he should be a medium-security prisoner. (Curiously, Marion guard-killers Silverstein and Fountain aren't at ADX.) A 1985 BOP-commissioned report found that 80 percent of the prisoners at Marion had security ratings that indicated they belonged at a lower-security institution.

Vanyur says the classification system has since been revised and that placement is based on more than a prisoner's security rating. "The bottom line, to be blunt about it, is that we have the authority to put an inmate into any facility we deem proper for our security," he says. "We have to manage people the way we feel is best."

end of part 1