Moussaoui will spend rest of life in solitary By Alan Elsner 37 minutes ago
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Zacarias Moussaoui, sentenced to life in prison on Thursday for his part in the September 11 plot, will almost certainly live out his days in a soundproofed cell, seldom having direct contact with other human beings.
Moussaoui was expected to be sent as early as Thursday to the super maximum security federal prison in Florence, Colorado known as the "Alcatraz of the Rockies."
If so, he will spend 23 hours a day in solitary confinement, in a 7-by-12 foot (3.5-by-2 meter) soundproofed cell. The remaining hour he will have the chance to exercise, also alone, in a concrete chamber.
Whenever he does leave his cell, Moussaoui will be in leg-irons and with his hands cuffed behind his back.
Furniture in the cells, according to those who have seen them, is made almost entirely of poured concrete. It includes a concrete stool, desk and bed covered by a thin mattress. There is a toilet and a shower in the room which runs on a timer to prevent prisoners causing floods.
A small black-and-white TV in each cell shows closed-circuit classes in subjects like anger management and literacy and religious services of numerous denominations, which are broadcast from a small chapel within the prison.
Moussaoui will seldom if ever see any of the other roughly 400 inmates in the prison. These include high-profile criminals such as Theodore Kaczynski, the "Unabomber"; Omar Abdel-Rahman, the "blind sheik" involved in the World Trade Center bombing of 1993; Richard Reid, the "Shoe Bomber"; Eric Rudolph, convicted of bombing abortion clinics and setting off a bomb in a park during the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games and Terry Nichols, convicted of involvement in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
Another inmate is Charles Harrelson -- the father of actor Woody Harrelson -- who is serving two life sentences for the murder of a federal judge.
Others include notorious gang leaders like Luis Felipe, leader of New York's Latin Kings gang, who ordered the murders of six gang members from his jail cell. Many of the inmates belong to prison gangs including the Aryan Brotherhood, Black Guerrilla Family and Mexican Mafia.
Florence is included in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's most secure prison. It has 1,400 remote- controlled steel doors and many motion detectors and hidden cameras. The area between the prison walls and the razor-wire perimeter is monitored by laser beams and pressure pads and guarded by attack dogs.
Human-rights activists say this kind of long-term segregation takes a harsh toll on prisoners' mental health and many of them eventually suffer from problems, including depression, paranoia, hallucinations and anxiety.