Moussaoui was expected to be sent 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 3.5-by-2 metre 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.
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.
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.—Reuters