Producer's Notebook: My Trip To Supermax

60 Minutes producer Henry Schuster took an off-camera tour of the Federal Correctional Complex in Florence, Colo., also known as Supermax. Below he shares some impressions from his visit.

They don't call it Supermax, of course, at least not on the signs. It is the United States Penitentiary - Administrative Maximum. But everyone uses the nicknames. ADX. Supermax. The Alcatraz of the Rockies. That last phrase is the one you find on the hoodies and T-shirts for sale in a case just past the visitor's entrance - all proceeds going to an employees organization.

There is a certain sort of architecture you see in the suburbs and exurbs of America, modernist brutalism, lots of brick on the outside, poured concrete on the inside and no windows that began in the 70's and reached its perfection in the 1990's. Prisons and public schools seemed to share an affinity for the style, which is heavy on the sensory deprivation.

I remembered how much I hated walking into school and the hours of windowless fluorescent lighting as I walked into Supermax. It had taken months to get here and as claustrophobic as the experience was going to be, that was in a sense precisely the point.

We had spent months researching our story about life behind these walls. The Bureau of Prisons is famously tight-fisted with information, hence the 30-plus Freedom on Information Act requests for Supermax records. They did not want us here and a spokeswoman had even tried to dissuade us early on from doing the story by telling us that it was perhaps the least interesting of federal prisons because, in her words, nothing much happened there.

Right. A prison that houses the Unabomber; the shoe-bomber; one of the Oklahoma City bombers; some of the al Qaeda embassy bombers; most of the first World Trade Center bombers; the Olympic Park bomber, the man who wanted to be one of the 9/11 hijackers; an FBI agent turned Soviet spy; the so-called American Taliban; and the leaders of the notorious Aryan Brotherhood prison gang is somehow boring?

If they ever let us in with cameras, we could shoot enough interviews to fill an entire season of 60 Minutes.

So here we were. We'd done our shooting outside the prison, hiking up to the fence line and seeing the mirrored glass of the gun towers. We'd even heard what sounded like a rock band playing from at the neighboring U.S. Penitentiary (which is a high-security facility itself).

The BOP decided to let us in, but only with other invited journalists, and there was no way we were going to be allowed to bring cameras. That was after pointing out to them they already allowed VIP tours and even visits by graduate students.

They chose 9/11 for our visit, which somehow seemed appropriate. Not just because of the al Qaeda members who were here. Not just because we had already interviewed officers at the prison who told us how the inmates cheered when they got news of the attacks. But also because the leader of the first World Trade Center bombing, Ramzi Yousef, is the nephew of the man who masterminded 9/11 and finished the attack that Yousef started back in 1993.

There was coffee and Danish and fresh fruit accompanied by a lecture from the current warden, Ron Wiley, in a surprisingly nice, paneled conference room with plasma televisions on the wall.

During Wiley's remarks before and after the tour, we didn't get any information that we had not already dug up on our own -- in fact, there was much less. There were a few pages of handouts that were short on statistics and a typed agenda which made it clear that we were going nowhere near the most interesting parts of the prison.

"H-Unit," where a number of the Islamic terrorists are kept in their single cells for up to 23 hours a day, along with the FBI traitor Robert Hanssen, was most certainly not on our walking tour. Those prisoners are allowed no contact with the outside world, except for a pre-approved list of family, friends and lawyers -- part of what are euphemistically called Special Administrative Measures (SAMs).

H-unit is where a dozen or so of the Islamic terrorists have been staging repeated hunger strikes. The prisoners are not allowed to exercise together and the only way they can communicate is by shouting to each other through the toilets and sinks in their small cells.

We did not go by D-Unit either. Back in pre-9/11 days, it was known as Bomber's Row, because Unabomber Ted Kaczynski was there, alongside Yousef and Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. One former officer described the scene in the recreation yard as a "recipe club" where the bombers could trade tips and compare their political views.

These days on D-Unit, it is mostly the second-string terrorists, the ones not considered dangerous enough to rate SAMs. Kaczynski is still there but perhaps more interesting is Olympic Park bomber Rudolph who seems -- from letters written to a Colorado Springs newspaper-- to have taken on the mantle of a prison rights advocate. He's also become fairly fluent in Arabic, getting shouted lessons from some of the other D-Unit residents.

We did pass a door marked Z-Unit, the segregation unit designed for discipline (though about the only discipline left for men who are in solitary, often for the rest of their life is to take away TV privileges). Somewhere in the maze of hallways off Z-Unit is Range 13 (though inmates in their letters sometimes refer to it as 13 range) which is the home to just two inmates.

Tommy Silverstein, who killed a prison guard at the federal pen in Marion, is there. He's perhaps the reason that Supermax got built. After he killed the guard, it became apparent that Marion's security, even in complete lockdown, just was not tough enough to satisfy the BOP. And since by that time Alcatraz was on its way to becoming a tourist attraction, Florence was built.

Ramzi Yousef is also there on Range 13. No one we have talked to who knows Yousef believes his change of religion is for real, despite the extraordinary steps of cutting his hair, eating pork and professing to be a Christian.

What we do know is that Yousef gets his news late and in pieces. He is not allowed to watch any of the news channels and he gets copies of USA Today a month after they are published. News items that relate to terrorism or are otherwise deemed a security risk are cut out of the paper before he gets it.

So we set off for our walk through the halls of Supermax, limited as our tour was going to be. Our CBS News Legal Editor Andrew Cohen was along and has a nice description of what he saw.

To me, the highlight was sitting inside one of the cells, imagining that life, imagining the prospect of spending the rest of my days in such confinement. We had gotten countless letters from inmates describing their conditions inside (most hated it, a rare few said they enjoyed or at least appreciated the solitude). And we even got pictures from inmates, because it turns out if you win a game of bingo -- played alone in your cell -- you can earn a candy bar or even the right to have your picture taken and sent to your family.

The 7' x 12' cell -- complete with poured concrete bed slab, desk and stool, not to mention your own shower stall and toilet along with a 12" black and white television seemed to shrink around me. You don't get a view of the Rockies, although unlike my old high school, each cell does have a slit window offering a view of an inner courtyard and maybe a patch of sky.

A few minutes inside that cell and two hours inside Supermax were enough to remind me why I left high school a year early. The walls close in very fast.

There was much I had hoped to learn at Supermax. Most of it I didn't see. I would like to come back with a camera and get a proper tour. But I certainly don't want to stay.
Written By 60 Minutes Producer Henry Schuster