By Daniel Testa

In an earlier time, Ted Kaczynski took refuge in western Montana seeking solitude and an escape from modern society. Ten years after his arrest and 28 years after mailing his first bomb, Kaczynski has achieved a different kind of solitude: one not provided by nature but imposed by man.

Kaczynski is serving out consecutive life sentences at the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence, Colo. Also called Admax, ADX Florence, Supermax or the “Alcatraz of the Rockies,” the prison houses the most dangerous and infamous criminals in America.

“It is about as brutal as can be and still be within the limits,” said Darrell Lindsey, executive director of the Florence Chamber of Commerce and chairman of a town-prison community relations board. He estimates he’s been inside Admax 40 to 50 times for meetings and describes the atmosphere as claustrophobic.

AP photo by Elaine Thompson

Theodore Kaczynski, wearing a white bullet proof vest, is escorted by U.S. marshals into the federal courthouse on June 21, 1996 in Helena, Mont.

Within Fremont County, where the Supermax is located, are nine state prisons and four federal prisons. For more than 140 years Colorado has kept its criminals in Fremont County. A territorial prison in Cañon City, west of Florence, incarcerated its first inmate in 1871.

In 1991 the Florence Chamber of Commerce deeded 600 acres to the Bureau of Prisons as incentive to build the proposed correctional complex in its town.

“It put the city of Florence on the map,” Lindsey said. “We’re well known throughout the whole wide world now.”

Judicial and law enforcement officials from Italy, Germany and China have all visited Florence to study the penal facilities.

The Florence Correctional Complex, of which Supermax is just a part, comprises four separate correctional facilities, each with a different security level. Lindsey estimates the FCC created 1,100 jobs. More than half the jobs in Fremont County are prison-related.
 
Built in 1994, at a cost of $60 million, Admax’s mission is to house “the most violent, disruptive and escape-prone inmates” in the U.S. penal system, according to the federal Bureau of Prisons.

The bureau does not provide information about individual inmates, and Kaczynski has been reticent to discuss details of his daily routine, declining interview requests from nearly all media outlets. He did not agree to be interviewed for this story.

It is possible, however, to glean details from documents in the Labadie Collection, a special section of the University of Michigan’s library dedicated to anarchist papers and social protest literature. In 2000, Kaczynski donated roughly 15,000 pages of documents to the university where he received his doctorate and later mailed a bomb. Selections of these documents, which include complaint letters, media interview requests and psychological reports, are also posted on thesmokinggun.com.

Since Admax inmates are kept in total isolation and confined 23 hours a day, it is unclear whether Kaczynski has met any of his neighbors, who include the “Shoebomber” Richard Reid, Oklahoma City bombing co-conspirator Terry Nichols, World Trade Center terrorist Ramzi Yousef, Olympic Park bomber Eric Rudolph and, most recently, convicted 9/11 terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui.   
     
Now 64, Kaczynski begins and ends his days in a “pod” (the prison prefers “pod” instead of “cell”) roughly 7 feet by 12 feet, dimensions similar to his Lincoln cabin.
Heavy steel doors shut silently behind you as you move from wing to wing on highly polished floors. (See Washington Post graphic of Admax Cell)

To reach a pod you must pass through two doors. A metal mesh grill door opens onto a small breezeway. Beyond the breezeway a thick steel door, with a slot for food or books or mail, leads to the narrow pod.  
       
Kaczynski’s bed, like the beds of all Supermax inmates, is a thin mattress on a concrete slab jutting from the wall. He has a metal mirror and another slab to use as a writing surface. His shower, like others in the complex, shuts off automatically after two minutes, to prevent him from flooding his cell. His sink and toilet have similar mechanisms.

This plumbing system has caused Kaczynski some problems. According to a document from the Labadie Collection, Kaczynski complained about a leak in his cell.

“The guy in the cell above mine has been hitting the shower button constantly for the last seven hours or more,” Kaczynski wrote in the undated complaint. “The water runs down into my cell and I have to keep sopping it up with a towel. Why not shut off his water? P.S. He kept hitting his shower button all night without stopping until after 4:30 a.m. That shower makes a fairly loud clunk when it shuts off, so he kept me awake most of the night. This is unreasonable. I shouldn’t have to put up with this.”

Other complaints from Kaczynski address mail delivery, guards working the night shift outside his cell listening to the radio too loud, and one day when inmates didn’t receive their daily ration of a full pint of milk.

Asked the color of the pod walls, Lindsey was shocked to find he couldn’t recall.

“I’ve been there so many times and I still can’t remember,” he confessed, but thinks they are gray or ivory. A small window affords a limited view of an internal courtyard.

Like all Admax inmates, Kaczynski may listen to religious services broadcast into his pod and has the option to receive visits by a chaplain. He also has a closed-circuit television on which he can watch educational programming selected by the warden.
When he needs to clean his cell, guards provide materials so that he may do it himself.

Meals are served through a slot in the door, on a plastic tray with plastic utensils. When finished, Kaczynski slides the tray and utensils back out through the door.

Lindsey has eaten at ADX many times and likes the food.  
  
“One of the morale boosters in incarceration is decent food,” Lindsey said. “You don’t have decent food, you’ve got yourself a wholemess of trouble.”

A 2001 progress report states that Kaczynski has “maintained clear conduct, has good cell sanitation …utilizes recreation when offered and has positive rapport with staff.”

At varying times Kaczynski, like all inmates, may leave his cell for an hour of exercise once a day. He is shackled and escorted by two armed guards to a recreation area enclosed by wire mesh roughly 50 feet long, 25 feet wide and 15 feet tall. His constraints are then removed and he is free to play basketball or handball, lift weights or exercise in any other way he chooses.

The 2001 progress report states Kaczynski is not permitted to work due to an unspecified medical condition. At the bottom of the document, Kaczynski wrote in May of 2003 that he has “no idea” what medical condition the report refers to, adding, “I run five miles a day, four or five days a week, so I ought to be fit to work. But if they don’t want me to work that’s fine with me since I have too much too (sic) keep me busy as it is.”

Admax inmates have daily contact with guards, case managers, counselors, unit managers, medical staff and others, according to the Bureau of Prisons. In addition to the officer who slides his meals in through a slot in the door and those who escort him to the exercise room, “he is seen on a daily basis by the psychology department staff and his unit team,” according to the 2001 report.

Like all inmates, Kaczynski has access to pens and pencils, but not a computer. All his communication is monitored. Kaczynski also has a constitutional right of access to the comprehensive law library at Admax, and a regular library provides reading materials.

Kaczynski has completed a number of correspondence courses at Admax. Most notable is a survey course on modern psychology. In a response paper, also from the Labadie Collection, Kaczynski attacked Freud and Jung, writing: “I wish that someone would have the guts to come right out and say that Freud and Jung were charlatans and/or mystics and/or cult-leaders – not scientists.”

There is almost no limit to the number of letters Kaczynski may send or receive. But a few restrictions have been noticed by Alston Chase of Montana’s Paradise Valley, who last corresponded with Kaczynski in the summer of 1999 and who authored a book titled “Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist.”

Chase recalled that after he sent Kaczynski a hardcover book, Kaczynski wrote back to thank him, but also requested that in the futurehe send only paperback books because  the prison removed the covers from the hardback.

 Another time Kaczynski took longer than usual to reply. When he did, he explained that he had just gotten Chase’s letter because the prison sometimes regulated the amount of mail an inmate could receive in a day.

Kaczynski also had a scholarly letter published in the New York Review of Books in July 2005, in which he took issue with a writer’s assertion that the ancient Egyptians worshiped dwarfs. Kaczynski cited a 1938 Belgian volume titled “Die Bambuti-Pygmäen vom Ituri” in which the author argues persuasively that the Egyptians worshipped Pygmies, not physical dwarfs from their own race.

 Later in the year Kaczynski wrote to the library of African studies at Northwestern University, offering to donate two rare books. 

Kaczynski has granted few interviews since his incarceration began. Chase said Kaczynski felt betrayed by a 1999 Time magazine article by Stephen Dubner that, Kaczynski felt, portrayed him unfavorably. Kaczynski, in “a state of high dudgeon” joked that he would only be speaking to environmental radical groups, people with long hair and earrings, Chase said.

Since then the Web site for the Earth Liberation Prisoners Support Network posted a 1999 interview with him, which was also published in the magazine Green Anarchy.

Asked in the article whether life in Admax was breaking his spirit, Kaczynski told the magazine, “No, what worries me is that I might in a sense adapt to this environment and come to be comfortable here and not resent it anymore. And I am afraid that as the years go by that I may forget. I may begin to lose my memories of the mountains and the woods and that’s what really worries me, that I might lose those memories, and lose that sense of contact with wild nature in general. But I am not afraid they are going to break my spirit.”