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Highway 50 runs straight as a pool cue from Pueblo, Colo., through 23 miles of rangeland and piñon flats before offering an exit to the scruffy little city of Florence (pop. 3,795). Like Flint, Mich., or Orlando, Fla., Florence is a company town. The industry here is prisoners, and the company is the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Twenty years ago, the people of surrounding Fremont County ponied up $160,000 to buy some open land outside Florence, hoping to entice the bureau to build a prison complex as a way to boost the town's economy. Corrections had long been a mainstay...

December 10, 2006: The United States has opened a new "supermax" (maximum security) prison facility at Guantanamo Bay, transferring 42 detainees to it. The new supermax can hold up to 178 prisoners, and has been built due to over 650 attacks on guards. It will be operated beside another prison built in 2004. This will allow the United States to close an older prison, which left guards more vulnerable to attacks. In at least 430 of the attacks, the detainees threw bodily fluids at the guards (which holds the risk for transmitting diseases). In another 225 cases, the assaults were...

At six feet four inches tall, Richard Reid makes a forbidding figure, even from behind the iron grates, steel doors and automated locks that separate him from his prison guards in this place they call Terrorist Central. Richard Reed after his arrest (Richard Reid) Held in darkness and paranoiaHunched on a stool that is moulded to the floor of his broom-cupboard-sized cell, he turns the pages of the newspaper spread out on the concrete desk before him, soaking up stories and pictures from an outside world that he will never see again. "Do you need anything today?" a prison guard...

WASHINGTON — Federal prison officials aren't reading all mail sent and received by convicted terrorists and other high-risk inmates, a security gap that could prove deadly, a Justice Department review concluded Tuesday. Moreover, prison investigators read less inmate mail now than a year ago at seven of 10 prisons surveyed by the Justice Department's inspector general. "Consequently, the threat remains that terrorist and other high-risk inmates can use mail and verbal communications to conduct terrorist or criminal activities while incarcerated," concluded the inspector general's report of U.S. Bureau of Prisons facilities. The mail investigation was spurred, in part, after three...

SANTA ANA Within the forbidding walls of the Supermax federal prison, where high-profile inmates live in heavily guarded isolation, a section was created in 1998 called "H Unit," where six special prisoners could mingle, use a computer and share information, a prison official testified Wednesday. The six men, dropouts from the notorious Aryan Brotherhood prison gang, were known as "cooperators" or in slang as "snitches." Danny Shoff, a Bureau of Prisons official now assigned to Washington, D.C., said he was one of the few staff members at the Florence, Colo., facility allowed entry to "H Unit" during the period that...

DENVER - Convicted Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui on Saturday began serving his life sentence at the nation's most secure prison after U.S. marshals flew him overnight from Virginia to Colorado. Marshals brought Moussaoui, prisoner 51427-054, before dawn Saturday to the Supermax federal prison in southern Colorado, where he will spend 23 hours a day in his cell and have little to no contact with other notorious criminals. "He has now begun serving his sentence of life without the possibility of release," the U.S. Marshals Service said in a statement. A special team of deputy marshals took Moussaoui from a...

Sorry to make you choke on your Cheerios this morning. But when an alert reader, Bob "Formerly of Savannah" Mason, passed this item along this week, I couldn't believe it:Ricky Jivens apparently is looking for a few good women. Female pen pals, that is. The most ruthless gang leader in modern Savannah history - a high-rolling drug dealer who had cops on his payroll and was said to be responsible for 15 to 20 deaths - wants to get up close and personal with members of the opposite sex in Europe and elsewhere, via the U.S. Postal Service, from his...

<p>Convicted Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui says he lied on the witness stand about being involved in the plot and wants to withdraw his guilty plea because he now believes he can get a fair trial.</p> <p>In a motion filed Friday but released today, Moussaoui said he testified March 27 he was supposed to hijack a fifth plane on Sept. 11, 2001, and fly it into the White House "even though I knew that was a complete fabrication."</p>

Just flashed on Fox, jury has a verdict, to be read at 4:30PM EST!

BALTIMORE (AP) - Fourteen years ago, Maryland opened its ultramodern Supermax prison, a high-tech fortress to hold the "worst of the worst." In contrast, a few blocks away stood the Maryland Penitentiary, a dark, gothic, castle-like structure built nearly 200 years ago when inmates were supposed to contemplate their sins in solitude and disgrace. But when Mary Ann Saar, Maryland's secretary of public safety and correctional services, recently described a Maryland institution as so out of step with modern correctional philosophy that it ought to be razed, she was talking about Supermax. "First of all, it's inhumane. Second, it has...