Isolating the Menace In a Sterile Supermax

But down a flight of stairs, the feeling of being hermetically sealed sets in. Fastened to the wall of the first "sally port," the space between a green steel gate that must slide shut before the gate in front opens, are two items: a fingerprint scanner and a digital clock that reports the weather outside the windowless maze that lies ahead.

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"I still get lost," said Michael K. Nalley, Bureau of Prisons regional director.

Down the long tunnel and to the left, the first door is marked "Visiting Room." Past that and another sally port lies G-Unit, visible from the hallway through a small vertical window in a steel door.

G-Unit is one of four "general population" units. Each has 64 inmates. These include Rodney Curtis Hamrick, who peered through the window of the steel door of a solitary exercise pen. He wore prison-issue horn-rimmed glasses and a bushy brown beard.

"Oh, you know me," he said.

In 2005, while incarcerated at Leavenworth in Kansas, Hamrick managed to mail a letter bomb to the federal appeals court in Richmond. For this he landed in ADX Florence, in a cell 12 feet by 7 feet 4 inches, slightly larger than the Montana cabin where Kaczynski hid out.

Each contains a bunk, desk, stool and shelf, all concrete. The stainless-steel sink and toilet evoke an airliner bathroom. The black-and-white television set has a clear plastic housing to leave its electronics visible. All inmates get closed-circuit programming on education and mental health; most also see cable news and entertainment channels.

Through the food port of the steel doors, a low murmur is audible in the hallway between cells. In one, a heavy white man with a shaved head exercised by stepping onto his bed, then stepping off. In the next, a middle-ageblack man looked up from a book and said: "Me, personally, I like the solitude. I'm at peace with myself."

Not everyone is. Critics argue that, with their enforced isolation, supermax prisons, "like the sensory deprivation environments that were studied in the '60s, tend to induce psychosis," said Terry Kupers, a psychiatrist at the Wright Institute in Berkeley, Calif., who has examined scores of prisoners in state supermaxes.

Those inmates "are, on average, the most severely psychotic people I have seen in my entire 25 years of psychiatric practice," Kupers once testified.

At Florence, 65 inmates take medication to control mental illness, said Paul Zohn, one of two resident psychologists. The medicine is prescribed by a Bureau of Prisons psychiatrist in Springfield, Mo., who examines the inmates by video link.

Personal assessments are conducted at the cell door by Zohn and fellow psychologist Marie Bailey. One of the counselors holds a riot baton. Zohn says if everyone speaks softly, the inmate may not be overheard by his neighbors.