(Administrator’s note: Today we welcome a new author/contributor, Sister Marie.  We appreciate this insightful posting, and look forward to future work from her).

“A cleaner version of Hell” is the phrase used by Robert Hood, to describe the place where he was warden during the years 2002-2005.  This “hell” is the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence, Colo, or “ADX” for short, also known as the “Alcatraz of the Rockies”.  Some of the worst Federal offenders are living out their remaining days here, including 9-11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, the spy Robert Hanssen, Oklahoma City Bomber Terry Nichols, and the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, to name just a few. ADX has gotten a rare detailed airing in the New York Times; You can find the full article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/29/magazine/inside-americas-toughest-federal-prison.html?_r=1

I was struck by two things when I read this article.  First, I find remarkable the appropriateness of the term “hell” as a description.  It is said that inmates spend 23 hours of their days in solitary confinement, isolated from any human contact.  Their only glimpse outside of their cell is of a bit of sky through a 4 inch wide slit-shaped window.  Inmates in solitary confinement generally do not cope well, as this article states: Whatever the reasons, such extreme isolation and sensory deprivation can take a severe, sometimes permanent, toll on emotional and mental health. Researchers have found that prisoners in solitary quickly become withdrawn, hypersensitive to sights and sounds, paranoid, and more prone to violence and hallucinations. Craig Haney, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has documented several cases of individuals with no prior history of mental illness who nonetheless developed paranoid psychosis requiring medical treatment after prolonged solitary confinement.   The aforementioned Mr. Hood sums it up: “this place is not designed for humanity.”

Isolation is also a hallmark of the Biblical Hell, described by Jesus as “outer darkness” (For example, see the fate of the unprofitable servant in Matthew 25:30).  It is the loneliness of being shut out from God’s presence.  In Matthew 7, Jesus states that some will be told “away from me” and “I never knew you.”  The Greek word that is commonly translated as “Hell” in the New Testament is “gehenna”, which referred to the valley of Hinnom, which at the time was a desolate place outside the city of Jerusalem that was being used as a kind of garbage dump into which all kinds of excrement (including corpses) might be cast (See, for example, this entry from The New World Encyclopedia).

The second thing in this article that has struck me is how our far our earthly justice is from divine justice.  Despite our best efforts, human justice is tainted and corrupt.  The mental illness found at the Supermax is not merely due to the deleterious effects of isolation.   The reason that the NY Times article has emerged is that the U.S. has been incarcerating those who are mentally challenged, in contravention of our own statutes:

The story of the largest lawsuit ever filed against the United States Bureau of Prisons begins, improbably enough, with this letter. Deborah Golden, the director of the D.C. Prisoners’ Project, fields approximately 2,000 requests each year, but Bacote’s, which she received in October 2009, caught her eye. “I thought I might be missing something, because it was inconceivable to me that the Bureau of Prisons could be operating in such a blatantly illegal and unconstitutional manner,” she said. Golden was referring to B.O.P. regulations that forbid the placement of inmates who “show evidence of significant mental disorder” in prisons like the ADX.

I’m filing this one under “Reflections of the Fall.”

Photo above: “Supermax prison, Florence Colorado” by US Bureau of Prisons – http://www.miamiherald.com/graphics/rich_media/1027903.html. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.