Welcome to hell: Inside the Colorado supermax prison

A concrete hole barely five meters wide and three meters long. This is prisoner Eddie Mills exercise yard. When was the last time you saw, for example, a tree? a tree ? The last time I went to court was in 8 ago, 8 years ago, I saw a tree. I was in a car and in a bus, actually, Mike is allowed just one hour a day to stretch his legs. He is serving his sentence in what is considered the harshest conditions of any prison in the United States, the so-called supermax, maximum security system. Ironically, Pelican Bay Prison is located among the superb scenery of the towering sequoia trees of Northern California. Three and a half thousand prisoners are doing time here. Murderers, rapists, violent criminals considered a threat to society at large. Sentenced to lengthy terms, often life, they are unlikely to ever leave the prison. Life in Pelican Bay is marked by clashes between rival gangs, often spilling over into extreme violence. Race riots, attempted stabbings in the exercise yard, and the settling of scores. Since the prison opened, eighteen detainees have been killed, five of them shot dead by prison guards. Each week, the prison governors uncover more weapons made by the prisoners. Lieutenant Thomas keeps them as trophies. What you see before you here is just a small portion of some of the weapons that have been discovered overtime. Well, I’m wearing these gloves because inmates keep these weapons stored in areas of their body, that i don’t want to have anything to do with at this point and if you look up into the light on the x-ray you can see that there’s a half a pair of scissors that were secreted in this man’s wreck Illegal weapons, uprisings, and aggressive behavior. When they break the rules, prisoners pay an extremely heavy price. At least two years in an isolation cell in a part of the prison feared by all, the supermax. White and shaped like an X, it’s a high security prison within a prison. No one has ever escaped from here. the fence is deadly. if it’s touched from the inside say for instance from an inmate wanting to come in go across the inner perimeter fence and touch that lethal death fence it would be fatal to that inmate the costs associated with running the fence are far less than the cost associated with manning the perimeter towers The supermax is just one hundred meters from the main building, a short distance away, but a dramatic change of regime. there are no windows in the security housing unit we do have windows in our general population cells the security housing unit is designed in such a way that the inmates have only verbal access to other inmates they never actually see other inmates unless they’re coming out of their cell what’s going on guys ? we’re coming into the security housing unit into C facility this inmate is being escorted from another area in the prison coming this direction as we pan around and walk this direction coming down the long corridor Inside maximum security the prisoners never see each other, and the guards are usually unarmed in order to avoid hostage situations. twelve block corridor please all of the units in the SHU have a corridor control that runs and operates these doors coming into the units Inside block C-twelve it’s lunchtime. There’s no canteen in the supermax, all meals are served in the prisoners’ cells on plastic plates. There is no cutlery. The prisoners have to eat with their bare hands. It takes two prison guards just ten minutes to feed all fifty detainees in the block. Under the watchful eye of a third guard, armed with a shotgun. this is a population of inmates that has proven over time that they can’t successfully come into a dining room with other inmates without there being trouble Extreme precautions, since according to the authorities, all of the prisoners here are murderers or dangerous psychopaths. Some cells in block C-twelve are made from plexiglass to avoid prisoners targeting or throwing things at the guards. There’s a population of inmates within the SHU unit, the security housing unit who have demonstrated over time that they want to use fecal matter, urine, different different liquid substances to assault officers Behavior not unusual inside the supermax, since some inmates after years of this kind of detention are bordering on madness. Sentenced to life for murder Fernando Medina has spent seventeen years inside the supermax, and now questions his own sanity. He’s not only kept a good distance away, but he’s also chained. All these years being confined, has it taken an effect on me? Has it had a psychological effect on me? Am I damaged in some way? I don’t know. I’ve seen individuals like that, too, where they snap. They snap psychologically, and they let the time get to them. I’ve seen individuals who, they just shut down. They refuse to participate in the program, and they’ll just shut down. They won’t say anything to anybody else, and they’ll just sit there in their cell all day looking at the walls, and they’ll let their mind run away with them. If we let ourselves deteriorate, that’s what will happen to us. Solitude, silence, and only the guards to speak to. Often for a lifetime. Eddie Mills was found guilty of violent hold-ups seven times. Here where he is serving a life sentence he’s considered a well-behaved prisoner. The camera was allowed closer for the interview, but still from outside his cell. think the biggest thing we probably all miss is just the human contact. Being around and joking, play and shake a hand. Eddie’s done himself no favors in prison. A member of a neo-Nazi gang, he stabbed a fellow inmate eleven years ago, and he’s been in solitary ever since. He’s locked inside a cell with no windows twenty-three hours a day. To pass the time he’s been teaching himself Spanish and French, and his latest project, business law. go to bed at about nine. I get up about four and study and then I usually work out after breakfast. Between reading and actually studying, trying to memorize grammar or whatever it is I happen to be learning. Right now it’s business law, so I have to learn the business law terms and memorize the different things in business law. I spend roughly eight to ten, sometimes fifteen hours a day, studying, doing reading or studying. For one hour a day the door to Eddie’s cell opens automatically to allow him out for exercise. We could only film him in the yard, and it’s the only time of the day where he sees any fellow inmates. The guards supervise the interview and allow us into the yard so long as Eddie is shackled. I’m a dangerous criminal, can’t be left alone. Newman can you close it down for just a couple ? For Eddie Mills, the exercise allows him his only glimpse of the open sky. Sometimes I don’t even come out, I don’t even bother coming out because it’s it’s almost the same thing as a cell without books or without television or without anything. It depends on the mood. Sometimes it’s good to come out here just to get away from the cell, a change of environment for a moment. Do you understand that there are rules? For example, being handcuffed while answering this interview ? I pose no threat to any of you at all, never really did, but I can see where they would take the precaution to make sure that I don’t pose a threat due to my other actions against other inmates or convicts or things of those in nature. Like many detainees, Eddie goes through a vigorous exercise routine each day to keep in shape. While he’s in the yard, the guards search his cell. Mills likes to do his own laundry with that line they can hang their laundry up here to dry it out we’ll definitely tell him that it’s not in not in the best interest of the cell or anything else to have it hanging there and we’ll take it from him but if you want you can come on in this is pretty typical example of one of our SHU cells in this particular case you can again see that the casing on the TV is clear with a clear casing we’re allowing, we can see inside, see all the components inside the television and make sure that we don’t have any contraband stored inside the TVs Television, pens, and a few books are allowed. In theory, paintbrushes are banned. Yet somehow, Eddie has managed to produce some paintings. I’m just checking stuff out that he seems to be using milk cartons and looks like little pieces of thread to create, to make a paint brush, evidently to do his artwork and paint and this is his colors that he’s using. Looks to be like a candy or a cream or something. Looks like he found a feather out on the yard. Maybe using that for some fine detail calligraphy work but that is considered contraband so we are going to take that. So silly as it sounds to the people that don’t have a very keen understanding of the prison setting, something as simple as that feather being as sharp as it is. could in a sense act as a dark tip for something flying through the cell and actually penetrate the skin that feather can be dipped in human secretion and darted out that hole and hit an officer or a fellow inmate and 85% of these inmates in this institution are hep c positive. Now I don’t want to have to go home and have to get hit with human secretion by this and worry about my family and me having hep c. Throughout the United States, an estimated twenty-five thousand maximum security inmates are detained in similar conditions. Eddie is unlikely to ever leave Pelican Bay Prison. The best he can hope for is to be returned to a normal prison regime, depending on his behavior.