Finger handshakes, the toilet phone, and the “shoe bomber.”

Officially called the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence — and colloquially known as the “Alcatraz of the Rockies” — the ADX is the highest-security federal prison in the country, located in the Colorado mountains. It houses some of the more notorious inmates in recent American history, from Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to September 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui to Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols to Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent who became a Soviet spy. Inmates at the ADX are held in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, and because of their crimes, many are never released.

But Travis Dusenbury, a 46-year-old from Lexington, N.C. who was locked up at the ADX for ten years, made it out. And he has much to say about the prison and the famous people he says he met there, including the “Unabomber” and the “shoe bomber.”

What was your first impression of ADX Florence when you arrived there?

It wasn’t like any of the prisons I’d been to, and I’ve been to a lot of prisons. I’ve been locked up in some isolated, rural places, but at least at those places I could always see a highway, see the sky.

But at the ADX, you can’t see nothing, not a highway out in the distance, not the sky. You know the minute you get there you won’t see any of that, not for years and years.

You’re just shut off the world. You feel it. It sinks in, this dread feeling.

What did the place look like — the cell you lived in, the bed you slept on?

It’s just the harshest place you’ve ever seen. Nothing living, not so much as a blade of grass anywhere.

My cell was all concrete. Every single thing, made out of concrete. The walls, floor, the desk, the sink, even the bed — a slab of concrete. Then you get a little fortified [recreation cage] that’s outside that you get to go walk around in for an hour a day.

It ain’t no lollygagging solitary confinement like you have at some other prisons — it’s 22, 23 hours in this concrete room, then one [to two] hours in this fenced-in area, and two days a week there was no rec though, and sometimes they just canceled it for no reason.

Did you ever run into any of the well-known terrorists and other criminals who are at the ADX?

Well, I never got sent to the control unit, where they keep the “worst” of them.

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