Name: What Happens in First 24 Hours in Supermax Prison
Uploaded: 2025-06-18T11:33:49.000Z
Duration: 15 min 2 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

As the van barrels down the highway, you're locked in the back, flanked by two US Marshals in full body armor.

Another sits directly across from you, silent, expressionless, his eyes never leaving yours.

The walls are padded, and the windows are blacked out.

It's just you, these three men, and a bunch of Glock 22s.

Your handcuffs have been triple locked, and your hands sweat inside a pair of oversized mittens.

Chains bind your ankles and wrap tight around your waist.

Every bump in the road sends a jolt of pain through your body.

There's no real chance of escape, but these guys are treating you like Hannibal Lecter.

Sure, you can be violent, you can be extreme, but only when you've got no other choice.

There was never even a warning that you were going to be transferred.

At about 4am, correctional officers burst into your special housing unit, or shoe cell, and strip searched you.

They handed you off to the Marshals, who haven't said a word beyond barking at you to keep quiet.

The fact that you're in a van and not on what they call Con Air tells you one thing, you're not going far.

Around six hours later, the van comes to a halt.

You can hear the faint crackle of radios and a series of gates opening, as the heavy electronic doors grind open and sunlight pours into the van.

You squint against the blinding light, and you can make out four officers waiting on the tarmac, three of them armed with AR-15s and another with a shotgun, and they're all in full body armor.

One officer grabs you and leads you like a dog out of the van.

All around you, and far into the distance, is desert, a vast expanse of dust against a backdrop of mountains.

There are floodlights standing high above the walls, and razor wire fences glistening in the sunshine.

You can see five or six circular guard towers where men are standing with rifles, and they're watching your every move.

The lead officer shoves you toward an entrance tunnel covered with sensors and motion cameras.

Inside the building, there are more and more armed officers as you walk through metal detectors.

This is nothing like the intake routine of regular prisons.

It is deathly quiet and immaculately clean.

The people working here are all focused on one thing, you.

It feels closer to medical quarantine than prison.

It is sterile and dehumanizing, like you're a walking contagion.

A door opens into a bare room where there's a counter with a man standing behind it.

The armed officers push you toward the wall, and the man behind the counter tells you that you will now be strip-searched.

This used to feel humiliating, but the fact is, after almost two years of incarceration, you know the procedure.

So, you take off your jogging bottoms, your t-shirt, and your underwear, and you're ordered to turn around.

You start to move, but just before your eyes leave the man, you catch a glimpse of him slipping on a pair of rubber gloves.

This is what you might call a rude awakening.

You didn't think cavity searches were even legal anymore for prison inductions.

The officer tells you that it's standard procedure here.

For certain prisoners, a failure to comply may result in disciplinary action.

You have the right to make a complaint to the Bureau of Prisons, but given your history of extreme violence, the prison deems a body cavity search is a reasonable precaution under State Department of Corrections policies.

When the search is over, the officer runs his hands through your hair and shines a torch in your ears and mouth, checking the space around your teeth.

When it's over, they throw you your new prison clothes, an orange jumpsuit with a velcro opening on the chest, and a small one for when you want to pee.

Your shoes are wafer-thin, like they're made out of cotton, but with rubber soles.

You are immediately sent to another room where there's a bed.

A male doctor takes your pulse and checks your blood pressure, asking you about previous illnesses or chronic conditions.

He wants to know if you take medications or have taken them recently.

No, you say, thinking about that study you read that said 38-42% of inmates in U.S. jails and prisons were taking medications for chronic conditions when they arrived there, almost 30% of them for psychiatric stuff, mostly depression.

Two in five U.S. inmates have a mental illness, twice the rate as on the outside.

You also remember reading that about 50% didn't get the meds in prison that they were taking when they were free.

Maybe that's one of the reasons why you had so many fights in your last place.

Half of those inmates were probably medically, mentally unstable.

Truth be told, since you got arrested you have gone from mentally stable to mentally wobbly.

But no, you tell the smartly-dressed female psychologist sitting across from you.

You wouldn't consider yourself depressed or anxious, and no, you've never experienced psychosis.

But if there is one thing you hate, it's isolation.

The shoe drove you crazy in the other place, but you decide not to tell her that because the fact is, it wouldn't matter.

You once saw a 2011 study that mentioned 30% of all U.S. inmates will engage in self-injurious behavior at least once while they are locked up, including 50% of women.

In a more specific New York study consisting of over 240,000 jail inmates, only 7.3% of the men went to solitary confinement.

But they made up 53.3% of acts of self-harm and 45% of cases of taking self-harm to the next level.

Men in solitary were seven times more likely to hurt themselves than other prisoners.

The evidence is clear that isolation often causes serious psychological distress, and you are about to experience the most isolated conditions in U.S. prison existence.

The purpose of supermaximum security is not to fix, but to break.

This isn't rehabilitation, this is carefully structured degradation.

When all the prodding and questioning is over, it's time for the orientation.

With your handcuffs and your shackles still clinging to your body, the same four armed officers escort you down a bright white hall to a door with a finger and an eye scanner.

It all feels so unnecessary, this level of security.

But then you remember the story of an inmate in a supermax attacking three officers in 2016, leaving them all with life-threatening injuries.

Attacks are rare, but they can certainly happen.

In the office, a man with a shirt and a tie introduces himself as the orientation officer.

He explains that there are various wings in the prison, some more high security than others.

He's letting you know that there are circles of hell, and whatever you might think is bad can get worse.

He says that you'll be going to the general population, which is essentially a high-tech shoe.

You won't interact with any other prisoners on the unit floor, and you're not supposed to engage in chit-chat with the officers.

If you have a complaint or question, you can request to speak, but other than that, there will be disciplinary action if you open your mouth when told not to.

You will eat in the cell three times a day, collecting the food through a hole in the door.

You'll shower in the same room, the water being turned on once in the morning each day.

You must use it or there will be disciplinary action for neglecting personal hygiene.

Dirt will not be tolerated in any form whatsoever.

Still, you have heard that in some maximum security facilities, the showers are outside of the cells and because of the effort it takes to move the inmates around, they only get two or three showers a week.

You guess that you have a better deal than those guys.

Visits are not often available, and you must request them a month in advance.

They can be taken away without warning at any time.

If you get put in a more secure unit, you get nothing.

Indeed, if you misbehave, you will be sent to a higher control unit where your privileges are fewer.

If you misbehave again, you might be sent to the Special Security Unit, or SSU, where the cells are soundproofed and there is zero interaction with anyone.

You will live in total silence, and you'll have to earn the right to receive books, writing equipment, or TV.

But he says if you follow the rules, in maybe a year from now, you could make it to a less secure unit as part of the step-down program.

This is decided by the multidisciplinary committee that you'll meet with once a month.

In the program, you'd occasionally be trusted to mix with other inmates.

You'd get yard time with them outside of a cage.

You'd get access to computers three hours a day outside of your cell and 300 phone minutes a month.

But one single transgression and you'd be removed from the program.

You are dangerous, he says, and will be treated as a threat all the time that you're in this prison.

But do as you're told, he says, and you might earn yourself a transfer back to a less secure prison.

There's no work program, he explains, but you can earn the privilege of cleaning if you prove yourself to be trustworthy.

There isn't a library, but there will be a selection of books that you can choose from, and these will be prison approved.

Once you've been over the rules, the armed officers escort you down to another set of seemingly endless bright white corridors leading to a security vestibule.

The officer does the scans and it opens to a large circular area, a kind of white panopticon, with cells spaced around two floors and a small circular officer unit in the middle.