Supermax

Scott Hardie | September 27, 2007
I've had two discussions in two days with Kelly about topics that I was surprised I had not mentioned to her before, since I find them to be interesting little bits of trivia and conversation-starters. Lo and behold, I haven't mentioned them here on the site either, so let me delay no further. Here's the first.

Ever heard of Arkham Asylum? That's the fictional super-prison where all of Batman's villains get locked up when he defeats them. Every once in a while, one villain manages to free them all at once. Thank goodness nobody tries that in real life with ADX Florence facility, a "supermax" prison in Colorado. That stands for super-maximum-security. Most of its inmates are the kind of ultra-violent prisoner that can't be mixed in with a regular prison population, but a few of them are celebrity prisoners who would be trophy-kills for any lifer, so they need extra protection.

Imagine a prison with all of these monsters locked up in it together: Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Terry Nichols from the 1994 Oklahoma City Bombings. Zacharias Moussaoui, the "20th hijacker" from 9/11. Richard Reid, the shoe-bomber. Sammy "The Bull" Gravano, John Gotti's underboss. Robert Hanssen, the traitor who sold national secrets to Russia and inspired the recent movie The Breach. Larry Hoover, founder of Chicago's Gangsta Disciplines. Eric Rudolph, the 1996 Olympic bomber. Ramzi Yousef, the 1993 World Trade Center bomber. John Walker Lindh, the white kid who joined the Taliban.

Short of Charlie Manson, it reads like a who's-who of famous prisoners, and it makes that facility sound like one of the scariest places on Earth.

Amy Austin | September 27, 2007
Sound like they should film Oz there... ;-)

Scott Hardie | September 27, 2007
Come to think of it, isn't "super maximum security" an oxymoron?

Kris Weberg | September 29, 2007
It's not an oxymoron, it's a pleonasm, sort of like "singularly unique."

Amy Austin | September 29, 2007
I was going to say "redundancy" myself... but perhaps a redundant pleonasm would get the point across. ;-)

"Military intelligence" is one of the classic examples of an oxymoron that comes to mind.