The United States Penitentiary, Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX) is an American federal supermax prison for male inmates located in Fremont County, Colorado. It is unofficially known as ADX Florence, Florence ADMAX, or the "Alcatraz of the Rockies." It is part of the Florence Federal Correctional Complex, which is operated by the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), a division of the United States Department of Justice. It houses the male inmates in the federal prison system who are deemed the most dangerous and in need of the tightest control. ADX also includes an adjacent minimum-security camp that, as of March 2014, houses more prisoners than the supermax unit. The BOP does not have a designated "supermax" facility for women. Women in the BOP system who are classified as "special management concerns" due to violence or escape attempts are confined in the administrative unit of Federal Medical Center, Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas. The facility's current warden is David Berkebile. In 1983 two federal correction officers were stabbed to death in separate incidents blamed on inadequate prison design.[8] Following these killings and other similar incidents, Norman Carlson, then director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, argued that a more secure type of prison needed to be designed, where uncontrollable inmates could be isolated from correction officers and other prisoners for the sake of security and safety. The control unit at USP Marion became a model for the subsequent construction of ADX, a facility designed from the ground up as a control unit prison.[9] Years later, Carlson said he felt such a prison was needed to house inmates so desperate that they would commit murder (of another prisoner, or a guard) in the hopes of being sentenced to death. ADX opened in November 1994.[10] The residents of Fremont County welcomed the prison as a source of employment. At the time, the county was already home to nine existing prisons. However, the lure of between 750 and 900 permanent jobs, in addition to another 1,000 temporary jobs during the prison's construction, led residents in the area to raise $160,000 to purchase 600 acres (240 ha) for the new prison. Hundreds of people attended the groundbreaking for the facility, which was designed jointly by two leading architecture firms in Colorado Springs, DLR Group and LKA Partners, and cost $60 million to build.
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