The former warden of America’s most notorious prison has lifted the lid on why being sent there is worse than the death penalty.

Following President Donald Trump’s decision, 37 federal prisoners who were initially given death sentences are being relocated to the Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX) in Florence, Colorado.

Shortly before President Joe Biden left office, he commuted the men’s sentences to life in jail without possibility of parole.

These inmates are presently housed at USP Terre Haute in Indiana. Attorney General Pam Bondi is actively working on moving these individuals, whom she described as ‘monsters,’ to a facility often described as a ‘living hell.’

Bob Hood, the former warden of the Supermax, told the Daily Mail: ‘It’s intended to be a place that, in my opinion, is beyond the death penalty.

‘With the death penalty, decades might pass before it’s carried out, if ever. At this facility, though, they will live in such severe conditions that they’ll feel as if they’ve truly entered hell, realizing how much worse their situation could not get,’ Bondi remarked.

‘Inmates should dread it. It’s going to be a slow death. It’s going to be a drip instead of [a shot] in the arm and goodbye.’

Known as the ‘Alcatraz of the Rockies,’ the Supermax currently has 375 inmates. They include some of the world’s most infamous: Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, shoe bomber Richard Reid, 9/11 hijacker Zacarias Moussaoui, World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef, and hook-handed cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri. 

Somewhere in the bowels of the complex, in the most ultra security area known as Range 13, is Mexican cartel leader Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán.

‘As they’re pulling up, they’ll see the beauty of the Rocky Mountains. This time of year it is absolutely beautiful,’ Hood said. 

‘That’s the last time they’re going to see freedom. You would see 12 gun towers and all these vehicles driving around with heavily armed officers.’ 

The bus is physically driven inside the prison building, and, from that moment on, inmates are video taped.

Unlike in other prisons, inmates cannot communicate with others across the hall. 

Each is placed in a cell which has a sliding electrical metal door with a four-inch slit for guards to look through. Four feet beyond the door is a barred solitary cell.

Their seven-by-12-foot cell has a cement bed and metallic commode, with fittings designed in a way that makes it impossible for inmates to hang themselves. They are in there for 23 hours a day, and have one hour of recreation.

Before the recreation hour, inmates are strip searched, shackled and taken to a yard designed so they can only see the sky, not the world around them.

‘The only thing they can see is if they look straight up. There’s no way to see any of the terrain. It’s by design, you want to pull them away from the world.

‘You can’t see the mountains, you can’t see the beauty. It’s all intentionally built so you don’t see all that beautiful stuff.’

In the yard, each person is put in a separate cage – about 20 by 20 feet – to exercise.

‘Basically, most of them walk around in a circle. You’re by yourself in a cage. A Richard Reid type would go out there and look around. He’s not the type that’s going to be doing 150 sit ups and push ups.’

But there is worse inside the Supermax, including what is known as special administrative measures (SAMs) and relegation to Range 13.

‘If you are getting that, that’s like getting a bullet in the head. 

‘If you go there, basically you’re in hell. You’re definitely in hell because you can’t see another inmate. You can’t hear another inmate. When you go out to recreation you’re in a dog cage, and you’re not even allowed to be with other inmates out there.

‘You don’t want people still doing business inside the prison, so they really do cut off the head of the snake.’

Inmates who have been on Range 13 include El Chapo, Yousef and multiple murderer Tommy Silverstein.

Some victims’ relatives prefer that their killers serve sentences in the Supermax instead of receiving the death penalty.

‘There’s a lot of people that say, you know what, I’m glad these people didn’t get the death penalty. Because the Supermax is going to let them be there for decades and decades with these conditions. And is that worse than death? I think it is.’

Some inmates go insane, and others manage to die by suicide.

Hood saw every inmate while he was warden between 2002 and 2005.

One he witnessed handling the extreme conditions better than most was the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski.

‘He was just waking up every day as a remote type of guy, like he lived on the street. He would basically say ‘Good morning, warden.’

He wasn’t very friendly, but he knew six or seven languages – he had his doctorate degree. He got up and he was able to handle the Supermax almost to a point of surprising the staff.

‘He beat the system in one sense because it never seemed like it ever got to him. The Supermax didn’t impact him. 

‘I would say that 97 percent to 98 percent of all inmates at the Supermax, I could see the impact of it. I’d see guys in tears sometimes during Christmas, I’d see an inmate teary-eyed talking about their kids.’

Once, when Hood took then-FBI Director Robert Mueller to see the Unabomber exercising in his cage, he was running in circles and each time he passed them said: ‘Hey, warden, I just want you to know I’m in Walla Walla, Washington, right now.’

Mueller was confused, but the warden knew Kaczynski was mentally clocking up the distance from the Supermax to where his brother lived on the West Coast, by doing laps in his cage.

‘A guy like that is going to be a different type of person than Richard Reid or Ramzi Yousuf, who was looking at getting up on the hour, praying. So each person is going to handle it on their own.’

Reid successfully earned his GED – equivalent to a high school diploma – in the Supermax, which ultimately led to a visit from his mother.

Another inmate, serial killer Michael Swango, refused for years to come out of his cell for his daily hour of recreation.

Swango, a former Marine and physician, had been attacked in the facility before and decided remaining solitary was safer.

‘He’s the only one I’ve ever met that’s in the Supermax and said, ‘No, I don’t want to come out.”

Some inmates stop eating and have to be involuntarily fed through their nose by a team of seven or eight people.

Other penitentiaries have been held up as the worst to spend time in, including Guantanamo Bay and the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in El Salvador.

But Hood said the difference is the lack of connection with other inmates.

‘You realize what’s different from Gitmo, where they had a lot of connection, they’re allowed to go outside with others and pray and do different things.’ 

Eight of the 37 federal inmates who were sentenced to death at Terre Haute, and spared by Biden, have already arrived at the Supermax, and the rest are expected there by early next year.

‘We have begun transferring the monsters Biden commuted to Supermax prison, where they will spend the rest of their lives in conditions that match their egregious crimes,’ Bondi said.

Among those being moved are Anthony Battle, a marine who stabbed his wife to death and then bludgeoned a prison guard to death with a hammer.

They also include Brandon Council, who killed a bank manager and teller during a bank robbery in South Carolina.

Also being moved is Shannon Agofsky, who was convicted of killing a bank president in Arkansas and then stomping another prison inmate to death.

Then there’s Len Davis, a former New Orleans police officer convicted of hiring a drug dealer to kill a woman who had filed a complaint against him.

Biden’s move spared the lives of these federal death row inmates.

His decision left three federal inmates still facing execution.

Two are at Terre Haute: Dylann Roof (who carried out the 2015 racist killings of nine Black members of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina) and Robert Bowers (who killed 11 congregants at Pittsburgh’s Tree of life Synagogue in 2018).

The third is Boston Marathon bomber Tsarnaev, who was moved to the Supermax – the legal battle over the validity of his death sentence is ongoing.