I’m 99 percent sure that no inmate is leaving ADX Florence unless he’s in a body bag. I don’t care if that person is a Delta, DEVGRU, SOG, or Jack frickin’ Bauer – I don’t think it’s happening. The only reason I’m even entertaining the one percent chance is because the SERE curriculum is super secret; I don’t know the specifics of what it entails because no one (that I’m aware of) has ever written about it in depth. Which makes sense, because if that curriculum became public knowledge, foreign nations would be able to exploit it. So yeah – maybe there’s part of SERE school where they teach you to defeat one of these:

But I ain’t heard about it. And there are a few, other factors that differentiate Florence from other super max facilities, aside from the infamy of it’s 300 or so inmates. (I believe there were 325 men locked up there as of June 2023).

That small number of inmates (relative to Pelican Bay, which currently houses over 1,700 prisoners) is actually going to be the first hurdle to breaking out of Florence: the staff to inmate ratio at ADX Florence is ridiculously low.

Prison staff are outnumbered by inmates, but it’s by a very slim margin. The numbers advantage that an escaping operator might be able to exploit (I.e. by inciting a riot and using the chaos to stage an escape) just isn’t there. The guards will shut that shit down with a quickness.

But honestly, I don’t know how our hypothetical SMU badass is going to go about inciting a riot in the first place. In ADX Florence, prisoners are locked down in one-man cells 23 hours a day. There’s no chow hall – all of your meals get delivered to your cell. (Note the teeny, tiny slot in the photo above.) And even those meals are assembled very intentionally.

For example, there’s no bone-in chicken or fish – an enterprising fella might be able to fashion a shiv out of bone; can’t have that shit. Also, your cell is super tiny, soundproof, and damn near everything in it is concrete or steel:

Good luck using the stuff in your cell to get inventive. Oh, and the walls are reinforced concrete – you will not Shawshank Redemption your way out of that motherfucker.

The most ingenious part of this design – and the part that I imagine would be especially challenging for a SERE graduate – is the four inch window. Obviously no one’s getting out of an opening that small, but the brilliant aspect is the manner in which the windows are oriented. You can see exactly two things from one of these windows: the prison’s roof and the sky.

That’s it. You can’t see any landmarks (I.e. trees, mountains, shrubs) that might help you orient yourself and figure out where the hell you are. If you don’t know where the hell you are, it’s incredibly difficult to use your land navigation skills and formulate an escape route. I suppose that seeing the sky would allow you to make out a star or two on a clear night, but if you don’t know that star’s position relative to other stars, your best bet is to make a wish like Geppetto.

But what about that one hour of yard time? Surely our former operator will be able to get a sense of their surroundings on the yard? Nah, whoever designed Florence ADX thought about that too. Just like there’s no mess hall, there’s no conventional prison yard.

Inmates at Florence do their yard time in pits constructed of concrete – envision a small swimming pool with no water. The pits are so deep that inmates can only see the sky above them. Again, it’s impossible to locate any identifying landmarks, and no one can climb out of the pit because prisoners are either shackled or handcuffed for the entirety of their yard time.

Factor in hundreds of motion sensors and cameras, about 1,400 remote controlled steel doors throughout the facility (all of which can be locked simultaneously with the activation of a panic button), a plethora of watch towers manned by sharpshooters, and fences topped with razor wire…our hypothetical operator would probably have better odds of escaping Azkaban.

Conversely, the prospect of escaping Pelican Bay doesn’t seem to be quite as daunting. All of the Level IV inmates are housed in two man cells, which makes conspiring to escape a little easier – assuming your celly is with it.

Level II prisoners are housed in an open cell, dormitory-style setting (think Oz), and Level I prisoners are actually held in a separate block outside the secure perimeter of the facility. Unless our operator finds himself in the SHU (a block made up of one-man cells more akin to those you would find in ADX), I’d gauge the likelihood of his escape a bit higher.

Maybe a 5 percent shot, if I had to pull a number out of my ass? But for what it’s worth, no inmate has ever successfully escaped from ADX, and only one inmate has ever escaped Pelican Bay. This guy:

However, Tore David Digirolamo was being housed in the aforementioned minimum security portion of Pelican Bay – not in the SHU or on a Level IV unit. He was also re-captured relatively quickly.