Thomson is the unused prison that the federal government recently bought from the state of Illinois. ADX, the notorious federal supermax in Florence, Colorado, holds its prisoners in 23-hour-a-day isolation with virtually no human contact. Federal SMUs, or Special Management Units, such as those found in Lewisburg Penitentiary in Pennsylvania, hold their prisoners in near round-the-clock lockdown in two-person cells. Both are forms of long-term isolation, and both have been denounced by human rights and prisoners rights groups as an inhumane and ineffective form of punishment, sometimes amounting to torture.
We have a ton of friends that work there and those inmates have a lot of privileges. Yes they only get 1 hour a day in the yard but they are not kept in a "HOLE". They can have stuff in their cells and they have TV's etc. They make it sound worse than it is.