President Joe Biden commuted the sentences of nearly all those incarcerated on federal death row at the end of his term in December 2024, yet those death row prisoners granted clemency are bracing for retaliation from the new Presidential administration.

In one of the most significant moves against capital punishment, President Biden commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 prisoners on federal death row. The clemency decision was the largest mass clemency grant of death-sentenced people by any U.S. president since Lincoln, and the first in the modern death penalty era. Those receiving commutation will stay in prison for life, but will not be subject to execution.

Biden’s move was believed driven in part by the incoming administration and an expected hard-line policy shift on federal executions. The incoming president renounced the move in a Christmas Day post on his social media platform, Truth Social, telling the prisoners to “GO TO HELL!” On the first day in office of his second term, the current president issued an executive order titled “Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety,” which called for an expansion of the death penalty and included language critical of officials who have opposed it. 

Now, those incarcerated persons who received clemency from Biden are bracing for retaliation from the current administration, coming in the form of the harshest conditions in the entire federal prison system, including near total isolation. An investigative report from Bolts Magazine and published in partnership with The Nation details the situation.

Excerpts from the report below.

Inside the federal supermax tucked away in Colorado’s high desert, prisoners spend 22 to 24 hours a day locked alone inside concrete cells that are smaller than a standard parking space. The prison, formally called United States Penitentiary Florence Administrative Maximum Facility but better known as ADX, has earned the nickname “The Alcatraz of the Rockies” because of its harsh conditions. 

Contact with others is extremely limited; programming, such as anger management or religious services, is broadcast over televisions in the cells, while psychological evaluations happen through the steel doors. Belongings are also strictly limited and prisoners aren’t allowed to hang photographs or drawings on their walls. Exercise time out the cell happens alone inside large cages called “dog runs”, where prisoners can only walk a few paces each direction. Prisoners are given virtual reality goggles to simulate the outdoors or community. A former warden once called ADX a “clean version of hell,” and said that living there was “far much worse than death.” Olympic Park bomber Eric Robert Rudolph and Rami Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, are both incarcerated at ADX. 

In February, Rejon Taylor learned he would be sent there. 

As one of the 37 people on federal death row whose death sentence was commuted to life without the possibility of parole by then-President Joe Biden before he left office, Taylor had been anticipating a transfer away from the prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, that houses the federal death chamber. He hadn’t considered he would be sent to ADX, which according to federal Bureau of Prison guidelines is reserved for people “who have demonstrated an inability to function in a less restrictive environment without being a threat to others.” Taylor by contrast had a clean disciplinary record and had earned a job as an orderly in Terre Haute, which gave him freedom to move around the unit during work. While he was allowed more than eight hours for phone calls every month, ADX would limit him to four 15-minute phone calls a month. 

“Some men here are grateful that they are alive, that they no longer have the threat of execution looming before them, and so they feel like the worst is behind them,” he told Bolts. “Then there are some like me, who feel that death feels closer after clemency, that the worst is ahead of us, at ADX, where we will exist in conditions of monstrosity, in a living hell.”

You can read the full report “Death Row Prisoners Granted Clemency by Biden Brace for “Living Hell” Under Trump” at the Bolts Magazine website. Bolts Magazine reports on the local elections and obscure institutions that greatly shape public policies but are overlooked in the U.S., and the grassroots movements that surround them.