LONG READ: Life inside America’s toughest prison

For years, conditions inside the United States’ only federal supermax facility were largely a mystery. But a landmark lawsuit is finally revealing the harsh world within, writes Mark Binelli

IN PRISON, Rodney Jones told me, everyone had a nickname. Jones’s was Saint E’s, short for St Elizabeths, the federal psychiatric hospital in Washington, best known for housing John Hinckley Jr after he shot Ronald Reagan.

Jones spent time there as well, having shown signs of mental illness from an early age; he first attempted suicide at 12, when he drank an entire bottle of Clorox.