Rudolph, who hid out from authorities for five years in the woods of western North Carolina before being captured, says in correspondence with a Colorado newspaper that his surroundings at the Supermax prison are getting to him.
``It is a closed-off world designed to isolate inmates from social and environmental stimuli, with the ultimate purpose of causing mental illness and chronic physical conditions such as diabetes, heart disease and arthritis,'' he wrote in one letter to The Gazette of Colorado Springs.
Rudolph wrote that he spends 23 hours a day in his 7-by-12-foot cell, adding that his only exercise is in an enclosed area he described as a ``large empty swimming pool'' divided into ``dog-kennel style cages.''
``Using solitary confinement, Supermax is designed to inflict as much misery and pain as is constitutionally permissible,'' he wrote.
Rudolph's victims have no sympathy for him.
``It gives me a great deal of pride to think he's never coming out of there,'' said Diane Derzis, who runs a Birmingham, Ala., women's clinic Rudolph bombed in 1998. ``He should never see daylight again.''
The newspaper reported in its Sunday editions that it has corresponded by mail with Rudolph for more than a year.
Besides criticizing the conditions at the prison, Rudolph reiterated in the letters that he is unrepentant for his actions.
In August 2005, Rudolph was sentenced to life in prison without parole for setting off a bomb in a park at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta that killed one person and injured 111 others, and also for setting off two other bombs in 1997 that injured 11 one at a gay nightclub and the other at an Atlanta abortion clinic.
He was previously sentenced to life in prison for a deadly explosion at the women's clinic in Birmingham. That blast killed a police officer and maimed a nurse.
Federal prosecutors made a plea deal with Rudolph who had faced a possible death sentence in exchange for revealing the location of more than 250 pounds of stolen dynamite he had buried in the woods of western North Carolina.
Rudolph was identified as the Olympic bomber after the Birmingham blast and spent the next five years on the run in the North Carolina wilderness, employing the survivalist techniques he learned as a soldier. He was captured in 2003 while scavenging for food behind a grocery store in Murphy, N.C.
http://accesswdun.com/article/2006/12/99044