As prisons have become a major growth industry since the 1980s, Florence welcomed the largest one ever built in the United States. It is actually four separate prisons designed to hold 2,350 people in what looks more like a community college than a corrections facility. The Post-modern design dresses up brick and concrete boxes with pediments, brick banding, blind roundel windows, and blue-green metal roofs. This $196 million complex, a joint venture of architects from Phoenix and Colorado Springs, has a “super max” for the nation's most dangerous convicts.