United States Penitentiary, Marion
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The United States Penitentiary is a medium-security prison located in Marion, Illinois. It was built in 1963 to replace the Alcatraz prison in San Francisco, which closed the same year.
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[edit] History
Opened in 1963, Marion became the United States' highest security prison by 1978.[1] The facility became the nation's first control unit when violence forced a longterm lockdown in 1983. The lockdown may have violated International Human Rights standards [2] and was the subject of a defensive NY Times Op-Ed piece. [3] , and only ended when the prison downgraded to a medium-security facility in September 2006.
Marion was one of two Supermax prisons in the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the other being ADX Florence in Colorado. The prison was originally constructed to hold 500 inmates. In 1968, a behavior modification program was implemented, called Control and Rehabilitation Effort, or CARE. Inmates placed in CARE wound up either in solitary confinement, or were subjected to "group therapy", which involved psychological sessions.
On October 22, 1983, two prison guards, Merle E. Clutts and Robert L. Hoffman, were killed in unrelated incidents in the maximum security prison in Marion.[4] Clutts was stabbed by Thomas Silverstein.[5] The prison was, at the time, the holding place for the Federal Bureau of Prisons' most dangerous prisoners. Despite this, two inmates were able independently to kill their accompanying guards. Relatively lax security procedures allowed a prisoner, while walking down a hall, to turn to the side and approach a particular cell. An accomplice would subsequently unlock his handcuffs with a stolen key and provide him with a knife.
As a result of the incident, the prison in Marion went into "permanent lockdown," and was completely transformed into a "control unit" prison. This penal construction and operation theory, since named supermax (a portmanteau of super and maximum) calls for the keeping of inmates in solitary confinement between twenty-two and twenty-three hours each day, and does not allow congregate dining, exercising, or religious services. These practices are used as administrative measures to keep prisoners under control.
Following the killings, Norman Carlson, then director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, successfully persuaded the federal government that a more secure type of prison needed to be designed reasoning that there was a need to isolate uncontrollable prisoners from both guards and each other for the sake of security and personal safety. Marion became a model for the subsequent construction of other facilities around the country built specifically as a control unit prison. So far, the only other supermax-only prison in the federal system is the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility, in Florence, Colorado.
[edit] The prison
The prison is located approximately nine miles outside of Marion, which is roughly 330 miles south of Chicago. Permanent lockdown, where prisoners remain in their cells 23 hours a day with little to no human contact, began in 1983 and ended in 2006, when the prison began extensive renovations as a medium security prison. The renovations increased Marion's inmate population from 383 to 900. [6] The majority of the inmates housed at Marion are weapons and drug offenders.
Besides the better known former supermax penitentiary, the facility also houses a minimum security work camp as well.
[edit] Famous inmates
- Leroy Antonio "Nicky" Barnes (1933- ) - former drug lord of Harlem
- Christopher John Boyce (1953- ) - Soviet spy
- James Coonan (1946 - ) - former leader of the Westies street gang, which operated in Hell's Kitchen, NYC
- John Gotti - (1940-2002) - American mobster and head of the Gambino crime family.
- Christopher Jeburk - (1975?- ) - prison escapee and bank robber
- Chevie Kehoe - (1973- ) - murderer and white supremacist
- Tom Manning - United Freedom Front militant
- Leonard Peltier - (1944- ) - Native American activist (served at Marion June 1, 1977-1985)
- Jonathan Pollard (1954- ) - Israeli spy
- Pete Rose - (1941- ) - athlete charged with filing false income tax returns (served at Marion August 8, 1990 through January 7, 1991)
- Thomas Silverstein (1952- ) - murderer and Aryan Brotherhood leader
- John Anthony Walker (1937- ) - Soviet spy
[edit] References
- ^ "Control Unit Prisons". University of Massachusetts. Retrieved on 2006-10-23.
- ^ "Supermax Prisons. Retrieved on 2008-02-26.
- ^ "On My Mind". Retrieved on 2008-02-26.
- ^ "Fallen Heroes". United States Federal Bureau of Prisons. Retrieved on 2006-10-23.
- ^ "America's Most Dangerous Prisoner?". BBC News. Retrieved on 2006-10-23.
- ^ {Hunsperger, Kevin. Marion Prison Tours. WSIL TV. Retrieved on 2008-03-24.
[edit] External links
- USP Marion
- USP Marion on Google Maps: [1]
