Slate: How A 1983 Murder Created America's Terrible Supermax-Prison Culture

[China]

How a 1983 Murder Created America's Terrible Supermax-Prison Culture

 

On Oct. 22, 1983, inmates aligned with the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang murdered two corrections officers at the United States Penitentiary near Marion, Ill. The reverberations from those killings are still being felt in the American prison system. The murders sent Marion into lockdown for 23 years, ushered in the era of the modern Supermax prison, and normalized the chilling idea that the only rational way to deal with violent or notorious prisoners is to lock them up in small, isolated cells and throw away the key.

 

In 1983 Marion was the toughest penitentiary in the federal prison system. The maximum-security complex housed some of the country’s most violent inmates, and the worst of those were put in Marion’s “control unit.” Getting placed in the control unit was akin to being buried alive. Inmates were confined to their small cells for almost 23 hours a day. When they left their cells, they were shackled, guarded, and under constant surveillance. The conditions there echoed the commandant’s line in The Great Escape: “We have, in effect, put all our rotten eggs in one basket. And we intend to watch that basket very carefully.”

 

Thomas Silverstein and Clayton Fountain were two of those prisoners who bore watching. In 1981 Silverstein and Fountain were charged with killing a black inmate named Robert Chappelle in the Marion control unit. (They allegedly strangled him in his cell during an exercise period.) As an encore, Silverstein and Fountain killed Raymond “Cadillac” Smith, a friend of Chappelle’s who had sought to avenge his death; according to former Washington Post reporter Pete Earley, the two men “stabbed [smith] 67 times and then dragged his body up-and-down the prison tier so that other prisoners, still locked in their cells, could see the bloody corpse.” In the wake of these murders, Silverstein thought he was being unduly harassed by Marion corrections officers, especially a guard named Merle Clutts. As Earley wrote, “Silverstein became obsessed with Clutts and spent months plotting his murder.”

 

The plot resolved quickly. On Oct. 22, 1983, a shackled and guarded Silverstein was released from his cell to take a shower. While in transit, another prisoner slipped Silverstein an improvised knife and a handcuff key. After freeing his hands, Silverstein stabbed Clutts approximately 40 times, killing him. Several hours later, Fountain used similar tactics to kill another guard, Robert Hoffman. The message the two men sent was clear: Even the tightest security restrictions weren’t enough to control them.

 

Marion officials accepted the challenge. Five days later, guards sent a message of their own, locking down the prison and allegedly exacting a measure of revenge against its inmates. In 1990 a former Marion C.O. named David Hale discussed the aftermath with Mother Jones:

I can't describe to you—I never seen beatings like that. At least fifty guys got it, maybe more. I was only involved in seven or eight, but there was beatings every day there for a while. I had inmates ask me how long this madness was going to last. And I said, from what I seen, it better be a permanent lockdown, because when you beat a man like that, he's gonna retaliate.

Putting Marion in permanent lockdown was an idea that had been discussed for years, and now it came to pass. For the next 23 years, the entire penitentiary effectively became a control unit. Making no pretense of rehabilitation, prison officials focused on exerting physical and psychological dominance over inmates, the vast majority of whom were permanently confined to their tiny cells, sleeping on concrete beds to which, if they caused trouble, they would be spread-eagled and chained. They were allowed 90 minutes of recreation per day, which was usually taken in the hall outside the cell. (“By comparison, in the rest of the federal prison system prisoners spend an average of thirteen hours per day out of their cells,” the Committee to End the Marion Lockdown reported in 1992.)

 

The conditions were brutal, and regularly denounced by human rights groups, which deemed the isolation strategy a form of torture. In 1987 Amnesty International said that “There is hardly a rule in the [united Nations] Standard Minimum Rules [for the Treatment of Prisoners] that is not infringed in some way or other” in Marion.

 

From the government’s perspective, however, the harsh tactics were effective. “There is no way to control a very small subset of the inmate population who show absolutely no concern for human life,” former Federal Bureau of Prisons Director Norman Carlson told the San Francisco Chronicle in 1998, justifying the decision to put Marion into lockdown. “[silverstein and Fountain] had multiple life sentences. Another life sentence is no deterrent.” After 1983 Marion’s rate of inmate murders and assaults dropped significantly, and it became one of the safest penitentiaries in the federal system.

 

It also became a model. Today nearly every state features at least one dedicated control-unit facility, specifically designed to house notorious or recalcitrant prisoners. The most famous of these is the Supermax facility at ADX Florence, in Colorado, where notorious inmates like Ramzi Yousef, Ted Kaczynski, and Zacarias Moussaoui are confined in a setting that resembles Marion, but allows for even less human contact. And there are plenty of others. There’s the Pelican Bay SHU in California, for instance, where conditions are so bad that inmates filed a class-action suit charging Eighth Amendment violations. Virginia’s Red Onion State Prison, home of Beltway sniper Lee Malvo, is a place where, according to Human Rights Watch, “racism, excessive violence, and inhuman conditions reign.” The Marion lockdown was the test case that made these other facilities possible; that helped normalized indefinite administrative segregation as a viable penal strategy.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[G.A.C.O.L.B.]

As someone who has been in solitary confinement, there is absolutely no way that anyone could ever convince me that it is not a form of torture. It is disturbing, sickening, sad and pathetic that it is an accepted practice in this country. It really is that bad. And trust me, this coming from me is saying something. How anyone can spend not just days or weeks or months or even years in it, but DECADES is just beyond me. Literally makes me shudder to think about.

And it makes me sad that we'll clearly never have politicians ballsy enough to tackle the desperate issue of prison reform in this country.

[skinsfan1523]

As someone who has been in solitary confinement, there is absolutely no way that anyone could ever convince me that it is not a form of torture. It is disturbing, sickening, sad and pathetic that it is an accepted practice in this country. It really is that bad. And trust me, this coming from me is saying something. How anyone can spend not just days or weeks or months or even years in it, but DECADES is just beyond me. Literally makes me shudder to think about.

And it makes me sad that we'll clearly never have politicians ballsy enough to tackle the desperate issue of prison reform in this country.

While I agree with you that it is harsh, although I've never been locked up so not from experience, what would your alternative be? I mean there are a lot of guys out there that have no regard for human life, you can't just let them kill people and there be no repercussions. I mean if I'm in for life and I know I'm never getting out, what do I care if I get another life sentence. I have no answer for that question.

[PeterMP]

As someone who has been in solitary confinement, there is absolutely no way that anyone could ever convince me that it is not a form of torture. It is disturbing, sickening, sad and pathetic that it is an accepted practice in this country. It really is that bad. And trust me, this coming from me is saying something. How anyone can spend not just days or weeks or months or even years in it, but DECADES is just beyond me. Literally makes me shudder to think about.

And it makes me sad that we'll clearly never have politicians ballsy enough to tackle the desperate issue of prison reform in this country.

 

I agree that we need massive prison reform, and we need a lot more focus on education and rehabilitation.

 

But from my perspective a large part of the issue, is what do you do with people like those described in the piece. 

 

It is a chicken and egg situation as long as their is an aggressive, violent, and active criminal presence in prisons, it makes very difficult if not impossible to carry out rehabilitation.

 

How are you going to reform and run affective education programs when other people in the prison are willing to kill people?

 

This is really the only reason that I actually support the death sentence.

 

If we can't put you in prison and have you "behave", then in order to have a prison system that actually works and does reform, I think we have to consider execution.

[Riggo-toni]

Drone strikes!

[Skinz4Life12]

As someone who has been in solitary confinement, there is absolutely no way that anyone could ever convince me that it is not a form of torture. It is disturbing, sickening, sad and pathetic that it is an accepted practice in this country. It really is that bad. And trust me, this coming from me is saying something. How anyone can spend not just days or weeks or months or even years in it, but DECADES is just beyond me. Literally makes me shudder to think about.

And it makes me sad that we'll clearly never have politicians ballsy enough to tackle the desperate issue of prison reform in this country.

 

You were in solitary? Holy **** man, what did you do?

[Botched]

I don't understand why some people think putting a person in a tiny cage for decades is an acceptable punishment, while giving them a quick death is barbaric and morally corrupt. It's mind-boggling.

 

Some people are nothing but poison to the world. Keeping them alive and in a cell 23 hours a day, with no chance of release, serves absolutely no purpose for anyone. Just execute them...for everyone's sake.

 

If you're already doing a life sentence and then kill someone, it should be an automatic execution. That shouldn't even be a debate.

[PokerPacker]

always worth a read when the question of Solitary Confinement comes up:

HellHole

[Mr. Sinister]

As far as rehabilitation is concerned, I definitely agree that more can be done, and  that some people can change, and become productive members of society and all that, but where do you draw the line? I think that many people who end up in prison for things like child molestation, murder, rape, etc were already stripped of their humanity at some point in one way or another, before they arrived there, and I don't think that there is any way to recover from that kind of mindset. Much like children, I don't think violence/isolation is the answer, because it only further enrages the inmate. I also don't think lengthy sentences with parole are the answer either, because I think people get swept up in the violent prison culture and lose what little bit of humanity they have left, falling further down the rabbit hole, or they develop better methods a drug dealing, robbing, murdering, etc, so they don't get caught next  time.

 

Even automatic execution is iffy. I mean it's not like you can pick and choose who you hastily execute. What if someone is innocent, and instead of maybe getting a new case and having new evidence presented while they are on death row, they get offed before then? What if they killed for a reason other than sheer insanity/lack of remorse?

 

I honestly don't see any dramatic solution besides making prison/punishments so severe that it deters far more people from committing acts that will get them put there.

[Kilmer17]

I don't understand why some people think putting a person in a tiny cage for decades is an acceptable punishment, while giving them a quick death is barbaric and morally corrupt. It's mind-boggling.

 

Some people are nothing but poison to the world. Keeping them alive and in a cell 23 hours a day, with no chance of release, serves absolutely no purpose for anyone. Just execute them...for everyone's sake.

 

If you're already doing a life sentence and then kill someone, it should be an automatic execution. That shouldn't even be a debate.

There are other reasons to oppose the death penalty.

[Big Weirdo]

always worth a read when the question of Solitary Confinement comes up:HellHole

Great read. Perfectly outlines everything that is wrong with this tactic. Goes into great detail as to what causes it (overcrowding, lack of mental health-care, environment).

[Spartacus87]

Wow, interesting timing on this article.

 

I was just reading an article the other day about the rise of the Aryan Brotherhood, into a group that's generally considered the most dangerous prison gang in the country.

 

The murder of Clutts at Marion is one of the keystone moments that the article touches on - although that article said that Silverstein and Clutts had some issues with each other for a long time, predating the murders of the black inmates.  It just came to a boiling point after those murders.

 

My main takeaway is that supermax prisons are scary places and the Aryan Brotherhood is an especially scary group of people.

[Kilmer17]

Can you link that? Sounds interesting