23 Hours a Day in Closet-Size Cell : Marion: America’s Toughest Penitentiary

A two-lane blacktop curves through woods and waters, through a remote refuge for deer, ducks and quail. At the end of the road, a gray concrete fortress looms.

This is the U.S. Penitentiary at Marion, home to some of America’s most dangerous criminals. The squat prison is surrounded by eight bulletproof guard towers and a pair of 14-foot-high fences topped with curling razor wire,

Nowhere in America is there a tougher federal prison. Nowhere is there a place where so many have so little freedom, a prison with such a brutal image it chills even hardened convicts.

Marion “houses the most vicious, unmanageable and manipulative inmates in our penal system today and perhaps in the history of the penal system in the United States,” U.S. Magistrate Kenneth Meyers wrote in a 1985 ruling.

The Last Stop

Alcatraz once had such a reputation. Now it’s Marion. It gets the inmates who’ve been in trouble in other prisons. This is the last stop.

For 3 1/2 years, Marion inmates have been locked in their cells up to 23 hours a day. For almost as long, a legal fight has been waged to lift this permanent lock-down that Marion calls its “high-security operation.”

At Marion, most inmates live more than 22 hours a day in cells that pace off at 8-foot-4-inches by 6-foot-8-inches. They don’t get out to work or to eat. Meals are delivered through a slot and are eaten while sitting on the floor or on beds; there are no chairs or tables.

Handcuffs Stay On

Most inmates wear handcuffs when they leave their units. Some also wear leg shackles and a black box on their handcuffs to prevent them from picking the lock. Even inmates examined by a doctor or dentist are handcuffed.

This is the only federal prison in America without family contact visits. When relatives arrive, touching is forbidden and glass separates them from the inmates. They talk on phones.

Marion even has a courtroom, to avoid moving inmates outside for legal proceedings.

“With such a limited amount of movement . . . and ways for guys to improve themselves . . . the whole place is almost just like a hole,” said Charles Perry, a bank robber.

The lock-down was ordered after a bloody week in October, 1983, in which two guards and an inmate were killed in separate incidents. One guard was stabbed 40 times. But Marion rocked with violence before that.

Violent Past

From February, 1980, to June, 1983, eight inmates were killed by other prisoners, and there were 14 attempted escapes, 10 group disturbances and 82 serious assaults on inmates or staff, one report said.

In a 1986 sampling of 288 prisoners, Marion found 46.9% had histories of escape or attempted escape and almost 40% attempted or committed murder while incarcerated.

But the wisdom of Marion’s hard-line attitude has stirred debate among penologists, psychologists and others in the outside world.

Critics say it is dangerous.

“If we treat them like animals and call them animals and all they do is sit there and build up hostility and anxieties, what’s going to happen when they get out?” asked Michael Mahoney, director of the John Howard Assn., a prison watchdog group. “I think they’re going to be a walking time bomb.”

ACLU Critical

The National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union has also been critical of Marion.

But prison officials argue that this approach is the only way to keep peace.

“We don’t have a better answer right now,” said Warden Gary Henman. “I think the model of Marion right now is working. Right or wrong, it’s working.”

Henman said violence had declined at Marion, with three inmates killed by other prisoners and no escape attempts since the lock-down. He asserted, too, that concentrating the worst inmates here made other federal prisons safer.

Researchers have studied Marion repeatedly. In 1984, two experts working for a congressional committee recommended dispersing the nation’s toughest inmates among maximum security units that would have to be built in prisons around the country and installing a mental health unit at Marion. Inmates now in need of psychiatric care are commonly sent to other prisons.

Depressed, Anxious, Angry

A current study seeks to determine the mental effects of the confinement, using inmates at the Leavenworth, Kan., penitentiary as a control group. According to Henman, the study was finding Marion inmates slightly more depressed and anxious than those at Leavenworth, and he said he was not troubled by that.

“We don’t want them to be happy here,” he said. “This is not a Boy Scout camp. . . . We want them to get off their duffs and work themselves out.”

Other experts quoted in court records have said that feelings of despair, desperation, anger and frustration are widespread at Marion.

Marion’s attention now centers on a class-action suit filed on behalf of inmates, challenging the high security and alleging brutality in the early weeks of the lock-down.

Charges of Abuse

About 50 inmates testified in 1985 hearings that they were victims or witnesses of beatings or abuse--some said they were pummeled with riot batons, knocked unconscious or stomped by guards.

But Meyers, the federal magistrate who presided over the hearings, said he saw “no credible evidence to support a pattern and practice of prison abuse.”

U.S. District Judge James Foreman accepted Meyers’ recommendations in February and ruled that prison conditions did not constitute cruel and unusual punishment.

An attorney for the inmates, Nancy Horgan, disagrees.

“What Marion is about is total control--physical and psychological,” she said. “It’s punishment for the sake of punishment. It tends to make prisoners crazy, violent or depressed. We say no one--even if they are the worst prisoners in the world--should be treated like this. It’s dangerous.”

Restrictive Conditions

Henman, warden since June, conceded that conditions were restrictive but added, “It’s very unfair to project Marion as being no-care, inhumane, hurting inmates. . . . We don’t make it any more uncomfortable than we have to.”

Marion was built in 1963 on the edge of the Crab Orchard National Wildlife Refuge in southern Illinois, 43,000 acres of land and lakes filled with white-tail deer, Canada geese and oak, hickory and cedar trees.

That same year, Alcatraz, the fabled fortress in San Francisco Bay, closed. It wasn’t until 1979, however, after the Bureau of Prisons created a new classification system, that Marion became its first and only prison at Level 6--most secure.

Marion has been called the new Alcatraz. There are similarities.

Infamous Inmates

The Alcatraz roster of infamous inmates included Al Capone, George (Machine Gun) Kelly, and murderer Robert Stroud, the so-called “Birdman of Alcatraz.” Marion houses Christopher Boyce, convicted of selling government secrets to the Soviet Union as the “falcon” in “The Falcon and the Snowman,” and Edwin Wilson, an ex-CIA agent convicted of shipping explosives to Libya.

Jack Henry Abbott, whose prison letters to writer Norman Mailer became the critically acclaimed book “In the Belly of the Beast,” did time here.

Escape attempts from Alcatraz became the stuff of Hollywood scripts, but Marion’s record could rival them.

In 1978, a woman hijacked a helicopter and tried to free an inmate. The pilot shot and killed her in a gun battle 2,000 feet in the sky, blades whirring.

Average Stay Not Long

Months later, her daughter hijacked a plane in a unsuccessful effort to free the same man, Garrett Brock Trapnell.

Three years before that, five inmates fled after building an electronic device that operated like a wireless garage door opener.

Marion now holds about 350 inmates, only 0.8% of all 42,000 federal prisoners. The average sentence of a Marion inmate is 43 years, but the average length of stay, usually preceded by time served elsewhere, is 27.2 months.

Horgan contends that Marion is the “ultimate warehouse.”

But Henman said it is “a new beginning . . . Marion is not a dead end.”

Henman said of 373 inmates at Marion in October, 1983, only 83 remain. Of those who left, 14 returned to Marion.

Clean, Calm, Quiet

“Our graduation success is fantastic,” Henman said.

Visitors to Marion notice immediately how clean it is--its floors gleam with wax--and how calm. Indeed, it is eerily quiet.

The only sounds on the way to the cell houses are the metallic clanging of blue painted grilles when they shut and the humming motors when they open.

Hallways are empty. So is the chapel, gym and outdoor recreation field.

The two-tiered cell houses, with flesh-colored paint flaking on the bars, look like endless rows of animal cages. Each dimly lit cell has a toilet, small mirror, sink, bed, cabinet and black-and-white TV. Many inmates pass the time watching soap operas.

Marion is divided into nine living units, each designated by a letter of the alphabet. The K unit houses Boyce and six other infamous inmates put there for protection from other prisoners.

‘Nit-Pick You to Death’

The elite unit, B, a pre-transfer area, holds about 50 inmates. Unlike other prisoners, they eat in a dining room and can walk in the unit hallway by day. They also work in Marion’s only industry, making electrical cables for military equipment.

The most physically dangerous live in H unit. When they leave their cells, their hands and legs are shackled and they have three guards, two of whom wield 2 1/2-foot batons. They are in their cells 23 hours a day.

Prisoners move to less restrictive units by exhibiting good behavior. But attorneys contend that such things as having an extra pair of socks can earn an “incident report” and delay progress.

“They nit-pick you to death,” said Lawrence Daniel Caldwell, convicted of armed robbery, who said he received reports for having felt-tip pens and a 5-inch ruler.

Simple Infractions

“It reinforces the attitude (that) if you have the power, absolute power corrupts and it really doesn’t matter as long as you don’t get caught,” added Caldwell, a B-unit inmate who has made three escape attempts.