At six hours apart, in the same cell block of the United States Penitentiary at Marion, Illinois, two federal correctional officers were murdered. Thomas Silverstein, a prisoner being escorted back from the shower in handcuffs, positioned himself beside another inmate’s cell. That inmate, Randy Gometz, reached through the bars with a homemade key, unlocked the cuffs, and passed Silverstein a knife. Silverstein then stabbed Officer Merl Klutz forty times.
Hours later, another prisoner, Clayton Fountain, attacked a group of officers. When Officer Robert Hoffman pulled Fountain off a colleague, Fountain turned and killed him too. Both killers were already serving multiple life sentences. The director of the Bureau of Prisons admitted there was no punishment the system could legally add that would deter them.
The government’s response was not a temporary measure. The Bureau placed the entire prison under what it called a permanent lockdown. Every prisoner was confined to his cell for nearly the entire day. No work, no communal dining, no group movement, no yard.
That lockdown lasted twenty-three years. From it came something the United States had never had before: the supermax, the practice of sealing the most dangerous prisoners in individual concrete boxes indefinitely. To understand Marion, you must begin where its predecessor ended. Alcatraz had opened in 1934 and built the most fearsome reputation of any prison in the country.
By the early 1960s, that reputation was its only remaining asset. Salt air had corroded the concrete and steel for three decades, maintenance costs were absurd for a facility holding only a few hundred men, and in June 1962 three prisoners escaped into the water and were never found, puncturing the claim that nobody ever got off the island. There was also a deeper problem. American corrections had committed itself publicly to rehabilitation.
Alcatraz, with its silence rules and punishment cells, was a nineteenth-century artifact inside a twentieth-century philosophy. It was expensive and politically indefensible. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy approved its replacement.
Alcatraz closed on March 21, 1963. That same year, in a quiet stretch of farmland in Williamson County, Illinois, the United States Penitentiary at Marion opened. It was announced as a modern, humane, rehabilitation-focused facility with an explicit promise of an abuse-free institution. It was designed to hold five hundred men described in congressional testimony as adult male felons who are difficult to control.
Not monsters. A management problem to be solved with programs and staff. Physically it resembled nothing of the fortress it replaced. No stone walls, no Gothic cells, no island.
Marion was low, flat, and functional, ringed by double chain-link fencing and razor wire. From the road it could have been a maintenance depot. The promise did not survive the decade. In 1968, Marion implemented a program called the Control and Rehabilitation Effort, known everywhere as CARE.
It was a behavior modification program. Prisoners deemed disruptive were placed in solitary confinement or forced through group therapy sessions where they sat before staff and other inmates and were systematically pressured to change. CARE was solitary confinement with a curriculum attached. It established the operating principle Marion would run on for four decades: receive the specific individuals other prisons could not manage and break their resistance through isolation.
By 1973, that logic had hardened into architecture. Marion created control unit cells, segregation cells where a prisoner could expect to spend twenty-three to twenty-four hours a day. The Bureau of Prisons began transferring men into them from federal institutions across the entire country. If a prisoner anywhere in the system seriously disrupted operations, he could be moved to Illinois and placed in a control unit cell.
The population was never limited to men who had killed someone. The bureau’s own criterion was behavior that seriously disrupted operations, a phrase covering a range considerably wider than violence. The men transferred in included a substantial number the bureau categorized as incorrigibles. Some assaulted people, some did not.
A meaningful portion were political prisoners in the plain sense: Black Panther Party associates, members of the American Indian Movement, Puerto Rican nationalists, anarchists, members of the Japanese Red Army. In 1979, the bureau designated Marion the only level six institution in the United States, a category created for a single building to indicate that it sat above maximum security. The government had spent sixteen years building the anti-Alcatraz and produced something considerably harder than Alcatraz had ever been. The 1970s produced a run of escape attempts difficult to believe happened at the same facility within a single decade.
In 1971, a prisoner climbed two fences, reached Kansas City, and walked into an FBI office, saying he wanted public attention for his water desalination invention. In October 1975, five prisoners walked out the front door using a radio converted into a remote control that opened every door in their path. In 1978, a woman named Barbara Anne Oswald hired a helicopter, pulled a gun on the pilot, and ordered him to land inside the prison yard to lift out Garrett Brock Trapnell, a hijacker serving life. The pilot, a Vietnam veteran, disarmed her and shot her dead.
Seven months later, her seventeen-year-old daughter Robin boarded a DC-9 with fake dynamite strapped to her body and demanded Trapnell’s release. She negotiated for ten hours, then surrendered. The dynamite was fake. Every escape was used inside the Bureau of Prisons as evidence of the same conclusion: the problem was insufficient control.
Isolation expanded. Movement contracted. By the early 1980s, the numbers describing who was inside that building had become extraordinary. In 1983, a third of Marion’s prisoners were serving life sentences or terms of seventy years or more.
Two years later, forty percent were serving time for murder, manslaughter, or assault with intent to kill. Consider what that meant operationally. A prison disciplinary system runs on the ability to make a situation worse. But if a man is already serving multiple life sentences with no possibility of release, already housed in the highest security institution in the federal system, with no federal death penalty in force, the system has run out of consequences.
The Bureau of Prisons had spent twenty years concentrating every man who could not be controlled by consequences into one building and then discovered it had nothing left to apply. Silverstein had entered the federal system as a bank robber. Inside, he became a member of the Aryan Brotherhood. The bureau moved him from institution to institution as violence escalated, each transfer sending him to a harder facility with a more concentrated population.
In 1981 he was implicated in killing an inmate. Then in September 1982, Silverstein and Clayton Fountain killed another prisoner, stabbing him sixty-seven times and dragging his body up and down the catwalk in front of other cells. Silverstein received another life sentence. Marion’s control unit was designed around the assumption that restraint plus supervision equals safety.
A prisoner leaving his cell was cuffed. Officers escorted him. Officers were unarmed. The system depended on the physical restraints working and on the cells around the escort route remaining secure.
Both assumptions failed on the same morning, because of other prisoners. Silverstein did not defeat his handcuffs. Gometz did, from inside a locked cell, with a key made inside the prison. The knife came from the same place.
A control unit built to isolate men from one another had been quietly reassembled by the men inside into a network capable of moving tools and coordinating timing. That is what the bureau took from October 1983. If one officer made a mistake, you retrain the officer. If a population can rebuild a functioning conspiracy inside a system designed to prevent exactly that, the only answer is to stop letting them out of the cells at all.
In November 1983, the entire prison went into the permanent lockdown. Every prisoner was confined to his cell for the overwhelming majority of every day. Communal dining ended. Group work ended.
Group movement ended. A man in a control unit cell lived in a space of roughly six by eight feet, concrete floor, concrete walls, a poured concrete slab for a bunk, a stainless steel toilet and sink combined into one fixture. The door was solid with a narrow slot for food trays. Light was artificial and controlled from outside.
Out-of-cell time in the most restrictive housing came to a minimum of about five hours per week. Rectal cavity searches were routine, performed on prisoners moving to and from visits, medical appointments, and legal calls. The prisoners sued. In 1984, a class action was filed in the case Bruscino against Carlson, naming the director of the Bureau of Prisons.
The prisoners alleged excessive force, routine brutal rectal searches, the sheer quantity of time sealed in cells, and a transfer process with essentially no due process. The district judge made a surprise visit to the prison in December 1986. Fifty prisoners testified to beatings. The magistrate found those fifty not credible and believed the single prisoner who said no beatings occurred.
The prisoners lost. On appeal, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals did not dispute that conditions were terrible. It described them as ghastly, sordid, and horrible. It said the whole picture was depressing in the extreme.
And then it ruled that none of it was unconstitutional. The court reasoned that the controls formed a unitary and integrated system for dealing with the nation’s least corrigible inmates, that dismantling any piece would destroy the rationale of the whole, and that the prisoners’ own attorneys had offered no suggestion for how order might be maintained by any other means. It noted that men with no expectation of release and no danger of execution cannot be deterred by the threat of punishment. The court also recorded in a single dry sentence that these allegations had aroused the interest of Amnesty International, which had criticized the management of the prison.
A federal appellate court examined an American prison, described the conditions as ghastly, sordid, and horrible, acknowledged an international human rights organization had taken interest, and concluded the Constitution permitted all of it because nobody could think of anything else to do. That ruling became the legal foundation the American supermax was built on. It told every corrections department in the country that this model would survive judicial review. They built accordingly.
Through the late 1980s and 1990s, state after state constructed its own version. California opened Pelican Bay in 1989. By the mid-1990s, supermax facilities existed in a substantial majority of American states, holding tens of thousands of people. In 1994, the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility opened at Florence, Colorado, designed from the ground up around the control unit model Marion had improvised.
The end of the line had moved to Colorado. The two men who started it ended where the logic ended. Clayton Fountain, designated the most dangerous prisoner in the federal system, was moved to the Federal Medical Center in Springfield, Missouri, into an arrangement built specifically for one man, with no meaningful contact with other prisoners for the remainder of his life. Inside that cell, he became religious.
Fountain became a lay member of the Trappist order, the Cistercians of the Strict Observance, a Catholic monastic order whose members traditionally live in silence, in enclosure, in a fixed cell, under a rule of prayer and contemplation. A priest visited him. He kept the hours. The harshest sanction the United States government could construct turned out to be physically close to a monastic cell.
He died in his cell in 2004 at forty-nine. Thomas Silverstein was placed under an order of indefinite solitary confinement. He entered isolation in October 1983. He was moved through a series of arrangements, a specially constructed cell at Leavenworth, then eventually ADX Florence, the supermax his own actions had helped bring into existence.
He spent approximately thirty-five years in solitary confinement, the longest continuous period of any prisoner in the history of the federal system. In February 2019 he was taken to a hospital in Colorado for heart surgery. He did not go back. Thomas Silverstein died on May 11, 2019, at sixty-seven, of complications from that surgery.
He had not been in general population with another human being since 1983. Marion’s lockdown ended in 2006, not because a court ordered it and not because the bureau concluded it had been a mistake, but because the function had moved elsewhere. ADX Florence had absorbed the most dangerous prisoners, and Marion had become an enormously expensive facility running a punishing regime on a population that no longer justified it. The bureau downgraded it to medium security.
Men now walk to a dining hall in a building where walking anywhere had been the thing the entire architecture existed to prevent. Twenty-three years of permanent lockdown ended with a paperwork reclassification. The story does not stop there. In March 2008, the Bureau of Prisons quietly established a new unit inside Marion called a communication management unit.
It was not a supermax. Prisoners were not held in twenty-three-hour isolation. What was controlled was the ability to speak to anyone outside. All written correspondence was reviewed.
All telephone calls were live-monitored, recorded, analyzed, and conducted in English. A request to speak another language required ten days’ notice. A general population prisoner gets three hundred minutes of phone time a month. A CMU prisoner gets one call per week, fifteen minutes maximum, and the warden can reduce it to three minutes.
All visits were non-contact through glass. Prisoners and staff alike called these units little Guantanamo. Litigation later established that the bureau had no formal written policy governing who should be placed in a CMU and no defined process for earning a way out, and that roughly sixty percent of those held were Muslim against six percent of the federal prison population overall. The unit still operates today.
Alcatraz closed in 1963 in large part because everybody could see it. Marion ran a regime substantially harsher than anything Alcatraz ever operated, for twenty-three years, in a low concrete building in a county most Americans could not find on a map, with almost no cultural presence at all. There is no film about Marion. There is no ferry.
There is no gift shop. The lesson American corrections took from the closure of Alcatraz was not that the regime had been too harsh. It was that the island had been too visible.