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Thomas (Terrible Tommy) Silverstein

2010-11-04T12:13:00.000-07:00

Thomas "Terrible Tom" Silverstein

Convicted of murdering Federal Correctional Officer Merle E. Clutts.

Prisoner at ADX Florence, the United States supermax federal prison in Florence, Colorado.

Thomas Silverstein Interview

Thomas Silverstein entered the federal prison system in 1975 after he was convicted of three bank robberies that he pulled with his father and his uncle. He was 19 years old. Three years later, he was convicted of murdering an inmate who had run afoul of the Aryan Brotherhood, the most feared white gang in prison. Silverstein was identified as a member of the AB, convicted, and sent to the federal prison in Marion, Illinois, the harshest in the country at the time.

A judge later overturned this conviction after ruling that the witnesses against Silverstein, which included a prison guard, were not believable. His ruling came too late, however. By then, Silverstein had been convicted of a second prison murder -- this time the strangulation of Robert Chappelle, a high-ranking member of the DC Blacks. Another murder soon followed. It involved Raymond "Cadillac" Smith, the national leader of the DC Blacks prison gang who had sworn to avenge his fellow gang member's death.

Prison records show that Smith made several attempts to murder Silverstein, yet prison officials kept the two men in cells close to each other. Silverstein and another inmate, Clay Fountain, broke out of an exercise area and caught Smith as he was leaving a shower area. They stabbed him 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.

Officer Merle E. Clutts was assigned to help bring order to the cellblock where Silverstein and Fountain were housed. Silverstein claims Clutts immediately began harassing him, but an investigation by the federal Bureau of Prisons and FBI would later clear Clutts of any wrongdoing. Silverstein would claim those two probes were whitewashes. Regardless, Silverstein became obsessed with Clutts and spent months plotting his murder.

On October 22, 1983, as Silverstein was returning to his cell from his weekly shower, handcuffed and escorted by three guards, he paused outside the H-unit cell of another inmate, Randy Gometz. In the flash of an eye, Gometz reached through the bars, unlocked Silverstein's cuffs with a hidden key and passed him a "shank"--a homemade knife. Silverstein broke away from the two guards escorting him and cornered the third, officer Merle Clutts, who'd been distracted by another prisoner. By the time Silverstein was subdued, Clutts had been fatally wounded, stabbed more than forty times.

Later that same day, Clay Fountain, performed a similar handcuff trick, killed another officer, Robert L. Hoffman, and stabbed two others in the same housing unit. Like Silverstein, Fountain was already serving three life terms for the murders of other inmates. Both men were reputed members of the Aryan Brotherhood, with a pathological hatred of corrections officers; both had virtually nothing to lose.

See also: Aryan Brotherhood; AB members & associates ; Aryan Brotherhood of Texas; AB Trial 2006; Dallas Scott; Clay Fountain

The Caged Life

Is Thomas Silverstein a prisoner of his own deadly past...or the first in a new wave of locked-down lifers?
By Alan Prendergast
published: August 16, 2007

When the goon squad showed up at his place at five in the morning, Tommy Silverstein knew something was up. He wasn't accustomed to greeting guests at such an ungodly hour — much less a team of corrections officers, helmeted and suited up for action.

In fact, Silverstein wasn't used to company at any hour. His home was a remote cell, known as the Silverstein Suite, in the special housing unit of the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas. He'd been cut off from other inmates and all but a few emissaries from the outside world for more than two decades.

He stayed in the Silverstein Suite 23 hours a day. His interactions with staff typically amounted to some tight-lipped turnkey delivering his food through a slot in the cell door. The only change of scenery came when an electronic door slid open, allowing him an hour's solitary exercise in an adjoining recreation cage. Visitors were rarely permitted, and entire years had gone by during which he never left the cell.

But this day was different. Silverstein could think of only a couple of reasons why so many well-padded, well-equipped officers would be at his door, ordering him to strip for a search. Cell shakedown? Time for a game of hockey, with Tommy as the puck? No, that was a captain leading the squad. Something big.

A transfer.

So it came to pass that on July 12, 2005, U.S. Bureau of Prisons inmate #14634-116 left his cage in Kansas for one in Colorado. Security for the move was tighter than Borat's Speedo — about what you'd expect for a former Aryan Brotherhood leader convicted of killing four men behind prison walls. (One conviction was later overturned; Silverstein disputes the second slaying but admits the other two.) The object of all this fuss didn't mind the goon squad. He was enjoying the view — and hoping that the move signaled the end to his eight-thousand-plus days of solitary confinement. Maybe, just maybe, his decades of uneventful good behavior had paid off.

"They said for me to keep my nose clean, and maybe one day it'd happen," he recalled recently. "So I foolishly thought this was it. If you saw me in that van, you'd think I was Disneyland-bound, smiling all the way."

But the smile vanished after Silverstein reached his destination: the U.S. Penitentiary Administrative Maximum, better known as ADX. Located two miles outside of the high-desert town of Florence, ADX is the most secure prison in the country, a hunkered-down maze of locks, alarms and electronic surveillance, designed to house gang leaders, terrorists, drug lords and other high-risk prisoners in profound isolation. Its current guest list is a who's who of enemies of the state, including Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, shoe bomber Richard Reid, plane bomber Dandenis Muñoz Mosquera, abortion clinic bomber Eric Rudolph and double-agent Robert Hanssen.

When it opened in 1994, ADX was hailed as the solution to security flaws at even the highest levels of the federal prison system. Much of the justification for building the place stemmed from official outrage at the brutal murders of two guards in the control unit of the federal pen in Marion, Illinois, during a single 24-hour period in 1983. The first of those killings was committed by Thomas Silverstein, who was already facing multiple life sentences for previous bloodshed at Marion. The slaying of corrections officer Merle Clutts placed Silverstein under a "no human contact" order that's prevailed ever since, and it gave the Bureau of Prisons the perfect rationale for building its high-tech supermax. Although he never bunked there until 2005, you could call ADX the House that Tommy Built.

What greeted Silverstein two years ago was nothing like Disneyland. His hosts hustled him down long, sterile corridors with gleaming black-and-white checkerboard floors that reminded him of A Clockwork Orange or some other cinematic acid trip. One set of doors, then another and another, until he finally arrived at the ass-end of Z Unit, on a special range with only four cells, each double-doored. His new home was less than half the size of the Silverstein Suite and consisted of a steel slab with a thin mattress, a steel stool and desk, a steel sink-and-toilet combination, a steel shower and a small black-and-white TV.

Stripped of most of his small store of personal belongings, Silverstein had little to do besides take stock of his eighty-square-foot digs. The Silverstein Suite was a penthouse at the Plaza compared to this place. There were steel rings on the sides of the bed platform, ready for "four-pointing" difficult inmates. A camera mounted on the ceiling to record his every move. If he stood on the stool and peered out the heavily meshed window, he could get a glimpse of a concrete recreation cage and something like sky. So this was his reward for all those years of following the rules — 24-hour surveillance in his own desolate corner of the Alcatraz of the Rockies. He was no longer simply in the belly of the beast. He was, he would later write, "stuck in its bowels, with no end/exit in sight."

The double doors muffled sound from outside. But over time, Silverstein realized that there was one other prisoner on the range. He shouted greetings. The man shouted back. He asked the man how long he'd been in the unit. Four years, the man said.

Silverstein told the man his name. His neighbor introduced himself: Yousef. Ramzi Yousef. Convicted of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the one that killed six people and injured a thousand. Nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the al-Qaeda leader who recently confessed to planning that failed effort to bring down the towers as well as the 9/11 attacks.

His keepers had put Silverstein in the beast's bowels, all right — right next to the one man in the entire federal system more loathed than he was. Still, it was somebody to talk to. Shouting to Yousef was the first conversation with another inmate that Silverstein had managed in almost twenty years.

But talking wasn't allowed. Within days, a new barrier was erected in the corridor outside his cell, preventing any further communication between the two residents of the range. Inmate #14634-116's transfer to ADX was now complete.

In the late 1980s, Pete Earley, a former Washington Post reporter, persuaded Bureau of Prison officials to grant him an unprecedented degree of access to inmates and staff at the Leavenworth penitentiary. Earley was allowed to walk the yard without an escort, to interview inmates without official monitoring, to talk candidly with veteran corrections officers about the dangers and frustrations of their work.

The resulting book, The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison, is one of the most vivid works of prison reportage ever published. Among several unsettling portraits of career criminals and their keepers, the most memorable character is probably one Thomas Silverstein, who was then being housed, a la Hannibal Lecter, in a zoo-like cage in Leavenworth's basement, where the fluorescent lights stayed on around the clock to make it easier to watch him. Wild-haired and bearded — the BOP would not allow him a razor or a comb — Silverstein spent hours talking into Earley's tape recorder, describing his violent past and the petty torments he claimed the guards were putting him through in an effort to drive him insane.

Earley's book made Leavenworth's dungeon monster seem not only rational but quite possibly human. Granting a journalist unfettered access to him was a public relations blunder the BOP has been unwilling to repeat. Silverstein hasn't been allowed to have a face-to-face interview with a reporter for the past fifteen years. When Westword recently asked to visit him, ADX warden Ron Wiley promptly denied the request, citing "continued security concerns." But then, Wiley and his predecessors haven't let any journalist inside ADX to interview any inmate since 2001 because of "continued security concerns" (see related story).

Although he readily agreed to an interview with Westword, Silverstein isn't a huge fan of the press, either. He remains friendly with Earley, but he's learned to be wary of hit-and-run tabloid writers following in his wake, eager to write about "the most dangerous prisoner in America." Most of what the outside world knows about him, if it pays any attention at all, is the fragmentary image presented in The Hot House; he's a captive of his own legend, like some prehistoric insect trapped in amber. His letters seethe with contempt for lazy "plagiarists" who have simply appropriated snatches of Earley's account as well as for those who've produced long magazine pieces or cheeseball cable programs about the Aryan Brotherhood that largely rely on the lurid tales of government snitches.

"For some odd reason the media pees when Master snaps his fingers," he wrote recently. "I wouldn't call 'em 'mainstream' any more cuz there isn't anything mainstream about 'em. They're just lackeys for the powers that be."

Silverstein's response to the "injurious lies" spread about him has been to launch his own information campaign at www.tommysilverstein.com. That's right — America's most solitary prisoner, a man who's been inside since before the personal computer was invented and has never been allowed near one, has his own website, maintained by outside supporters who forward messages to him and post his responses.

"He's got a pretty impressive network," says Terry Rearick, a California private investigator who has communicated with Silverstein by letter and phone over several years. After the two lost touch for a time, Rearick got a call from a woman in England on Silverstein's behalf.

The same woman posts regularly on the website, where Silverstein himself duels at length with his detractors. (A similarly heated debate has ignited over the wording of Silverstein's entry on Wikipedia; his defenders and his critics alternately revise the account to suit their competing versions of his crimes.) Some visitors to his site dismiss him as a textbook psychopath. But Silverstein contends that if people understood the grim context in which the killings at Marion took place, the snitch games and psychological warfare and organized violence of prison life, they wouldn't be so quick to demonize him.

It's a strangely disconnected argument — a garbled dialogue between cultures on different planets. Most of the visitors to his website know little about Silverstein's world, just as he knows little about theirs. He's been in prison for the past 32 years, and much of what he's learned about life on the street since he was put in solitary in 1983 has come from reading or watching television. No American prisoner, not even Robert Stroud, the Birdman of Alcatraz, has ever been condemned to such a walled-off existence for such a long period of time. Many of Stroud's years of solitary confinement were spent in relative ease at Leavenworth; he had not only frequent visitors, but also a full-time secretary. Even his seventeen-year stretch in Alcatraz allowed for much more daily communication with others than Silverstein has had.

"I'm amazed that he's not stark, raving mad," says Paul Wright, the editor of Prison Legal News, who's corresponded with Silverstein for years and published some of his writing. "He's been in total isolation for almost 25 years. The only people I can think of that have been held in anything remotely like this in modern times are some of the North Korean spies held in South Korea."

Yet the no-contact conditions imposed on Silverstein are becoming less unique by the day. There are now 31 supermax prisons in the country, with more under construction, including Colorado's own 948-bed sequel to the current state supermax, known as Colorado State Penitentiary II. They are costly on several levels — the operational expense per cell can be double that of a less-secure prison, and the rate of mental illness in solitary confinement far exceeds that of the general prison population — but lockdown prisons are all the rage with a vengeful public. Increasingly, they are being used not for short-term punishment (disciplinary segregation) but for long-term confinement of hard-to-manage inmates (administrative segregation), whose privileges keep shrinking. Colorado, for example, no longer allows journalists to interview its supermax inmates except by mail.

"The phenomenon is disturbingly common," says David Fathi, a staff attorney for the ACLU's National Prison Project. "If it's disciplinary confinement, it's finite — when you're done, you're done. But with administrative segregation, there's a real lack of transparency about what a prisoner can do to earn his way out."

In the federal system, the past decade has seen the rise of "special administrative measures," or SAMs, which are imposed on terrorists or other inmates whose communications with the outside world "could result in death or serious bodily injury to persons." There are now at least two dozen SAMs cases in federal prisons, including Yousef and Zacarias Moussaoui, whose access to mail, phone calls, media interviews or other visits are extremely limited or banned outright. At present the restrictions must be approved by the U.S. Attorney General, but the Bush administration is considering changes that would allow wardens at ADX or other high-security prisons to designate inmates as terror threats and thus ban them from all media contact — even if they haven't been convicted on terrorism charges yet, Fathi notes.

Silverstein isn't a SAMs case. He still has his website and his mail (although he claims it's frequently withheld or "messed with" in other ways). But he may be the prototype of what the government has in mind for other infamous prisoners — to bury them in strata of supermax security to the point of oblivion.

Responding in letters to questions about the psychological impact of his isolation, Silverstein struggles to find the right words. "Trying to explain it is like trying to explain what an endless toothache feels like," he writes. "I wish I could paint what it's like."

In an article a few years ago, he called solitary confinement "a slow constant peeling of the skin, stripping of the flesh, the nerve-wracking sound of water dripping from a leaky faucet in the still of the night while you're trying to sleep. Drip, drip, drip, the minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, constantly drip away with no end or relief in sight."

In a Darwinian world, predators have to adapt or die, just like their prey. Tommy Silverstein arrived in the federal prison system at a critical phase of its evolution, when the number of inmate assaults on other inmates and staff was rising sharply and officials were looking at the idea of control units as a way to neutralize the growing threat posed by prison gangs. Silverstein quickly became a symbol of the problem — and the inadequacy of the proposed solution. It's not a stretch to say that the Marion control unit helped to make him what he became, just as the mayhem that erupted there helped to reshape the American prison system.

Before he reached the nether regions of the BOP, Silverstein's criminal career had been thoroughly unremarkable. Born in 1952 in California, he'd grown up in a middle-class neighborhood in Long Beach, but he was bullied by other kids who thought he was Jewish. (According to The Hot House, Silverstein's biological father was a man named Thomas Conway, whom his mother divorced when Tommy was four years old; she later married a [Jewish] man named Silverstein.) As a teenager, he ripped off houses for money to buy drugs; his sister, Sydney McMurray, says he was battling a heroin addiction and problems with his volatile, controlling mother.

"We were taught never to throw the first punch, but never to walk away from a fight," McMurray recalls. "My brother started getting into trouble because he was running away from a violent environment at home. Then he got into drugs, and he became a brother I never knew."

At nineteen, Silverstein landed in San Quentin for armed robbery. Paroled, he was soon arrested again for series of robberies — pulled with Conway and another relative — that yielded less than $1,400. This time, he went into the federal system on a fifteen-year jolt. He was 23 years old, and his life on the streets was already over.

At Leavenworth Silverstein became closely associated with Aryan Brotherhood members who allegedly controlled the heroin trade inside the prison — close enough that when convict Danny Atwell was found stabbed to death, supposedly because he'd refused to be a mule for the heroin business, Silverstein and two other AB members were charged with the murder. In 1980, he was convicted at trial on the basis of shifting testimony from other inmates and sentenced to life in prison. A federal appeals court later ruled that much of the testimony should never have been allowed and threw out the conviction. But by that time, Silverstein was in the Marion penitentiary and facing more murder charges.

Marion opened in 1963, the same year that Alcatraz closed. It was intended to be not just a replacement for the Rock but an improvement, with a more open design and modern rehabilitation programs. Yet by the late 1970s, it had the most restrictive segregation unit in the BOP; not coincidentally, it was also the most violent prison in America, a dumping ground for gang leaders and crazies. Between 1979 and 1983, the prison logged 81 inmate assaults on other inmates and 44 on staff; 13 prisoners were killed. BOP reports issued in 1979 and 1981 proposed turning the entire facility into a "closed-unit operation."

Confined to a one-man cell in the control unit 23 hours a day, Silverstein says he spent much of his time learning how to draw and paint. "I could hardly read, write or draw when I first fell," he explains. "But most of us lifers are down for so long and have so much time to kill that we actually fool around and discover our niche in life, often in ways we never even dreamt possible on the streets. We not only find our niche, we excel."

Prison officials worried that Silverstein was finding his niche in other areas, too. Long-simmering disputes between white and black gangs had a way of coming to a boil in the control unit. In 1981, D.C. Blacks member Robert Chappelle was found dead in his cell. He'd apparently been sleeping with his head close to the bars and had been strangled with a wire slipped around his neck, plied by someone exercising on the tier. Silverstein and another convicted killer, Clayton Fountain, received life sentences for the crime; inmates who testified for the prosecution claimed the two had boasted of it.

Silverstein has always denied killing Chappelle. (Another inmate later claimed to have done the deed, but investigators found his confession at odds with the facts.) Yet even if he hadn't been convicted in court, the suspicion that he was responsible was sufficient to trigger more violence. Shortly after the slaying, the BOP saw fit to transfer one of Chappelle's closest friends, D.C. Blacks leader Raymond "Cadillac" Smith, to the Marion control unit from another prison. Within days, Smith had tried to stab Silverstein and shoot him with a zip gun. Silverstein and Fountain responded by cutting their way out of an exercise cage with a piece of hacksaw blade and paying a visit to Smith while he was in the shower. Smith was stabbed 67 times, in what Silverstein still describes as an act of convict self-defense.

"Everyone knew what was going on and no one did anything to keep us apart," he told Earley. "The guards wanted one of us to kill the other."

At the time, there was no federal death penalty for inmate homicides — and not much the system could do to Silverstein, who was already serving multiple life sentences in the worst unit of the worst prison the BOP had to offer. But some staffers, concerned about Silverstein's outsized rep among white inmates, apparently did their best to keep him in check. In the months that followed Cadillac's death, Silverstein began to regard Officer Merle Clutts, a bull-headed regular of the control unit, as his chief tormentor.

Silverstein has given different explanations about what Clutts did to deserve such attention. Clutts trashed his cell during shakedowns and withheld mail; he smudged his artwork and taunted him; he even tried to set him up for attack by other inmates, Silverstein has suggested. Silverstein claims he told Earley "the whole story," but only pieces made it into The Hot House. Earley won't comment, saying he no longer discusses Silverstein with other reporters because of past misunderstandings.

The BOP has denied that Clutts harassed Silverstein. Whatever the source of the feud might have been, there's no question that Silverstein became fixated on Clutts. One study by Harvard psychiatrist Stuart Grassian suggests that prisoners in control units sometimes experience "the emergence of primitive, aggressive fantasies of revenge, torture, and mutilation" of the guards who watch over them.

Silverstein thought about Clutts, and he thought about the difficulties involved in getting to his enemy when he was allowed out of his cell only one hour a day, shackled, escorted by three guards.

Locked down for life, he had a mountain of time to consider the problem.

One day in solitary is pretty much like another. Prisoners have different strategies for filling up their days, but there are always more days to come.

In his cell at Florence, 54-year-old Tom Silverstein usually rises before dawn, catches up on letters and reads, waiting for the grand event that is the delivery of his breakfast. He goes to rec for an hour, comes back to the grand event that is lunch, showers and cleans his cell. Time for some channel-flipping on the small black-and-white TV, in search of something fresh amid the religious chatter and educational programs he's watched over and over. More reading, some yoga. Then dinner, more TV - he's a sucker for Survivor, Big Brother and other "reality-type shows" — and so to bed.

When he was in the Silverstein Suite at Leavenworth, Silverstein had access to paintbrushes, pens and other art supplies. At ADX, he's only permitted pastels, colored pencils and "cheap-ass paper," he reports; consequently, he hasn't drawn a lick since he's been there. He says that every few weeks, he's moved from the cell with the heavily meshed window to one with no window at all, then back again a few weeks later. There are rare, glorious interruptions in the routine — a visit with sister Sydney last May, an occasional lawyer checking in. Visitors sit in a booth outside the cell and talk to him on a phone; he sits shackled on the other side of a glass partition and talks back. But these dazzling bursts of conversation quickly fade into a muddle. Did the last lawyers come before or after his sister? Silverstein isn't sure.

"It's all a blur, a dream state of mind," he writes. "Like my memories. When I venture back to my yesterdays, it's hard to distinguish fact from fiction."

Yet there is one memory, one day that stands out from all the rest — the day that started it all. Twenty-four years later, Silverstein is still in the position of analyzing, defending and regretting the act that has defined his fate. But nothing can explain away the act itself, a murder that was meticulously planned and ruthlessly executed.

Marion wasn't designed to be a supermax. Control unit prisoners had to be shackled and escorted to the shower every day, and the guards permitted them to have brief conversations with other inmates in cells along the way. On October 22, 1983, Silverstein was on his way back from his shower when another inmate in a rec cage called over one of his three escorts — Merle Clutts. Now flanked by only two guards, Silverstein paused at the cell of one of his buddies, Randy Gometz, and struck up a conversation.

Before the guards knew what was happening, Gometz had reached through the bars, uncuffed Silverstein with a hidden key — and supplied him with a shank. Silverstein broke away from the guards and headed toward Clutts, now isolated at the far end of the tier. "This is between me and Clutts!" he shouted.

He stabbed the officer forty times before the dying Clutts could make it off the tier. Hours later, Silverstein's friend Clayton Fountain pulled the same handcuff trick and attacked three more guards in the control unit, fatally wounding Robert L. Hoffman Sr.

Two federal officers slaughtered in one day, on what was supposed to be the most secure unit in the entire BOP, sent the system into shock. The bureau's response was to forge ahead with the long-considered plan to turn all of Marion into a control unit while whisking Silverstein and Fountain into even more restricted quarters. (Fountain died in 2004 at the age of 48).

For years prison activists attempted to challenge the Marion lockdown in court, charging that the prison staff set about beating other prisoners and subjecting them to "forced rectal searches" as payback for the deaths of Clutts and Hoffman. In 1988, a federal judge ruled that the inmate accounts of staff brutality were simply not credible.

By that point, Silverstein and the bureau were already on the road that would lead to ADX — a place where communication among inmates, and physical contact between inmates and staff, could be strictly controlled and all but eliminated.

If the guard killings in Marion happened at any federal prison today, the perpetrators would almost certainly face the death penalty. Silverstein has suggested more than once that death would have been a more merciful option in his case.

"Even though we may not execute people by the masses, as they do in other countries, our government leaders bury people alive for life in cement tombs," he writes. "It's actually more human to execute someone than it is to torture them, year, after year, after year."

Silverstein's last taste of some kind of freedom came in the fall of 1987. Rioting Cuban prisoners broke into his special cell in the Atlanta federal penitentiary and set him loose. For one surreal week, he was able to roam the yard while the riot leaders dickered with federal negotiators over the release of more than a hundred prison staffers who'd been taken hostage.

Then the Cubans jumped him, shackled him and turned him over to the feds. Surrendering Silverstein had been high on the BOP's list of demands for resolving the situation, right up there with releasing all hostages unharmed.

Contrary to the bureau's expectations, Silverstein didn't butcher any guards during his precious days of liberty. He didn't harm anyone. He suggests the episode shows that he's not the killing machine the BOP says he is, and that he could exist in a less restrictive prison without resorting to violence.

Terrible Tommy says he's changed. He claims to have gone 21 years without a disciplinary writeup. Other long-term solitaries go berserk, smearing their cells with feces and "gassing" their captors with shit-piss cocktails. Not him.

"The BOP shrinks chalk it up as me being so isolated I haven't anyone to fight with," he writes, "but they're totally oblivious to all the petty BS that I could go off on if I chose to. I can toss a turd and cup of piss with the best of 'em if I desired. What are they going to do, lock me up?

"But I just have more self-control now, after 25 years of yoga, meditation, studying Buddhism and taking some anger-management courses. All that goes unacknowledged."

McMurray says her brother has learned a great deal about patience and suffering over the years. "He's more like the brother I knew on the outside years ago," she says. "I have spoken with the guards who deal with him every day, and they don't have a bad thing to say about him. It's the ones in administration who are trying to make it as difficult as they can for him.

"But my brother has a spirit that is unbreakable. In Leavenworth, at least he could draw. It's been more of a challenge for him in this situation, but he hasn't let it break his spirit."

Silverstein has told reporters that he wants to apologize to the families of the men he killed, "even though it was in self-defense." He has recanted some oft-quoted lines from his interviews with Earley about "smiling at the thought of killing Clutts" and feeling the hatred grow every time he was denied a phone call or a visit. He says he regrets the grief he's caused and no longer seethes with hatred.

Silverstein has been cut off from the operations of the Aryan Brotherhood for decades. His story is still told among the faithful, in an effort to keep his memory alive among the younger members, but he disputes that the group is a white supremacist organization. His own paintings include an ethnically diverse array of portraits. "I think it's worth noting that Tommy is no longer a racist, if he ever was," says Prison Legal News editor Wright.

Twice a year, prison officials hold a brief hearing to review Silverstein's placement in administrative segregation. For many years, the hearings were held in the corridor outside the Silverstein Suite in Leavenworth. Silverstein stopped attending because the result was always the same: no change. At ADX, he's taken to filing grievances, claiming that the move has left him more isolated, with fewer privileges than ever before.

"I am being punished for good conduct under ploy of security reasons," he wrote last year in a formal appeal of his situation. "The goal of these units is clearly to disable prisoners through spiritual, psychological and/or physical breakdown."

In his response, Warden Wiley pointed out that Silverstein is provided with food and medical care, "daily contact with staff members" and access to television, radio and reading materials.

"It's ridiculous to call a nameless guard that shoves a food tray through the hole in the door...a source of meaningful 'human contact,'" Silverstein fired back. "I request placement in general population."

He took his appeal to the regional office, then to headquarters, where it was swiftly denied. "You are serving three consecutive life terms plus 45 years for bank robbery and murder, including the murder of Bureau of Prisons staff," an administrator noted. "You are a member of a disruptive group and an escape risk. Your heinous criminal and institutional behavior warrant a highly individualized and restrictive environment."

Wiley declines to comment on Silverstein's treatment at his prison. Last spring, a group from Human Rights Watch was allowed to tour certain areas of ADX. The group wasn't let in Z-Unit, where Silverstein lives, or anywhere near A-Unit — the "hole," where most disciplinary cases are housed. But they saw enough to realize that the staffers who bring meals "do not converse regularly, if at all, with the inmates." Despite claims that clinical psychologists checked on prisoners every other week, "several inmates said they had not spoken to a psychologist in many months," and such conversations tended to be brief.

The group also reported that many ADX prisoners are trapped in a catch-22 predicament — they've been sent there directly after sentencing but have never been provided any opportunity to "progress" to a less restrictive setting because of the nature of their crime. Every placement review finds that the "reason for placement at ADX has not been sufficiently mitigated."

"No matter how well they behave in prison, they cannot undo the past crimes that landed them in prison, generally, and then ADX, specifically," Human Rights Watch director Jamie Fellner wrote to BOP director Harley Lapin.

Some crimes, it seems, are beyond redemption.

Silverstein got a copy of the do-gooders' report and immediately fired off a letter to the group, suggesting that they come see him in Z-Unit if they want the real story about the government's "failed and draconian penal system."

No one from the group has come to see him yet. Silverstein waits for them in his box within a box. He knows that the bureau just wants to bury him and that he turned the key himself. But he also knows he didn't build that box all on his own.

His earliest possible date of release is eighty-eight years away. He has nothing but time.

Clayton Fountain 89129-132

2010-11-04T12:12:00.000-07:00

Clay Fountain

Clayton Anthony Fountain (1955 -- 2004) was born into a military family at Fort Benning, GA. As a young man he himself entered the armed services. While stationed in the Philippines in the 1970’s Clayton murdered his immediate military superior, for which he was incarcerated and consigned to the Federal Penitentiary at Marion, IL. While at Marion, Clayton murdered three prisoners and one guard. These acts merited Clayton's designation as “Most Dangerous Prisoner” in the federal system.

In 1983 Clayton was moved to the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri. There, he was confined in a “Special Housing Unit” (SHU) where he lived for over twenty years in virtual isolation from everyone except for specially authorized personnel. In 2004, Fountain died of a heart attack.

See also: Aryan Brotherhood; AB members & associates ; Aryan Brotherhood of Texas; AB Trial 2006; Dallas Scott; Thomas Silverstein

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Why the Death Penalty

Officer Hoffman was murdered by prisoner Clay Fountain. Fountain managed to slip off his handcuffs and stab one of the three officers escorting him back to his cell. The other two officers rushed in. One of these officers was injured and the other, Officer Hoffman, was killed attempting to protect his fallen comrade. Following this unprovoked, brutal stabbing, inmate Fountain waved his arms in a victory expression as he walked down the cell ranges in front of other inmates. This inmate was serving a life sentence for the murder of a staff sergeant while in the United States Marines. He had repeatedly engaged in extremely violent acts, including the murders of inmates in 1979, 1981, and 1982. He was serving three life sentences at the time he murdered Officer Hoffman......

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"Inmates were frequently killing each other not because of any actual slight but because of the color of their skin. In one incident, Silverstein and an A.B. associate, Clayton Fountain, who, according to a friend, was eager to "make his bones," stabbed a leader of the rival gang D.C. Blacks sixty-seven times in the shower, then dragged his bloody corpse through the tiers while other white inmates chanted racial slurs. After Silverstein was charged with murdering another inmate, he boasted in court, "I have walked over dead bodies. I've had guts splattered all over my chest from race wars."

On a Saturday morning in the fall of 1983, at Marion federal prison, in southern Illinois, Thomas Silverstein waited for guards to take him for a routine shower. Marion, which is about a hundred miles southeast of St. Louis, was opened in 1963, the year that Alcatraz closed, and was designed to cope with the profusion of violent gang members--in particular, men like Silverstein, who by then had been convicted of murdering three inmates and had earned the nickname Terrible Tom (as he often signed his letters, with looping strokes).

Before taking Silverstein to the bathroom, the guards frisked him, to make sure he hadn't fashioned any weapons. (He often had pens and other sketching tools for his art work.) They also shackled his wrists. Three guards surrounded him, one of whom was a hard-nosed, nineteen-year veteran with military-style gray hair named Merle Clutts. Clutts, who was to retire in a few months, was perhaps the only guard in the unit who didn't fear Silverstein; he once reportedly told him, "Hey, I'm running this *beep* You ain't running it."

As the guards escorted Silverstein through the prison, he paused outside the cell of another gang member--who, as planned, suddenly reached between the bars and, with a handcuff key, unlocked Silverstein's shackles. Silverstein pulled a nearly foot-long knife from his conspirator's waistband. "This is between me and Clutts," Silverstein hollered as he rushed toward him.

One of the other guards screamed, "He's got a shank!" But Clutts was already cornered, without a weapon. He raised his hands while Silverstein stabbed him in the stomach. "He was just sticking Officer Clutts with that knife," another guard later recalled. "He was just sticking and sticking and sticking." By the time Silverstein relinquished the knife--"The man disrespected me," he told the guards. "I had to get him"--Clutts had been stabbed forty times. He died shortly afterward.

A few hours later, Clayton Fountain, Silverstein's close friend, was being led through the prison when he paused by another inmate's cell. In an instant, he, too, was free. "You *beep* want a piece of this?" he yelled, waving a blade. He stabbed three more guards. One died in the arms of his son, who also worked in the prison. Fountain reportedly said that he didn't want Silverstein to have a higher body count.

It was the first time in the history of American federal prisons that two guards had been killed on the same day. "You got to understand," Thompson said. "Here were guys in restraints, locked in the Hole in the most secure prison, and they were still able to get to the guards. It sent a simple message: We can get to you anywhere, anytime."

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"On October 22, 1983, a Marion inmate named Thomas Silverstein managed to shake the federal prison system to its core. Returning to his cell from his weekly shower, handcuffed and escorted by three guards, Silverstein paused outside the H-unit cell of another inmate, Randy Gometz. In the flash of an eye, Gometz reached through the bars, unlocked Silverstein's cuffs with a hidden key and passed him a "shank"--a homemade knife.

Silverstein broke away from two of his captors and cornered the third, Officer Merle Clutts, who'd been distracted by another prisoner. By the time Silverstein was subdued, Clutts had been fatally wounded, stabbed more than forty times.

Later that same day, another H-unit inmate, Clay Fountain, performed a similar handcuff trick, killed another guard and stabbed two others. Like Silverstein, Fountain was already serving three life terms for the murders of other inmates. Both men were reputed members of the Aryan Brotherhood, with a pathological hatred of corrections officers; both had virtually nothing to lose. Prison legend has it that Fountain didn't want Silverstein to "get ahead" in the body count.

The murders triggered a lockdown of the entire prison--a lockdown that, with few modifications, persists to this day. In testimony before Congress and in media interviews, BOP officials still invoke the deaths of the two guards as ample justification for their policies regarding predatory inmates."

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"In one infamous 24-hour period in 1983, two AB lifers escaped their handcuffs and killed two guards in the most secure unit of the federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois. They did it, most chroniclers of the event agree, for sport as much as spite, simply because they could -- spurring the outcry for a federal supermax that eventually led to the construction of ADX, the "Alcatraz of the Rockies." Yet despite being housed in the bowels of ADX, Mills and Tyler Davis "The Hulk" Bingham have allegedly continued to direct AB activities in other prisons, including the killing of black inmates in Illinois and Pennsylvania during a racially charged turf war in the late 1990s."

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Clayton’s religious conversion

Clayton writes: Not long after my placement in the SHU I underwent a five year “trial-by-fire purification” process in which God worked to purge me of the inner ‘poisons’ (that is, hatred, rage, bias, bitterness, revenge, vengeance, violence, and so forth) that I had foolishly permitted to control much of my life so that I not only failed to make responsible choices and decisions for my life, but also ended up in prison. (From a letter to Fr Mark.)

Clayton’s conversion process resulted in his receiving Catholic baptism and confirmation both on Easter Sunday, April 19, 1992.

Simultaneous to Clayton’s moral turnaround and religious conversions, he embarked on an intellectual adventure as well. Through correspondence courses, Clayton was granted, first a high school diploma, and later an AA degree (in 1997), and a Bachelor of Specialized Studies (in 2000), the latter two both from The Ohio University. In addition, he was awarded the Catechetical Diploma from the Catholic Distance University in 2001. At the time of his death, Clayton was already enrolled in the Master’s Degree program at CDU with hopes to seek admission to a Doctor of Theology program

In his Catholic period, Clayton made the acquaintance with our Fr Robert and with Fr Paul Jones, one of our other two Family Brothers. These became Clayton’s spiritual mentors. Through their guidance, Clayton was able to sustain and deepen his conversion. He creatively turned his solitary confinement into a rich and full eremitical life, follow a fairly detailed daily regime of prayer, study, exercise, and work.

The monks of Assumption Abbey are proud to include Clayton among their members. His life resembles in many ways the most dramatic stories of the early Desert Fathers. One is reminded, too, of the story of St Bernard. Return to Clairvaux after a trip, Bernard came across a murderer being led by the authorities to his execution. Bernard spoke to the captain: “Give him to me, and I will put him to death myself,” referring, of course, to the to sin and conversion to Christ in the Cistercian monastic way of life.

Prison Guards killed at Marion Federal Prison

2010-11-04T11:53:00.000-07:00

Prison Guards killed at Marion Federal Prison

Two Prison Guards were killed at Marion Federal Prison in 1983. David Hale talks about the killings and the prison's environment at that time.
. keywords:
. David Hale, Correctional Officer, prison, prison guard, Merle E. Clutts, Robert L. Hoffman, Thomas "Terrible Tommy" Silverstein, Clayton Fountain, inmate stabbings, 1983, guards killed, Marion Federal Prison, United States Penitentiary Marion, Federal Bureau of Prisons, BOP, lockdown, control unit, supermax

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Control Units To SUPERMAX

2010-04-23T22:04:00.000-07:00

In this article we will trace the history of control unit prisons in the United States from their beginnings in the early 1970's to the situation in 1992, as a means to understanding their function within the prison system. However, any theory involving prisons is ultimately a theory of the society of which they are a part. Indeed, Dostoevsky wrote that if you want to understand a society you should look inside its prisons. Thus, we have attempted to analyze the development of control unit prisons within the context of society as a whole.

The term ``control unit'' was first coined at United States Penitentiary (USP) at Marion, Illinois in 1972 and has come to designate a prison or part of a prison that operates under a ``super-maximum security'' regime. Control unit prisons may differ from each other in some details but all share certain defining features:

1. Prisoners in a control unit are kept in solitary confinement in tiny cells (six by eight feet is usual) for between twenty-two and twenty-three hours a day. There is no congregate dining, no congregate exercise, no work opportunities and no congregate religious services.
2. These conditions exist permanently (temporary lockdowns occur at almost every prison) and as official policy.
3. The conditions are officially justified not as punishment for prisoners but as an *administrative* measure. Prisoners are placed in control units in *administrative* moves and since there are no rules governing such moves (in contrast to *punitive* moves), prisoners are denied any due process and prison officials can incarcerate any prisoner in a control unit for as long as they choose, without having to give any reason.

The present article is structured as follows. Sections 2 and 3 will describe the history and ongoing conditions at USP Marion, which has been the focus of control unit development and, from 1983 until now, the premier example of a control unit prison. Section 4 deals with the imminent replacement of Marion by a new, purpose-built control unit prison in Florence, Colorado. Section 5 documents the proliferation of control units, modelled on Marion, in state prison systems across the country. In Section 6 we analyze the function of control units, contrasting the official claims with the facts. In Section 7 we broaden the analysis to look at imprisonment in the United States as a whole and draw conclusions as to the true purpose of prisons. Section 8 describes the state of public opinion on issues regarding prisons and the role of the media in shaping and maintaining that opinion. Section 9 is a brief summary.

Early History of the Marion Control Unit

USP Marion, located in rural southern Illinois, opened in 1963, the same year the federal prison at Alcatraz closed. Alcatraz had gained a reputation as the ``end of the line,'' the federal system's most repressive prison. Prominent gangsters, such as Al Capone, and Robert Stroud, the famous ``Bird-Man,'' were imprisoned there, as were celebrated political prisoners like Rafael Cancel Miranda, the Puerto Rican National Hero, and Morton Sobell, co-defendant with Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. However, the brutality of conditions at Alcatraz proved too controversial in an era when prisons were supposedly committed to the rehabilitation of prisoners.

Marion was constructed to hold 500 ``adult male felons who are difficult to control,'' according to Congressional testimony in 1971 by George Pickett, then superintendent of Marion (Mitford, 1973: 199). Nonetheless, Alcatraz's prisoners were not transferred directly to Marion. Presumably, the BOP considered that the move might spark off significant protest and they wanted to test out the new facility before sending the most politicized prisoners there. Not until the late 1960's were some of Alcatraz's former prisoners transferred to Marion (Breed and Ward, 1984: 10). At about the same time, Marion began its transformation into the new end of the line, a true heir to Alcatraz in its barbaric treatment of prisoners.

The transformation began with the prison's implementation in 1968 of a behavior modification program called Control and Rehabilitation Effort, or CARE. Prisoners in the program were put in solitary confinement and otherwise coerced into participating in group ``therapy,'' which consisted of intense psychological ``attack sessions.'' The purpose was to bring prisoners under the staff's control as totally as possible and turn them against other prisoners (Mitford, 1973: 134-5). 1972 marked a turning point in the program. In July, prisoners began a work stoppage to protest a guard's beating of a Mexican prisoner (Cancel Miranda, 1990). Officials confined all prisoners to their cells for six days, then put seven suspected strike leaders into segregation (solitary confinement). The strike abated briefly, then began again. Prisoners were then subjected to a mass reprisal to end the strike, with sixty men locked in segregation and enrolled in the CARE program, establishing the Control Unit. In 1973, H-Unit at Marion was officially designated the Long-Term Control Unit (Adams v. Carlson, 1973: 621-2; Anderson, 1975; Gruenberg, 1975).

The Control Unit was used to expand the CARE program to include prisoners from throughout the federal prison system ``whose behavior seriously disrupted the orderly operation of an institution,'' according to official federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) policy (Breed and Ward, 1984: 10). This marked a return to a feature of BOP practice missing since Alcatraz's closing - the concentration in a single prison of those the BOP targeted for special punishment. Like some of the prisoners in Marion's traditional solitary confinement unit, the Disciplinary Segregation Unit (I-Unit), prisoners in the Control Unit were under ``administrative'' rather than disciplinary segregation. Officially, administrative segregation differed from disciplinary segregation in that it was not considered punishment, but rather an administrative response to the prison's purported inability to manage the prisoner by normal means (Adams v. Carlson, 1973: 606).

Prior to the establishment of the CARE program and Control Unit at Marion and similar behavior modification programs and facilities in other prisons, prison officials at least went to the trouble of setting guidelines on under what circumstances and for how long a prisoner should be subjected to solitary confinement. For example, the 1959 Manual of Standards of the American Correctional Association, noting that segregation could have a ``damaging effect upon some inmates'' and that ``[e]xcessively long periods [in segregation] for punishment defeat their own purpose by embittering and demoralizing the inmate,'' recommended ``a few days'' of punitive segregation for most infractions, and an additional thirty to ninety days of administrative segregation in extraordinary circumstances (Adams v. Carlson, 1973: 606). Evidently intending precisely to demoralize prisoners, Marion officials ignored these guidelines for prisoners in the Control Unit. Indeed, in 1975 the General Accounting Office reported that some prisoners in the CARE program had been in the Control Unit for its entire three year existence (Gruenberg, 1975).

In 1978, the BOP added a security-level six category to its prisoner classification system, and in 1979 Marion was designated the only level six prison. That same year a BOP report contemplated turning Marion into a ``closed-unit operation,'' and a 1981 report detailed plans to convert the entire prison into a control unit (Breed and Ward, 1984: 11, 22). Stiffer controls inspired prisoner hunger and work strikes throughout the early 1980's. The longest of these- ``reported to be the longest and most peaceful [strike] in U.S. prison history''- began in September 1980, when the warden, Harold Miller, refused to respond to the following list of concerns, which had been presented to him the preceding month:

1. Allow Native Americans to practice purification rites.
2. Allow religious services in segregation and the Control Unit.
3. Allow Muslims to wear the fez and turban.
4. Stop the use of boxcar cells (cells having solid doors).
5. Stop guards from harassing and beating prisoners.
6. Extend visiting and make the visiting room more comfortable.
7. Improve medical care.
8. Improve diet by using real meat.(Susler et al., 1984: 8)

The strike was never broken, but ended when the administration closed the prison factory in January 1981 (Lassiter, 1990: 76; Breed and Ward, 1984: 12). This extraordinary act of resistance was the result of the BOP's practice over the previous decade of sending its most dissident and politicized prisoners to Marion.

In two separate incidents on October 22, 1983, two guards were killed by prisoners in the Control Unit. Although no rebellion resulted and the prisoners responsible were identified, prison officials seized the opportunity to violently repress all prisoners and implement their 1981 plans. The ``lockdown'', or cell-confinement of all prisoners, was imposed on October 27, 1983. The next day, the warden declared a state of emergency. Sixty guards, including specially trained Special Operations Response Team (SORT) members, were transferred to Marion from other institutions to assist in the lockdown. In addition, eight BOP executive staff members and three senior wardens were sent to ``monitor'' the procedure (Carlson, 1984). A guard at the time, David Hale, recalls how a Marion official, evidently uninhibited by the team of outside monitors, set the tone for the ensuing shakedown:

``I seen them carry one inmate down the corridor with a guard on each leg and one on each arm. The assistant warden comes down the hall and grabs the inmate's testicles and starts yanking on them, saying, 'Who's doing it to who now, boy?' Well that was a signal for every guard in the place to do whatever the hell he wanted. I can't describe it to you- I never seen beatings like that. At least fifty guys got it, maybe more.'' (Lassiter, 1990: 76)

The guards were outfitted with helmets, plastic shields, bullet-proof vests and other special gear, and their name tags were removed, making it impossible to identify guards who were involved in abuses[3]. They administered severe beatings while conducting cell shakedowns and forcing cell transfers, using fists, boots, and three-foot riot bludgeons, each with a steel ball affixed to the end. These ``rib-spreaders,'' which have been part of regular equipment at the prison ever since, are designed to separate intercostal rib cartilage and inflict pain without breaking bones or leaving bruises. Prisoners were punched in the face, choked, knocked to the ground, and driven head-first into walls and metal doors. Four prisoners were beaten while in the prison hospital. In many cases, prisoners were handcuffed during the beatings.

Prisoners were subjected to illegal and excessive x-ray examination for contraband. In many cases, the guards ripped off prisoners' underclothing and conducted forced rectal searches. Several prisoners were confined to individual cells for up to four days, handcuffed behind their backs and wearing only underwear. One prisoner testified that he was injected with an unknown drug which caused him to lose consciousness for two days. Personal property was destroyed in the raid. Articles for religious worship, glasses and false teeth were destroyed or seized and never returned. For example, guards desecrated Alan Iron Moccasin's medicine bag and confiscated sacred articles of his Lokata religion. A minister's Koran was taken in the raids, and he was given a Bible in its place.

Prisoners were locked in their cells around the clock. Most privileges were curtailed or eliminated. Congregate religious worship was eliminated. Visits were restricted. After revelations about the beatings surfaced, attorneys were denied entry to meet with prisoner clients for a period of several days in November.

Within days, the Control Unit was expanded from its original seventy-two cells to include all 353 Marion prisoners. The entire population at Marion was collectively, severely and permanently punished in a calculated move by the BOP.

Ongoing Conditions of the Lockdown

USP Marion comprises nine living units, B through I and K. Conditions vary between units. The five general population units, B through F, are located on Marion's East Corridor. Among these units, D, E and F are the most restrictive. C-Unit is slightly less restrictive than these three units and holds prisoners who are being considered for transfer to B-Unit. B-Unit is a pre-release unit with conditions similar to those in most maximum security prisons. On the North Corridor are located the prisons' four ``special living units.'' I-Unit, the Disciplinary Segregation Unit, holds prisoners from the East Corridor units who are on disciplinary or administrative segregation, and those who are being considered for transfer to H-Unit. G-Unit is similar to I-Unit and also holds prisoners in protective custody. H-Unit, or the Control Unit, holds prisoners who are on long-term administrative segregation (Bruscino v. Carlson, 1985: 491-2). K-Unit, or the Director's Unit, holds prisoners assigned there specifically on the order of the Director of the Bureau of Prisons (Dickey, 1990: 69). The following description of conditions at Marion, unless otherwise noted, applies to units D, E and F. At the end of this section we will briefly describe some of the differences between these and the remaining units.

D, E and F-Unit prisoners are let out of their cells one and a half hours each day. By comparison, in the rest of the Federal prison system prisoners spend an average of thirteen hours per day out of their cells. The hour and a half of daily ``recreation'' is usually spent in the narrow hallway immediately outside the cell. This time provides little stimulation and no real exercise opportunity. One hour of outdoor recreation in a fenced area is offered once a week in winter and three times a week in summer. The only chance prisoners have to take showers is during the exercise period.

The cell itself measures six by eight feet. Meals are taken through the bars and eaten in the cell- there is no congregate dining. Beds are concrete slabs with pads laid on top of them. At each of the four corners of the bunk is a ring so that the men can be strapped down whenever prison authorities think that it is appropriate. Jackie Leyden from National Public Radio reports that ``guards have the power to chain a man spread-eagled and naked to a concrete bunk'' (Leyden, 1986). Prisoners have reported being chained like that for days at a time.

No one makes any pretensions about rehabilitation. The only jobs are barber and porter. Prisoners may take correspondence courses, but only one at a time. The prison feeds educational tapes into the cells via closed circuit TV, but no instruction, discussion or group classrooms exist. There are no large-group religious services.

Prison officials tamper with letters and legal mail. While it is illegal for prison officials to look into prisoners' legal documents, they do so with impunity. Moreover, they often withhold or send back personal correspondence [5].

Visitation rights are severely restricted and no contact visits are ever allowed. The men can never touch their children, wives or other loved ones who come to visit. Prisoners must conduct conversations through Plexiglas and over a phone, which is monitored. A guard remains present, watching and recording the entire affair. Few visitors venture so far to endure such painful conditions. Prisoners often ask loved ones not to visit while they are at Marion in order to avoid the humiliation that comes with this situation. As a result, one usually finds the visiting room virtually empty. Prisoners are allowed two ten-minute phone calls per month.

Despite the Plexiglas partition separating them from visitors, prisoners are strip-searched after every visit. Finger probes of the rectum may be conducted ``whenever there is reasonable suspicion'' that the prisoner is hiding contraband [6]. A general idea of what constitutes ``reasonable suspicion'' is given by the fact that every prisoner who leaves the prison for any reason is strip-searched and subjected to the ``finger wave'' on his return, despite being shackled and guarded the whole time. Whenever a prisoner is not separated from staff by bars, he is handcuffed behind his back and escorted by two guards equipped with rib-spreader bludgeons.

Only the vaguest and most arbitrary rules exist at Marion. These whimsical guidelines all revolve around pleasing the guards and warden. The guidelines allow for disciplinary actions at Marion for trivial matters, such as failing to replace salt and pepper packets on a food tray, or hanging wet clothes to dry on the bars of a cell. In particular, no rules govern graduation of prisoners to relatively less restricted status within Marion. Prisoner promotions and demotions are officially at the discretion of the assistant warden. However, the power to veto any promotion effectively resides in every guard in the form of the despised Incident Reports, or ``shots,'' citations for rule violations. One of the most common shots is ``disobeying the direct order of a guard,'' which can be used to cite any ``misbehavior'' a guard desires. A single shot wipes out all good-conduct time a prisoner has earned, and puts the prisoner back at the beginning of ``the program'' that ostensibly governs the progression out of Marion to a level five prison. (Leyden, 1986: 2-3)

B and C-Units are the stepping-stones to release from Marion. Prisoners in C- Unit spend slightly more time out of their cells, and are considered for transfer to B-Unit. B-Unit serves as an ``honor unit,'' the last stage before transfer out of Marion. Here prisoners can spend all day outside their cells, eat meals in the dining room, have lockers and suffer restraints only for legal visits. They also work seven hours a day in the prisons' factory for twenty-two cents an hour, which makes the monthly labor bill for the fifty prisoners less than $2000, during which period they produce $250,000 worth of electrical cable for the Department of Defense (Lehman, 1990: 30). However, placement in C and B-Units is completely arbitrary. A prisoner must have one continuous year of good conduct before being considered for C-Unit, a total of eighteen continuous months of good conduct for consideration for B-Unit, and a total of two continuous years of good conduct for consideration for release to a level five prison. There is no specification of what ``good conduct'' is, so even without the intercession of guards and their shots, no clear system for progressing from one unit to the next exists.

At the other end of the spectrum from B and C-Units are the North Corridor Units, G, H, and I-Units. In these units, what minute breathing space exists in D, E and F-Units is further restricted. Cells contain only a toilet, sink and concrete bed. Prisoners spend only one hour a day out of their cells, are strip-searched before and after exercise periods, are allowed only one phone call per month and three showers per week, and are put in both handcuffs and leg-irons and escorted by three guards, one holding their handcuffs, when they are out of their cells. Even this level of punishment is superseded in I and H-Units' ``boxcar'' cells, which have solid second front doors that cut off sound and air circulation.

Despite the gradations of repression, all of Marion functions as a control unit, where the men are under constant and total control of the guards. John Campbell, a prisoner at Marion, comments, ``No one belongs in an environment where he's being buried alive, where he's in a- like a tomb for the dead... And the police have total control over you, and they know they have total control, and they abuse that control frequently, either on a psychological level or a physical level.'' Another prisoner, Steve Layton, adds, ``They try to drag up the monster in you. It eats on a person, on a person's mind.'' (Leyden, 1986: 2)

Marion to be Replaced by Florence

Marion was not originally built as a control unit prison. It has thus been inadequate for the task of implementing the even tighter control of prisoners which BOP Director J. Michael Quinlan, in testimony before a Congressional subcommittee in the fall of 1989, said would constitute an improvement upon Marion's existing regimen (Lehman, 1990: 36-7). The BOP has decided to replace Marion with a control unit prison in Florence, Colorado specifically designed to achieve this goal. Scheduled to open in 1993, the prison's state-of-the-art technology will help to eliminate even the minimal levels of human contact prisoners have at Marion. It has proved very difficult to find out exact details of the new control unit prison to be built at Florence. When a Freedom of Information Act request for information on plans for Florence was submitted to the BOP, the BOP denied the request on the basis that the plans did not yet exist [7]. If that is the case, then the local newspapers appear to know more about the new prison than its designers. The following information comes from such newspapers (Miniclier, 1991: A1; Henson, 1990: B1; O'Keefe, 1991; Chronis, 1990: B1; Harmon, 1991: B2; Associated Press, 1990; Ritter, 1991: 13).

The Marion replacement is one of a complex of four federal prisons being built just south of Florence. The control unit will house 550 prisoners and is designed so that one guard will be able to control the movements of numerous prisoners in several cell-blocks by way of electronic doors, cameras and audio equipment. ``We'll be able to electronically open a cell door, shut it behind the inmate and move him through a series of sliding doors,'' according to Russ Martin, project manager for the Florence prison. Prisoners will be even more restricted than at Marion, according to the Pueblo, Colorado Chieftain: ``Inmates won't have to travel nearly as far in the new Florence prison.'' At Marion the prisoners can at least shout to each other through their bars. At Florence, solid cell doors will make that difficult or impossible [8] and there will be no windows in the cells.

Just five miles from the prison site, in Lincoln Park, is the Cotter Corporation, a uranium milling company owned by Commonwealth Edison of Chicago, Illinois. The area surrounding the mill and nearby railroad has been extensively radioactively contaminated. Uranium tailings dumped in unlined ponds have poisoned the underground aquifer and the nearby Arkansas River. Dried radioactive dust is carried for miles by the high winds. The contamination of the water alone has caused the Lincoln Park area to be on the Environmental Protection Agency's National Priorities List since 1984 and it has been designated a Superfund site for contamination clean-up (O'Keefe, 1991: 10).

The political landscape around Florence is equally bleak. Florence is in Fremont County where more than one in ten of the work force is employed by the Colorado Department of Corrections in the nine prisons clustered around Canon City (O'Keefe, 1991: 10). Prisoners constitute more than ten percent of the population of the county (Miniclier, 1991: A1).

Florence itself is an economically devastated community of 3,000 where unemployment stands at seventeen percent and the prospect of about 1000 temporary and 750-900 new permanent jobs has proved irresistible. Ninety-seven percent of respondents to one local mail-in poll were in favor of the building of the Florence complex. The citizens raised $160,000 to purchase the 600 acres for the site; 400 locals gathered for the ground-breaking; t- shirts bearing a map of the site were ``sold out'' at $7.99; a housewarming barbecue hosted by the BOP was attended by 1000 local residents. Now, Pueblo Community College is offering criminal justice courses customized to suit the needs of the federal prison.

Proliferation of Control Units
The model for the new control unit at Florence is the Security Housing Unit (SHU) at Pelican Bay State Prison in California (Wilson, 1991: 2). The SHU, which opened in December 1989, was designed as the ultimate facility for the implementation of Marion-style repression. Built to hold 1,056 prisoners in near-total isolation, it is already twenty percent over capacity (Smith, 1991: 1). Prisoners are confined to their eighty square foot cells with solid steel doors for twenty- two and one half hours a day. They are allowed out only for a ninety minute ``exercise'' period alone in an empty concrete yard the size of three cells with twenty foot high walls and metal screens overhead. Guards open the sliding doors by remote control and use loudspeakers to direct the prisoners in and out. Prisoners moved off the cell-block for any reason are shackled and flanked by two guards wielding truncheons. Except for the sound of a door slamming or a voice on a speaker, the SHU is silent. Prison officials, not the courts, ``sentence'' prisoners to SHU terms (Corwin, 1990: A1). Often, confidential tips from other prisoners serve as the basis for a disciplinary hearing to determine whether to send the prisoner to the SHU, and these hearings have few safeguards of due process. Many prisoners are sent there for filing grievances or lawsuits or for otherwise opposing prison injustices (Weinstein, 1990). SHU prisoners report the use of ``hog-tying'' (the intertwining of handcuffs and ankle-cuffs on a prisoner), ``cock-fights'' in which guards double-cell enemies or otherwise allow them to attack each other, and forced cell moves using Taser stun-guns, thirty-eight millimeter gas guns and batons [9].

Conditions such as those at the SHU and Marion are replicated in state control units throughout the country. Many of these prisons feature their own innovations in controlling and dehumanizing prisoners. At a second California control unit prison at Corcoran, armed guards patrol the Plexiglas ceilings over the cells and peer in at prisoners through Plexiglas cell walls (Wilson, 1991: 2). At Colorado's Centennial Prison in Canon City, the administrative segregation unit has been expanded to include the whole prison (Foster, 1990; Ruark, 1991). A priest hired by the prison delivers communion through a small, knee-high food slot in a solid steel cell door. ``If you ain't wrapped too tight, 23-hour lockdown can be enough to make you explode,'' says the priest. Guards are armed with ``nut- guns,'' wide-bore guns that fire wildly caroming, acorn-sized ``nuts'' at prisoners from close range. ``It's a miniature cannon,'' the priest explains. ``The recommended technique is to fire at the floor so that the acorn ricochets.'' Prisoners hit by the nuts can be maimed. ``One guy lost his eye, and since I arrived here three years ago, an acorn took off a guy's nose and plastered it to his cheek'' (Johnson, 1990: 12). A specially constructed, $44 million control unit prison, scheduled to be opened near Canon City in early 1993, will hold 500 prisoners, with an additional 250 capacity expansion part of the prison's design (Lemons, 1991).

At Lebanon, Ohio, prisoners under administrative control are held in eight by six foot isolation cells. Each cell has a second door so that prisoners can be locked in the extreme back, darkened portion of the cell. A prisoner describes being leg-shackled, having his arms cuffed to a belt about his waist and being escorted by three guards whenever he is moved from his cell. Other prisoners are forbidden to speak to him (Perotti, 1991). In Missouri, the state prison at Potosi is run by Warden Paul K. Delo, a Vietnam War veteran who, by Missouri law, doubles as the states' executioner since Death Row is at Potosi. Says Delo of his secondary duties, ``One of our officers had an analogy. He said it's just like at your own house. Nobody likes to take out the garbage, but somebody has to''(Uhlenbrock, 1989: 1). Perhaps inspired by Delo's army experience, prison officials apply the ``double-litter restraint'' to recalcitrant prisoners. The prisoner's hands are cuffed behind his back, his ankles are cuffed and he is forced to lie face-down on an Army-type cot, his head turned to the side. A second cot is then tightly strapped upside-down over the prisoner and the ends are strapped shut, totally enclosing and immobilizing him. Carl Swope, a 21 year-old sentenced to seven years for credit card fraud, filed suit after being held in the restraint for three hours (Bryant, 1991: A3).

Other state control unit prisons are at Ionia, Michigan (Detroit News, 1989: B3); Southport, New York; McAlester, Oklahoma; Baltimore, Maryland; Florence, Arizona (Jacobson, 1991): Starke, Florida; Walla Walla, Washington; Westville, Indiana (Associated Press, 1991a); and Trenton, New Jersey (Page,1991). A survey by the Federal Bureau of Prisons found that thirty-six states now operate some form of super-maximum security prison or unit within a prison (Lassiter, 1990: 80). The list continues to grow. Colorado (Lemons, 1991) and Connecticut (Cardaropoli, 1991) have control unit prisons under construction, and Indiana is building a second control unit prison at Sullivan.

Control unit technology is even trickling down to the local level. The Jefferson County Detention Center in Colorado holds each prisoner in an eighty square foot cell equipped with a concrete bed with a mattress on top, sink, toilet and concrete table. Everything from the lights to the locks on the doors is operated electronically by guards in control booths. The jail was designed to allow for a range of control measures, including nearly round-the- clock cell confinement (McGraw, 1986). New York City's Central Punitive Segregation Unit on Rikers Island holds 300 people under twenty one - twenty three hour a day lockdown with no television or radio. Most of those in the ``Bing,'' as the unit is informally known, are detainees awaiting trial. The city plans to expand the unit to hold 900 (Raab, 1991a: 12).

Control unit prisoners have resisted the brutality they are subjected to with the means at their disposal. Prisoners at the Pelican Bay SHU flooded the federal court with over three hundred civil rights petitions, forcing an unusual meeting between federal judges and the prison's warden to discuss prison conditions. Lawyers for the prisoners have since filed a class action lawsuit charging, among other things, that the extreme isolation violates constitutional safeguards against cruel and unusual punishment (Mintz, 1991). At Southport, New York, prisoners capped months of resistance by taking guards hostage and holding three of them for twenty-six hours until the prisoners' grievances were aired over local television (New York Times, 1991; Raab, 1991b).

Probably the most sustained resistance has occurred at the Maximum Control Complex [MCC] at Westville, Indiana, which opened in April, 1991. Sixteen of the thirty five prisoners in the MCC launched a hunger strike in September to expose conditions in the prison: twenty three and a half hour daily cell time, extremely cold temperatures, denial of mail, constant bright lighting of the cells, and severely restricted visitation. The announced minimum stay in the unit is three years. Four of the prisoners continued the strike for thirty-seven days, eating only after prison officials obtained a court order allowing them to force-feed the prisoners (Associated Press, 1991b). The hunger strikes continued intermittently. One prisoner severed off his fingertip with a razor, and a second tried unsuccessfully to do the same (South Bend Tribune, 1992). The protests garnered coverage in papers across the nation (Associated Press, 1991c; 1991d). Prison officials responded by having guards brutally beat prisoners, sometimes while they were in shackles, assigning some of the prisoners to isolation where they are clothed only in their underwear and socks, and obstructing attempts by lawyers to gain entry (Carmody, 1992).

The Function of Control Units

To understand the reasons for the spread of control units, we must determine what function they serve, what it is that they achieve. We will examine what is claimed about control units by prison officials and compare those statements with what is known. We will analyze three specific claims repeatedly made by prison officials all over the country and reported in any media coverage of control unit issues:

1. Control units contain the most violent prisoners, the ``worst of the worst'', who have proved too violent to be held at other prisons.
2. Control units reduce violence at other prisons by isolating the most violent prisoners.
3. The reduction of violence allows security at these other prisons to be relaxed.

The first claim is the major one, on which the other two rest, so we will concentrate on it. The facts of Marion show that the claim is false. Federal prisons used to be given a security rating from one through six, one being the least secure and six being the most secure. In 1984, Marion was the only level six prison in the federal system and prisoners there were supposed to have a corresponding level six rating. However, a 1984 report by consultants hired by a Congressional oversight committee stated that eighty percent of prisoners at Marion did not deserve that level of security (Breed and Ward, 1984). In fact, prisoners are sent to Marion for a variety of reasons and sometimes for no reason at all. For example, the U.S. District Court ordered a cap on prison population and as a result, so many prisoners convicted of felonies in the District of Columbia have been moved to Marion to relieve overcrowding that they constituted seventeen per cent of Marion's population in 1990 (Lassiter, 1990: 80). Virtually all of these prisoners are Black.

There is, however, a trend to be seen. Prisoners have been transferred to Marion for writing ``too many'' lawsuits, for protesting the brutality of the prison system, or for angering prison officials in some other way. In addition, among the many political prisoners who have been in Marion, American Indian Movement leader Leonard Peltier, Sekou Odinga, member of the Black Liberation Army, Alan Berkman, Tim Blunk and Ray Levasseuer were sent directly to Marion from court (Can't Jail The Spirit, 1989; O'Keefe, 1991) thereby disproving the claim that prisoners at Marion have been violent at other prisons.

The Prison Discipline Study initiated in 1989 by the Prisoner Rights Union of Sacramento, California, investigated the question of which prisoners were most often disciplined and how (Prison Discipline Study, 1991). The report showed that solitary confinement was the most common disciplinary action. Included in this report were testimonies by prisoners that those of them exhibiting personal integrity are singled out for brutal treatment. Respondents to the survey described this group as: ``those with principles or intelligence''; ``those with dignity and self-respect''; ``authors of truthful articles''; ``motivated self-improvers''; those ``verbally expressing...[their] opinion'', ``wanting to be treated as a human being'' and/or ``reporting conditions to people on the outside.'' The study shows, therefore, that a practice such as sending prisoners to control units, which is based on arbitrary and subjective judgments by guards and other officials, will target prisoners who are most likely to be challenging the prison system.

In fact, the BOP's own rules for determining who gets sent to Marion are far broader than the ``violent at other prisons'' line given to the media. In the aforementioned ``one through six'' security rating system, prisoners were assigned their security rating on a number of factors: Type of Detainers, Severity of Current Offense, Projected Length of Incarceration, Types of Prior Commitments, History of Escapes or Attempts and History of Violence (Breed and Ward, 1984: 35). Although this rating system is obviously broader than the ``violent'' formula and open to a certain amount of interpretation, the finding that four out of five prisoners at Marion did not have the required level six rating meant the BOP had to find another, vaguer system. They have therefore revised their rules and now classify institutions as minimum, low, medium and high security. Prisoners must be ``high'' security to be sent to Marion, which is determined by pre-commitment factors such as severity of offense. In addition, prisoners at Marion should have a ``maximum'' custody rating, which is determined by post-commitment criteria such as ``disciplinary record'' (Dove, 1991). Having revised these rules, the BOP changed the classification of everyone at Marion to ``high-max'' (Dunne, 1991).

It is admitted at the highest level that a prisoner's political beliefs are basis for assigning that prisoner to a control unit. In a letter to Congressperson Kastenmeier, the then Chair of the Congressional subcommittee that oversees the BOP, Michael Quinlan, the Director of the BOP, stated:

``A prisoner's past or present affiliation, association or membership in an organization which has been documented as being involved in acts of violence [or] attempts to disrupt ... the government of the United States ... is a factor considered in assessing the security needs of an inmate'' (Quinlan, 1987).

We may ask what constitutes ``association'' with an organization, or what is meant by trying to ``disrupt'' the government. In a case brought by a prisoner in the Security Housing Unit (SHU) at the California State prison in Sacramento, Chief Justice Karlton made it clear that prisoners are sent to the SHU for reasons that have nothing to do with discipline. He noted that the plaintiff, who was challenging the prison's forbidding him to practise his Native American religion, was in the SHU for being ``an associate'' of a prison gang, the Mexican Mafia and that ``given that [he] is in the SHU by virtue of his status rather than as punishment for a particular act, there is no apparent way for him to work his way out'' (Sample v. Borg, 1987).

As a last point in our argument against the claim that Marion contains the ``worst of the worst'' we note that for this to be true, all or most prisoners who satisfy their criteria must be at Marion. For example, Oscar Lopez Rivera, a Puerto Rican Nationalist, is in Marion for ``conspiring to escape''. Since he is there, then other prisoners who ``conspire to escape'' should be there as well as all the prisoners who actually try to escape, as well as all the prisoners who actually *do* escape and are apprehended. Are they? There are prisoners at Marion who have assaulted guards (not in itself an indication of violence if the guard had been harrassing and abusing the prisoner). Are all prisoners who have assaulted guards, or even killed guards, at Marion? Obviously the answer is no.

Finally, let us address the two other claims made by officials about control units.

Prison officials claim that Marion, Pelican Bay and the other control units reduce violence in the rest of the prison system. Since we have shown that the control units do not hold the most violent prisoners, this cannot be true and there is no evidence that it has happened. Moreover, all the evidence points to the opposite being true. Most of the prisoners will be released at some stage either back into the general prison population or into society. It is known that control unit conditions produce feelings of resentment and rage and mental deterioration (Korn, 1988). Prisoners will have been so deprived of human contact that it will be hard for them to cope with social situations again. The inhumanity of control units cannot reduce violence, it can only increase it. Evidence includes the high level of violence at Marion during the period before the lockdown, when controls were being tightened but not yet to the extent of completely physically incapacitating prisoners. The tighter controls certainly did not have a calming effect on the prison. In addition, the guard deaths of 1983 occurred in the Control Unit itself.

The claim that control units allow security to be loosened at other prisons is also invalidated because of the truth about which prisoners go there. And again, there is no evidence that the situation in other prisons has improved. Furthermore, Marion has been the model for the numerous state control units [10]. A delegation of the U.S. House Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property and the Administration of Justice which visited Marion in May, 1990, cited the need to ``develop a more humane approach to the incarceration of the maximum-security prison population. This is particularly true because the Federal Bureau of Prisons serves as a model for state prisons and for other countries in the world.'' (Lassiter, 1990: 80) Incredibly, similarity to Marion is now a defense against suits brought to contest inhuman conditions at other prisons (Reed, 1992). The existence of Marion has not improved conditions at other prisons; its example has dragged them downwards toward greater brutality.

Having disposed of the official claims regarding the purpose of control units, we turn to the true function. Ironically, this was clearly stated by Ralph Arons, a former warden at Marion, who testified in federal court:

``The purpose of the Marion Control Unit is to control revolutionary attitudes in the prison system and in the society at large'' (Whitman, 1988: 25).

(Notice ``revolutionary *attitudes*'' not ``actions.'')

This is born out by the large number of political prisoners who are, or have been at Marion and by the Prison Discipline Study. That control of dissent, protest and liberation movements is the true purpose of control units is also shown by history, most especially the history of the early seventies. In September 1971, the prisoners at the state prison at Attica in upstate New York rebelled against the inhuman and racist regime there, declaring their solidarity with all oppressed people and demanding their rights. The rebellion, and the consequent brutal murder of thirty-nine prisoners and hostages by New York State Troopers, under the orders of Governor Nelson Rockefeller, rocked the nation. The whole prison system was at boiling point. Despite the recommendations of the official report into the Attica rebellion that prison conditions be humanized, the response of the New York Department of Corrections was to plan a control unit in which to isolate prisoners such as those who lead the rebellion ( Kaufman, 1971). It was never built, due to resistance led by Martin Sostre, a Puerto Rican prisoner who had run a radical bookshop, groups supporting Puerto Rican political prisoners and POW's and a defense group headed by Angela Davis (Buhle et al., 1990). Even corrections experts judged the planned prison to be too brutal and to be counterproductive to the purported purpose of violence control (Tomasson, 1971). However, not long after, in 1972, the Control Unit at Marion was initiated.

Starting in the early seventies, around the time of the opening of the Control Unit at Marion and the Attica rebellion, the prison population in the U.S. started to increase rapidly. Concurrently, there has been an increase in the proportion of prisoners who are people of color. We will document these developments in the next section but mention them here since they lead us to interpret the proliferation of control units in the United States as an attempt to suppress the increased likelihood of protests and dissent.

Imprisonment as Control

On Dec. 31, 1990 there were well over 1,100,000 people behind bars in the United States, which makes the U.S. incarceration rate (the number of people per 100,000 of the population) the highest in the world at 455 (Mauer, 1992: 3). This is well above the next highest rate which was for South Africa under apartheid (311) and dwarfs rates in the Netherlands (46) and Australia (79) (Mauer, 1992: 5). The number of people in prison in the U.S. has more than doubled over the last decade and it is projected by the government that an additional 300,000 people will be incarcerated by 1995 (New Yorker, 1992: 27). Even in 1981 the situation was so bad that New York State Correction Commissioner Thomas Coughlin admitted that ``the department is no longer engaged in rehabilitative and programming efforts, but is rather forced to warehouse people and concentrate on finding the next cell'' (Day, 1988: 8).

These figures are even more striking when analyzed in terms of race. The incarceration rate for Black men is 3,370 per 100,000, more than seven times that for white men (Whitman, 1991). We do not have current data on the rates of incarceration for other non-white people, however through 1976-78, Indians were arrested at a rate more than ten times that of white people (U.S. Census of Population, 1976-1978). The U.S. incarcerates Black men at a rate five times higher than South Africa does (Mauer, 1992: 1). Just as control units suppress the prison population, so prisons act in our poor, Black, Latin and Native communities. It is no exaggeration to say that hardly anyone in these communities escapes the shadow of the ``criminal justice system.''

The devastation can be expressed in many ways. Black people are twelve percent of the U.S. population, forty-three percent of the prison population (Wicker, 1991). Using data based on a single day in mid-1989, a study by Marc Mauer for the Sentencing Project in Washington, D.C. found that about one in four Black men in their twenties were under some kind of control by the criminal justice system and about one in twelve were actually behind bars (Mauer, 1990). In 1985, the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics published the results of a 1979 survey that sought to determine the probability that a person in the U.S. would go to prison in his/her lifetime (Langan and Greenfeld, 1985). Using the data in this report, it can be calculated that in 1979 the probability that a Black man would go to prison sometime in his life was twenty-two percent. In 1992 we can be sure that this is higher so that probably one in four Black men will go to prison in his lifetime. What must this mean for the Black community? Families suffer financially and emotionally. Whatever few jobs might have been available to Black men will be further out of reach for an ``ex-con.'' Prisoners rejoin their communities from prisons which don't even pretend to rehabilitate and where conditions encourage violence and criminality.

Faced with the question ``Why do Black people go to prison at a rate seven times higher than white people?'' we can answer in three different ways. One is that Black people commit seven times as much crime and are genetically disposed to do so. The second is that Black people commit seven times as much crime and something about their disadvantaged social situation is responsible for this. The third is that Black people do not commit that much crime but the criminal justice system is racist enough to make sure they end up in prison that often.

Rejecting the first alternative, the truth must lie somewhere in between the last two answers, and, although it is difficult to determine how much weight to give to each, one cannot escape the conclusion that U.S. society is extremely racist. If the imprisonment rate accurately reflects the crime rate, one is lead to the conclusion that to effectively combat crime, poverty and racism must be eliminated (even if one is not interested in eliminating them for any other reason.)

The other alternative, that in fact Black people do not commit such a disproportionate amount of crime, is indicated by much evidence, though it is hard to calculate the exact degree of the disparity. For example, the number of crimes committed is so huge that actual imprisonments only account for a small fraction of the people who perpetrate them. The crime rate is difficult to determine and the two major national sources of crime data disagree significantly on both quantity and trends. They do, however, both show that the amount of crime is very large: in 1986, between thirteen [11] and thirty-four [12] million crimes were committed. Thus from a huge pool of potential prisoners, i.e., people who have committed crimes, the criminal justice system singles out those who will go to prison. This is done mainly via policing policy. One major example that shows how racist this is, is the ``War on Drugs,'' in which police target poor, Black neighborhoods even though the great majority of drug users are white. It is estimated by the government that by 1995, sixty-nine percent of people in prison will be drug offenders (Mauer, 1992: 7). A front page story in the Los Angeles Times said that while about eighty percent of the nation's drug users are white, the majority of those arrested for ``drug crimes'' are Black (Harris, 1990). Racism also explains why the 1986 Federal Anti-Drug Abuse Act equates selling five grams of crack cocaine worth about $100 with 500 grams of powdered cocaine worth about $50,000, both crimes drawing mandatory prison terms of five years. Black drug users often choose cheaper crack cocaine, while white drug users more often use the relatively expensive powder which is the real profit-maker for the drug trade (McPherson, 1992).

Crime is a problem that must be tackled. However, there is no evidence that high imprisonment rates are the answer to the problem of crime. Indeed, study after study shows that prisons do not deter crime (Blumstein et al., 1978; Visher, 1987: 513-543; Krajick and Gettinger, 1982) and, remarkably, we know of no research that indicates that they do. (The only slight reduction in the crime rate due to incarceration is by the incapacitation of those imprisoned, but the conclusion of the studies referenced above is that massive increases in the imprisonment rate have only a tiny effect on the crime rate.) Imprisoning large numbers of people in order to stop crime has been a spectacular and massively expensive failure. Academic research shows this and even prison officials sometimes admit to the reality of the situation. According to the Director of Corrections of Alabama, ``We're on a train that has to be turned around. It doesn't make any sense to pump millions and millions into corrections and have no effect on the crime rate'' (Ticer, 1989: 80).

Prisons do not reduce crime, so what do they do? They cause direct suffering to prisoners and their families. More subtly, though more significantly to our discussion, they are a major cause of the deterioration of communities of poor people and especially people of color. If one decides that the purpose of prisons cannot be to stop crime, because they do not and this has been known for many years, then one can conclude that this devastation is the real intention. The consequent suppression of active protest amongst people of color against the injustices of a society based on the maximization of profit is obviously a gain for those with a vested interest in such a society.

Control of Public Opinion

Control units seriously violate prisoners' rights. The facts about Marion shows that they serve to suppress dissent among the prison population. Imprisonment does not reduce crime but brutalizes entire communities. The ``War on Drugs'' has no effect on the problem of drug abuse but is a war on Black people. These truths never appear on our televisions or in our newspapers, even though crime and prisons are practically a media obsession.

The present system of mass incarceration with the accompanying specter of more and more control units can only be maintained with at least the tacit approval of society as a whole. So it is not surprising that those of the population least likely to experience the brutality of prison are also subjected to appropriate control procedures. We have already described how the media repeat the falsehoods concerning control units. Newpaper articles often do not even bother to attribute claims to prison spokespeople but make statements such as ``Florence will become the inheritor of the worst of the worst in the federal prison system '' (Pueblo Chieftan, 1990: 4A) as if they were facts.

We face a constant barrage of racist anti-crime and anti-drug hysteria from the establishment. Prisoners are portrayed as incorrigible and dangerous, undeserving of even the most basic human rights. Politicians and the mainstream media never even mention, let alone intelligently discuss, underlying problems of poverty, inequality and racism. Debate is thus limited to how to manage the ever-increasing flood of prisoners, the necessity of creating such a flood being taken as given.

The reality of the role of control units is carefully hidden from public view. Most control units and other newly constructed prisons are located in isolated, economically depressed, rural areas. This serves several purposes. The ardent support of local people, who rely on the prison for desperately needed jobs, is secured and prisoners are isolated from their families and friends.

Political figures support increased imprisonment since most of them thrive on ``tough-on-crime'' platforms. Nor can the courts be relied upon. In Bruscino v. Carlson, Marion prisoners sought compensation for the attacks which occurred during the October 1983 shakedown and relief from the ongoing conditions of the lockdown. A 1985 Magistrate's Report for this case was approved by the full U.S. District Court for Southern Illinois in 1987. The decision found that fifty prisoners who testified to beatings and other brutalities were not credible witnesses, and that only the single prisoner who testified that there were no beatings was believable (Bruscino v. Carlson, 1985). When the prisoners appealed the decision, the ruling of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals described conditions at Marion as ``ghastly,'' ``sordid and horrible'' and ``depressing in the extreme,'' but maintained that they were necessary for security reasons and did not violate prisoners' constitutional rights (Landis, 1988: A1).

Finally, there is no discussion of what should be considered a crime and who is to be considered a criminal. The Black drug addict who sells drugs to keep up his habit, the poor man who robs a drug store at gunpoint, the woman who kills her abusive husband: they are all sent to prison and considered dangerous. However, the violation of safety codes by slum landlords and mine owners, embezzlement and fraud by savings and loan executives, pollution of land, seas and atmosphere by oil and chemical company directors, the bombing of schools, hospitals and water purification plants by U.S. presidents, the aggressive marketing of cigarettes (the most deadly narcotic in the world, causing almost 200 times as many deaths as cocaine in the U.S. in 1988 according to C. Everett Koop, Reagan's surgeon general (Shalom, 1992: 15)) across the world by U.S. tobacco companies cause hugely more death, injury and impoverishment and yet are rarely punished by imprisonment. Crimes against humanity and the environment are not illegal if committed by the powerful.

References Cited

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* Anderson Bobby: Affadavit in Adams v. Carlson in Behaviour Modification: New Method of Prison Repression Eugene, Oregon: Coalition Press, 1975.
* Associated Press, ``Scientist Recommends Health Risk Study of Lincoln Park Area,'' Pueblo Chieftain, December 8, 1990.
* Associated Press, ``Civil Libertarians Might Sue Over Maximum Security Prison,'' Fort Wayne News Sentinel, October 25, 1991a.
* Associated Press, ``Court Order Ends 37-Day Hunger Strike at Prison,'' Gary, Indiana Post Tribune, October 31, 1991b.
* Associated Press, ``Inmates Refuse Food for 26th Day,'' San Francisco Chronicle, October 19, 1991c.
* Associated Press, ``Indiana Inmates' Hunger Strike Nears a Month,'' New York Times, October 20, 1991d.
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* Bryant Tom ``Encased: Prison's Use of `Cocoon' is Challenged in Suit Here,'' St. Louis Post Dispatch, January 26, 1991.
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* Mauer Marc, Americans Behind Bars: One Year Later, Sentencing Project, Washington D.C., February 1992.
* McGraw Pat, ``Safety for Both Guards, Prisoners Designed into Jeffco's High-Tech Jail,'' Denver Post, September 7, 1986.
* McPherson Lionel, ``News Media, Racism and the `Drug War','' Extra! (New York), April/May 1992.
* Miniclier Kit, ``Florence Pins Hopes on Prisons,'' Denver Post, April 4, 1991.
* Mintz Howard, ``Pelican Bay Litigation Attacks Prison's Mission,'' The Recorder, 29 October, 1991.
* Mitford Jessica, Kind and Usual Punishment: The Prison Business, New York, Vintage Books, 1973.
* New York Times, ``Trying to Economize, New York Makes Its Own Alcatraz,'' February 20, 1991.
* New Yorker, in Talk of the Town, April 13, 1992.
* O'Keefe Mike, ``Big House on the Prairie,'' Westword (Denver), April 24-30, 1991.
* Page Peter, `` `Modules' or `Cages'? TSP [Trenton State Prison] Enclosures Stir Protest,'' The Times (Trenton, New Jersey), August 17, 1991.
* Perotti John, Prison News Service (Toronto), March/April 1991.
* Prison Discipline Study, Prisoners' Rights Union, Sacramento, California, 1991.
* Pueblo Chieftain, Editorial, December 26, 1990.
* Quinlan, Michael, letter from BOP director Quinlan to Congressperson Robert W. Kastenmeier about the Lexington control unit, 1987.
* Raab Selwyn, ``New York City's Maxi-Maxi Dungeon: Too Brutal?'' New York Times, August 4, 1991.
* Raab Selwyn, ``The Inmate's View of a Riot: A Reaction to Jail Brutality,'' New York Times, June 26, 1991.
* Reed Little Rock, Letter from Reed to CEML, February 12, 1992.
* Ritter Jim, ``Colorado Suit Accuses Edison of Radiation Pollution,'' Chicago Sun-Times, February 18, 1991.
* Ruark Ted, letter from Colorado State prisoner Ruark to CEML, August 5, 1991.
* Sample v. Borg 675 F.Supp. 574 (E.D. Cal. 1987)
* Satchell Michael, ``The Toughest Prison in America,'' U.S. News and World Report, July 27, 1987.
* Shalom Stephen R., ``Made in the U.S.A.: Deadly Exports,'' Z Magazine, April, 1992.
* Smith Wes, ``State Puts Low Priority on High-Security Prison,'' Chicago Tribune, April 1, 1991.
* Susler Jan et al., ``An Updated Public Report about the Continuing Lockdown and Torture of Prisoners at U.S. Penitentiary Marion,'' 1984, unpublished.
* Ticer Scott, ``The Search for Ways to Break Out of the Prison Crisis,'' Business Week, May 8, 1989.
* Tomasson Robert E., ``Experts Divided on Special Prison,'' New York Times, October 10, 1971.
* U.S. Census of Population: 1976-1978.
* Uhlenbrock Tom, ``Soft-Spoken Executioner to Run New Prison,'' St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 26, 1991.
* Visher Christy A., ``Incapacitation and Crime Control: Does a `Lock 'Em Up' Strategy Reduce Crime?'' Justice Quarterly, 4, 1987.
* Weinstein Cory, ``Supermax Blues at Pelican Bay SHU,'' California Prisoner, August, 1990.
* Whitman Steven, ``The Marion Penitentiary - It should be Opened Up, Not Locked Down,'' Southern Illinoisan, August 7, 1988.
* Whitman Steven, ``The Crime of Black Imprisonment,'' Prison News Service (Toronto), July, 1991.
* Wicker Tom, ``The Iron Medal,'' New York Times, January 9, 1991.
* Wilson Noel K., ``Hard-Core Prisoners Controlled in Nation's High-Tech Prisons,'' Chicago Daily Law Bulletin April 25, 1991.

Forum

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Gang Identification Posters
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www.GangsOrUs.com

Excellent website that covers all prison & street gangs.

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Street gang tattoos & data. Note: most gangs originated in Chicago and California.

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Interesting website that displays current data on gangs & etc.

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Aryan Brotherhood Trial 2006

2010-04-03T19:08:00.000-07:00

Aryan Brotherhood Trial 2006

On a cold, damp December morning in 2002, after weeks of secret planning, the United States Marshals launched one of the most unusual dragnets in the organization’s two-hundred-and-fifteen-year history. As the fog lifted on a small stretch of land in the northwesternmost corner of California-a sparsely populated area known primarily for its towering redwoods-nearly a dozen agents, draped in black fatigues and bulletproof vests, and armed with assault rifles and walkie-talkies, gathered in a fleet of cars. The agents sped past a town with a single post office and a mom-and-pop store, and headed deep into the forest until they arrived at a colossal compound, a maze of buildings surrounded by swirling razor wire and an electrified fence that was lethal to the touch. A gate opened and, as guards looked down with rifles from beneath watchtowers, the convoy rolled inside. The agents jumped out.

After entering one of the buildings and walking down a long corridor lined with surveillance cameras, the officers reached their destination: a fortified cellblock in the heart of Pelican Bay, California’s most notorious prison. They could hear inmates moving in their ten-by-twelve, windowless cement cells. Pelican Bay housed more than three thousand inmates, men who were considered too violent for any other state prison and had, in the parlance of correctional officers, “earned their way in.” But the men on the cellblock, which was known as the Hole, were considered so dangerous that they had been segregated from this already segregated population.

Four prisoners were ordered to remove their gold jumpsuits and slide them through a tray slot. While some officers searched their belongings, others, using flashlights, peered through holes in the steel doors to examine the inmates’ ears, nostrils, and anal cavities. To make sure that the prisoners had no weapons “keistered” inside them, the guards instructed them to bend down three times; if they refused, the guards would know that they were afraid to puncture their intestines with a shank. Once the search was complete, the inmates were shackled and escorted to a nearby landing strip, where they were loaded onto an unmarked airplane.

All across the country, agents were fanning out to prisons. They seized a fifth inmate from a maximum-security prison in Concord, New Hampshire. They took another from a jail in Sacramento, California. Then they approached the Administrative Maximum Prison, in Florence, Colorado, a “supermax” encircled by snow-covered ravines and renowned as “the Alcatraz of the Rockies.” There, in the most secure federal penitentiary in the country-a place that housed Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, and Ramzi Yousef, the man behind the bombing of the World Trade Center, in 1993-agents apprehended four inmates who were allegedly responsible for more than a dozen prison murders.

Before long, the marshals had rounded up twenty-nine inmates-all of whom were among the most feared men in the American prison system. One had strangled an inmate with his bare hands; another had poisoned a fellow-prisoner. A man nicknamed the Beast was thought to have ordered an attack on an inmate who had shoved him during a basketball game; the inmate was subsequently stabbed seventy-one times and his eye was gouged out.

Then there was Barry Mills, who was known as the Baron. Soft-spoken and intense, with a gleaming bald head, he was described by one of his former prosecutors as a “cunning, calculating killer.” He liked to crochet in his cell and, according to authorities, compose lists of enemies to kill. In a previous court case, he testified that “we live . . . in a different society than you do. There is justified violence in our society. I’m here to tell you that. I’m here to tell all you that.” He was not, he conceded, “a peaceful man,” and “if you disrespect me or one of my friends, I will readily and to the very best of my ability engage you in a full combat mode. That’s what I’m about.” Once, at a maximum-security prison in Georgia, Mills was found guilty of luring an inmate into a bathroom stall and nearly decapitating him with a knife.

Along with the Baron and the other prisoners, five women on the outside were also seized, as well as three ex-cons and a former prison guard. Most of those apprehended-there were forty in total-were transported on a Boeing 727, with their legs and arms shackled to their seats, while guards patrolled the aisles, their rifles sealed in compartments out of arm’s reach. Days later, the prisoners ended up in a Los Angeles courtroom, where they were accused of being members of an elaborate criminal conspiracy directed by the Aryan Brotherhood, or the Brand. Authorities had once dismissed the Aryan Brotherhood as a fringe white-supremacist gang; now, however, they concluded that what prisoners had claimed for decades was true-namely, that the gang’s hundred or so members, all convicted felons, had gradually taken control of large parts of the nation’s maximum-security prisons, ruling over thousands of inmates and transforming themselves into a powerful criminal organization.

The Brand, authorities say, established drug-trafficking, prostitution, and extortion rackets in prisons across the country. Its leaders, often working out of barren cells in solitary confinement, allegedly ordered scores of stabbings and murders. They killed rival gang members; they killed blacks and homosexuals and child molesters; they killed snitches; they killed people who stole their drugs, or owed them a few hundred dollars; they killed prison guards; they killed for hire and for free; they killed, most of all, in order to impose a culture of terror that would solidify their power. And, because the Brotherhood is far more cloistered than other gangs, it was able to operate largely with impunity for decades-and remain all but invisible to the outside world. “It is a true secret society,” Mark Hamm, a prison sociologist, told me.

For the first time, on August 28, 2002, that world cracked open. After more than a decade of trying to infiltrate the Brand’s operations, a relatively unknown Assistant United States Attorney from California named Gregory Jessner indicted virtually the entire suspected leadership of the gang. He had investigated hundreds of crimes linked to the gang; some were cold cases that reached back nearly forty years. In the indictment, which ran to a hundred and ten pages, Jessner charged Brand leaders with carrying out stabbings, strangulations, poisonings, contract hits, conspiracy to commit murder, extortion, robbery, and narcotics trafficking. The case, which is expected to go to trial early next year, could lead to as many as twenty-three death-penalty convictions-more than any in American history.

On a recent morning, I visited the United States Attorney’s office in downtown Los Angeles, where the prosecution was preparing to arraign the last of the forty defendants. As I waited in the lobby, a slender young man appeared in a gray suit. He had short brown hair, and he carried a folder under his arm as if he were a paralegal. Unlike the attorneys around him, he spoke in a soft, almost reticent voice. He introduced himself as Gregory Jessner.

“I’m forty-two,” he told me, as if he were often greeted with similar astonishment. “Believe it or not, I used to look much younger.” He reached in his pocket and revealed an old office I.D. He looked seventeen.

He led me back into his office, which had almost nothing on the walls and appeared to be decorated solely with boxes from the case, one stacked upon the other. On his desk were several black-and-white photographs, including one of an inmate who had been strangled by the gang.

“An Aryan brother went in his cell and tied a garrote around his neck,” Jessner said. He held out his hands, demonstrating, with tapered fingers, how an Aryan Brotherhood member had braided strips of a bedsheet into a noose. “This is a homicidal organization,” he said. “That’s what they do. They kill people.”

He was accustomed, he explained, to murder cases, but he had been shocked by the gang’s brutality. “I suspect they kill more than the Mafia,” he said. “They kill more than any single drug trafficker. There are a lot of gang-related deaths on the streets, but they are usually more disorganized and random.” He paused, as if calculating various numbers in his head. “I think they may be the most murderous criminal organization in the United States.”

There are hundreds of gangs in this country: the Crips, the Bloods, the Latin Dragons, the Dark Side Nation, the Lynch Mob. But the Aryan Brotherhood is one of the few gangs that were born in prison. In 1964, as the nation’s racial unrest spread into the penitentiaries, a clique of white inmates at San Quentin prison, in Marin County, California, began gathering in the yard. The men were mostly motorcycle bikers with long hair and handlebar mustaches; a few were neo-Nazis with tattoos of swastikas. Together, they decided to strike against the blacks, who were forming their own militant group, called the Black Guerrilla Family, under the influence of the celebrated prison leader George Jackson. Initially, the whites called themselves the Diamond Tooth Gang, and as they roamed the yard they were unmistakable: pieces of glass embedded in their teeth glinted in the sunlight.

Before long, they had merged with other whites at San Quentin to form a single band: the Aryan Brotherhood. While there had always been cliques in prison, known as “tips,” these men were now aligned by race and resorted to a kind of violence that had never been seen at San Quentin, a place that prisoners likened to “gladiator school.” All sides, including the Latino gangs La Nuestra Familia and the Mexican Mafia, attacked each other with homemade knives that were honed from light fixtures and radio parts, and hidden in mattresses, air vents, and drainpipes. “Everything was seen through the delusional lens of race-everything,” Edward Bunker, an inmate at the time, told me. (He went on to become a novelist, and appeared as Mr. Blue in “Reservoir Dogs.”)

Most prison gangs tried to recruit “fish,” the new and most vulnerable inmates. But according to interviews with former gang members-as well as thousands of pages of once classified F.B.I. reports, internal prison records, and court documents-the Aryan Brotherhood chose a radically different approach, soliciting only the most capable and violent. They were given a pledge:

An Aryan brother is without a care,
He walks where the weak and heartless won’t dare,
And if by chance he should stumble and lose control,
His brothers will be there, to help reach his goal,
For a worthy brother, no need is too great,
He need not but ask, fulfillment’s his fate.
For an Aryan brother, death holds no fear,
Vengeance will be his, through his brothers still here.

By 1975, the gang had expanded into most of California’s state prisons and was engaged in what authorities describe as a full-fledged race war. Dozens had already been slain when, that same year, a fish named Michael Thompson entered the system. A twenty-three-year-old white former high-school football star, he had been sentenced for helping to murder two drug dealers and burying their bodies in a lime-filled pit in a back yard. Six feet four and weighing nearly three hundred pounds, he was strong enough to break ordinary shackles. He had brown hair, which was parted in the middle, and hypnotic blue eyes. Despite the violent nature of his crime, he had no other convictions and, with a chance for parole in less than a decade, he initially kept to himself, barely aware of the different forces moving around him. “I was a fish with gills out to bleening here,” he later said.

Unaligned with any of the emerging gangs, he was conspicuous prey for roaming Hispanic and black groups, and several of them soon assaulted him in the yard at a prison in Tracy, California; later, he was sent to Folsom, which, along with San Quentin, was exploding with gang wars. On his first day there, he says, no one spoke to him until a leader of the Black Guerrilla Family, a trim, angular man in shorts and a T-shirt, began to taunt him, telling him to come to the yard “ready” the next day. That night in his cell, Thompson recalled, he looked frantically for a weapon; he broke a piece of steel off his cell door and began to file its edges. It was at least ten inches long, and he sharpened both sides. Before the cell doors opened and the guards searched him, he said, he knew he needed to hide the weapon. He took off his clothes and tried to insert it in his rectum. “I couldn’t,” he recalled. “I was too ashamed.” He tried again and again, until finally he succeeded.

The next morning in the yard, he could see the guards, the tips of their rifles glistening in the sun. The leader of the Black Guerrilla Family circled toward him, flashing a steel blade, and Thompson lay down, trying to extricate his weapon. Eventually, he got it and began to lunge violently at his foe; another gang member came at him and Thompson stabbed him, too. By the time the guards interceded, Thompson was covered in blood, and one of the members of the Black Guerrilla Family lay on the ground, near death.

Not long after this incident, several white convicts approached him in the yard. “They wanted me to join the Brand,” Thompson said. Initially, he hesitated, in part because of the gang’s racism, but he knew that the group offered more than protection. “It was like being let into a sanctuary,” he said. “You were instantly the man-the shot caller.”

To be accepted, according to Thompson and to other gang members, each recruit had to “make his bones,” which often meant killing another inmate. (One recruit told authorities in a sworn statement that the rite was intended to “create a lasting bond to the A.B. and also prove that he had what it takes.”) Thompson also recited a “blood in, blood out” oath, in which he vowed not only that he would spill another’s blood to get in but also that he would never leave the gang unless his own blood was fatally spilled. While many new members had a probationary period, which often lasted as long as a year, Thompson, because of his physical strength and his ability with a knife, was voted into the gang almost immediately. He was “branded” with a homemade tattoo gun (which inmates made out of a beard trimmer sold at the commissary, a guitar string, a pen, and a needle stolen from the infirmary). Sometimes members were tattooed with the letters “A.B.” or the numerals 666, symbolizing the beast, a manifestation of evil in the Revelation of St. John. On Thompson’s left hand, just above one of his knuckles, he received the most recognizable symbol: a green shamrock. “All I had to do was show that ’rock and I was in charge,” he said.

He was moved from one state prison to the next, often for disciplinary reasons, but these transfers only helped him garner more influence, and he gradually rose through the Brotherhood’s rarefied ranks. He met Barry Mills, a.k.a. the Baron, who had initially been incarcerated for stealing a car and became the gang’s vanguard member, seemingly concentrating all his energies not on returning to the outside world but on remaining in the inside world, where he was, in the words of Thompson, “the hog with the biggest balls.” And he met T. D. Bingham, a charismatic bank robber who was nearly as wide as he was tall and who could bench-press five hundred pounds. Nicknamed the Hulk and Super Honky, he spoke in a folksy manner that concealed a burning intelligence, friends say. In photographs from the time, he has a black walrus mustache and a ski hat pulled down over his eyebrows. Part Jewish, he wore a Star of David tattooed on one arm and, without any apparent irony, a swastika on the other. Once, when he testified on behalf of another reputed Aryan Brotherhood inmate, he told the jury, “There’s a code in every segment of society. . . . Well, we have a different kind of moral and ethical code.” He later added, “It’s a lot more primordial.” One of his friends, referring to his propensity for violence, told me, “Sometimes he got the urge, you know what I mean? He got the urge.”

Thompson soon became acquainted with the Brotherhood’s inner sanctum. There was Thomas Silverstein, a talented artist with long flowing hair who, a counselor noted in his prison file, “seems to be easily influenced by these men and is eager to please them.” After shedding an enemy’s blood with a handcrafted knife, he would often retire to his cell and draw elaborate portraits. One ink sketch showed a man in a cell with a claw reaching down toward him. Thompson also met Dallas Scott, a drug addict who once told the reporter Pete Earley, in the 1992 book “The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison,” “In your society I may not be anybody, but in here I am”; and Clifford Smith, who lost an eye after a black-widow spider bit him at San Quentin and who, when asked to carry out his first hit, said, “Yeah, bro, I’ll do the meanie.”

Thompson, who had only a high-school education, was being tailored for leadership. He was given many books, a curriculum that formed a kind of world view. He read Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” and Machiavelli’s “The Prince.” He read Nietzsche, memorizing his aphorisms. (“One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly.”) And he read Louis L’Amour, whose pulp novels about romantic gunslingers who ride for “the brand” inspired the gang’s nickname. “It was like you went to school,” Thompson said. “You already hate the system, hate the establishment, because you’re in jail, you’re buried, and you start to think of yourself as this noble warrior-and that’s what we called each other, warriors. It was like I was a soldier going out to battle.”

Thompson said that, like other new members, he was trained to kill without blinking, without reservation. One A.B. instruction manual, which was seized by authorities, stated, “The smell of fresh human blood can be overpowering but killing is like having sex. The first time is not so rewarding, but it gets better and better with practice, especially when one remembers that it’s a holy cause.” During a confidential debriefing with prison officials, one Aryan brother described how members studied anatomy texts, so “that when they stab somebody it was a killshot.”

In 1981, according to prison records, Thompson approached one of the gang’s enemies “from behind and began stabbing him,” and “continued” striking his victim “as he lay on the floor.” Thompson once wrote in a letter, “Knife fighting, at its best, is like a dance. Under ideal conditions, the objective is to bleed your opponent-cutting hands, wrist, and arms and as the opponent weakens from blood loss, inflicting further damage to the face (eyes) and torso.”

Inmates were frequently killing each other not because of any actual slight but because of the color of their skin. In one incident, Silverstein and an A.B. associate, Clayton Fountain, who, according to a friend, was eager to “make his bones,” stabbed a leader of the rival gang D.C. Blacks sixty-seven times in the shower, then dragged his bloody corpse through the tiers while other white inmates chanted racial slurs. After Silverstein was charged with murdering another inmate, he boasted in court, “I have walked over dead bodies. I’ve had guts splattered all over my chest from race wars.”

To try to rein the Brand in, prison officials, in desperation, had begun to place its members throughout the correctional system. (No inmate would publicly admit being in the gang, and, when asked under oath, would typically say, “Sir, I will not answer a question like that.”) The dispersal measures, however, only spread the Brand’s reach to penitentiaries in Texas and Illinois and Kansas, and still farther east, to Pennsylvania and Georgia. A once classified 1982 F.B.I. report warned that leaders were “recruiting for the A.B., only now they had the entire country to pick from.” One letter from a gang member, which was obtained by Texas prison sociologists, said, “All members shipped from here last week have written back and it looks like the family is in the process of growing.” Another stated, “We are growing like a cancer.”

Upon entering a new prison, Brand members would often carry out a “demonstration” killing or stabbing, in order to terrorize the inmate population. The Baron reportedly ordered that one foe be “taken out in front of everyone, to let these rabble rousers know we mean business.” Indeed, rather than conceal its murders, the gang flaunted them even in front of the guards, as if to show it had no fear of repercussions, of being shot or sentenced to life without parole. “We wanted people to think we were a little crazy,” Thompson said. “It was a way, like Nietzsche said, of bending space and reality to our will.”

On a Saturday morning in the fall of 1983, at Marion federal prison, in southern Illinois, Thomas Silverstein waited for guards to take him for a routine shower. Marion, which is about a hundred miles southeast of St. Louis, was opened in 1963, the year that Alcatraz closed, and was designed to cope with the profusion of violent gang members-in particular, men like Silverstein, who by then had been convicted of murdering three inmates and had earned the nickname Terrible Tom (as he often signed his letters, with looping strokes).

Before taking Silverstein to the bathroom, the guards frisked him, to make sure he hadn’t fashioned any weapons. (He often had pens and other sketching tools for his art work.) They also shackled his wrists. Three guards surrounded him, one of whom was a hard-nosed, nineteen-year veteran with military-style gray hair named Merle Clutts. Clutts, who was to retire in a few months, was perhaps the only guard in the unit who didn’t fear Silverstein; he once reportedly told him, “Hey, I’m running this poop. You ain’t running it.”

As the guards escorted Silverstein through the prison, he paused outside the cell of another gang member-who, as planned, suddenly reached between the bars and, with a handcuff key, unlocked Silverstein’s shackles. Silverstein pulled a nearly foot-long knife from his conspirator’s waistband. “This is between me and Clutts,” Silverstein hollered as he rushed toward him.

One of the other guards screamed, “He’s got a shank!” But Clutts was already cornered, without a weapon. He raised his hands while Silverstein stabbed him in the stomach. “He was just sticking Officer Clutts with that knife,” another guard later recalled. “He was just sticking and sticking and sticking.” By the time Silverstein relinquished the knife-“The man disrespected me,” he told the guards. “I had to get him”-Clutts had been stabbed forty times. He died shortly afterward.

A few hours later, Clayton Fountain, Silverstein’s close friend, was being led through the prison when he paused by another inmate’s cell. In an instant, he, too, was free. “You rabble rousers want a piece of this?” he yelled, waving a blade. He stabbed three more guards. One died in the arms of his son, who also worked in the prison. Fountain reportedly said that he didn’t want Silverstein to have a higher body count.

It was the first time in the history of American federal prisons that two guards had been killed on the same day. “You got to understand,” Thompson said. “Here were guys in restraints, locked in the Hole in the most secure prison, and they were still able to get to the guards. It sent a simple message: We can get to you anywhere, anytime.”

As the gang’s reputation for brutality was growing, so, too, were its ranks. Although the Brand continued to permit only a select few to become “made” members, it had thousands of followers, known as “peckerwoods,” who sought out the perks of being associated with it: permanent protection, free contraband, better prison jobs (which were often dictated by trusty inmates who did whatever the gang demanded). As Thompson put it, “The guards controlled the perimeter of the prison and we controlled what happened inside it.” But as the number of gang members, associates, and hangers-on swelled, managing the organization grew increasingly difficult.

When the Brotherhood was in its infancy, every member had an equal vote on critical matters; by the early eighties, this policy was creating chaos. In a previously undisclosed briefing, Clifford Smith told authorities, “We used to be one man one vote, included damn near everything. I mean, damn near everything. Somebody getting in, whacking somebody . . . You damn near had to have the whole state’s okay. . . .You had to send some kites”-notes-“and runners and lawyers and this and that. It always got tipped off by the time we got back to you and said, ‘Yeah, dump the guy.’ . . . You can’t have someone in the yard that you want to bump and let them be out there for two or three weeks.” Smith said the gang members were becoming “like twelve horses teamed to one wagon, with each of them going in a different direction.” An internal report at the time by the California Department of Corrections went so far as to predict that “the A.B. will probably not propose a serious threat to law enforcement agencies in the future unless it gains a clear and well enforced chain of command.”

Thompson started to push for just that. “I wanted to eliminate the irrationality and make it into a true organized-crime family,” he said. “I wasn’t interested in killing blacks. I was interested in only one thing: power.”

He and other leaders hatched a plan with gang members who were incarcerated at a prison in Chino, in Southern California. These men, who were awaiting trials for the assaults or murders of fellow-inmates, were encouraged to represent themselves as attorneys, thereby allowing them to subpoena their colleagues around the country as witnesses. Each time a Brand member sent out a “writ,” another member would have to be relocated to Chino. For several days, using what one member called “subpoena power unlimited” and exploiting the very legal system that was trying to stop them, most of the Brand was able to meet for hours in the yard, in what amounted to a private convention.

As Smith recalled, “We all get over in the corner one day and say, ‘Damn, man, check this out, we got all the power right here. Let’s take this one step further.’ ” The Brand’s California leaders decided to establish a chain of command modelled loosely on the structure of the Italian Mafia. A council of about a dozen members would manage gang operations throughout the state prison system. Each council member would be elected by majority vote. He would be responsible for enforcing all of the gang’s policies, which would now be codified; he also could authorize a hit at any moment, as long as it wasn’t on a fellow A.B. member. The council’s actions would be overseen by a three-man commission. Authorities say that Thompson and Smith served on the California council. In the federal prison system, where the gang set up a similar hierarchy in roughly a dozen maximum-security prisons, the Baron and T. D. Bingham allegedly became high commissioners.

The A.B.’s new structure strengthened its grip, but there remained one outstanding obstacle: snitches. Though other crime families had to worry about members “rolling over,” in prison everyone had an incentive to “flip,” and all an inmate had to do was whisper in a guard’s ear. In the early nineteen-eighties, a former gang member, Steven Barnes, had testified in a murder rap against one of the new commissioners and was housed in protective custody, where no one could get to him. In response, the Aryan Brotherhood settled upon a new policy: If it couldn’t get to you, it would get to your family. “What we wanted to do was hit . . . Barnes’s wife,” Smith explained. “If we couldn’t get to her, we’d move then to his brother . . . or sister and from there we’d work our way down the list. . . . That was policy that we’d established that we’d do from then on.”

To carry out its new policy, Brand leaders needed to find a hit man, someone who could, in the words of the gang, “step up.” And so they allegedly turned to Curtis Price, a forty-one-year-old made A.B. member who was about to be paroled from Chino prison, and who would, according to a former gang member, “kill as to directions received from the A.B. council.” Described by his parole officer as “one of the most dangerous state prisoners I’ve dealt with in my twenty-two years” of service, Price was six feet tall, with short brown hair and vacant blue eyes. In photographs, the bones around his pallid face protrude and give him a slightly ghostly air. Price, who had once expressed hope of going into law enforcement, had in more recent years stabbed another inmate and taken two guards hostage, telling one, “I’ll blow your partner’s head off.”

Court and prison records reveal that upon his release, on September 14, 1982, Price met a twenty-two-year-old mother of two children named Elizabeth Hickey and stole several weapons from her stepfather’s house, including a twelve-gauge shotgun and a Mauser automatic. Price then drove to the home of Steven Barnes’s father, Richard, in Temple City, California, and shot him three times in the head, execution style. Barnes’s neighbors found him lying on his bed, face down, his cowboy hat resting nearby.

Afterward, Price returned to Elizabeth Hickey’s home and beat her to death, crushing her skull in five places, in an apparent attempt to eliminate her as a potential witness. He then bought a ticket to see the movie “Gandhi.” The gang soon received a postcard in prison. It said, “Business has been taken care of.”

One day not long ago, I tried to find Michael Thompson. I had been told that he had mysteriously dropped out of the Aryan Brotherhood shortly after the Barnes killing, and had testified against Price, who, in 1986, was convicted of the two murders. Thompson became the highest-ranking defector in the gang’s history. (“He’s big, he’s tough, he’s mean, he’s killed, and then all of a sudden he’s gone, just rolled over,” one A.B. associate said in disbelief.) Thompson was thought to have as many death threats made against him as anyone in prison; his family had been relocated, and he was being held in the correctional system’s version of the witness-protection program. He was moved from prison to prison anonymously, and was often kept in a protective-custody unit, walled off from most inmates.

After weeks of searching, I called the prison where I had heard Thompson was incarcerated. The authorities insisted that there was no one there by that name. Moments later, I received a call from a law-enforcement official who knew I was trying to find Thompson. “They think you’re trying to kill him,” she said. “They’re moving him out of the prison right now.”

After explaining to officials why I wanted to speak with Thompson, I was able to get a letter to him, and, with his agreement, I headed to the maximum-security prison where he was being held under the name of “Occupant.” To get inside the prison, I had to submit my car to a search, and I was given a checkered shirt to replace my blue oxford, which happened to match the color of some inmate uniforms and was therefore forbidden. There were several children with their mothers filing in alongside me; they wore white dresses or neatly pleated pants, as if they were attending church.

We passed through several steel gates, each door clanking loudly behind us, before reaching a brightly lit room filled with wooden chairs and tables. While the other visitors were allowed to sit freely with inmates, I was led to the back of the room, where a three-foot-by-three-foot bulletproof window was cut into the wall. A chair was placed in front of it, and I sat down and peered through the scuffed plastic. I could see a small cement cell, with a telephone and a chair. The room was sealed on all sides except for a steel door at the opposite end. A moment later, the door clicked open and Thompson, a giant of a man, appeared in a white prison jumpsuit with his hands shackled behind his back. As a guard removed his chains, Thompson bent forward and I could see his face. It was covered with a hermit-like beard. His hair reached to his shoulders and was parted down the middle, in the style that was fashionable in the seventies, when he was first convicted of murder. As he came closer to the glass, I could see, amid the thickets of graying hair, his bright-blue eyes. He sat down and reached for the phone, and I picked up mine.

“How was your trip?” he asked.

He spoke in a soft, courteous voice. I asked him why he had dropped out of the Brand, and he said he made his decision after the debate over whether to kill Steven Barnes’s father and other family members. “I argued with them for days,” he said. “I kept saying, ‘We’re warriors, aren’t we? We don’t kill children. We don’t kill mothers and fathers.’ But I lost. And they killed him, execution style, and then they killed Hickey, an innocent woman, just because she knew where Price had gotten the gun. And that’s when I walked away. That’s when I said, ‘This thing is out of control.’ ’’ He leaned toward the window, his breath steaming the glass. “I am still willing to fight someone in here, head up, if I have to. That’s the culture of where I live. But I was not for killing people on the outside, people in your world.”

When I asked him what he initially found compelling about the gang, he paused for a long moment. “That’s a very good question,” he said. There was the protection, he suggested, ticking off the reasons. There was the sense of belonging. But that wasn’t really it. For him, at least, he said, it was the rush of power. “I was naïve, because I saw us as these noble warriors,” he said. In the eighties, he added, he had tried to change the nature of the gang. “I thought that by organizing we could make the gang less bloody. I thought we could strip away the irrational killings. But I was foolish, because at some level you could never remove that. And the structure only allowed the gang to be more deadly.”

During our conversation, Thompson cited various philosophers, including Nietzsche, whose “true genius,” he later wrote me in a letter, “the gang often misinterprets.” It was hard to reconcile this cerebral figure with a man who said he had once helped to stab sixteen men in a single day. But, when I asked him about his training, he reached out with his hand and began, in almost clinical fashion, to show how to assassinate someone. “You can do it here on the right side of the heart, in the aorta, or here in the neck, or back here in the spine, which will paralyze someone,” he said, moving his hand back and forth, as if slicing something. “I’ve been in jail thirty years now, and I know I am probably never going to get out. I am a dangerous person. I don’t like violence, but I am good at it.”

He had tried, he said, to isolate himself from other prisoners. “I don’t go in the yard much,” he said. “It’s not safe.” He said the only people he could really interact with were the guards, for fear of being recognized. “In here, I am lower than child killers and child molesters. Because I defected from the A.B., I am the lowest there is.”

The gang had tried several times to get to him; after he was placed in the protective-custody unit, he said, the Brand sent in a “sleeper”-a secret collaborator-who had tried to stab him. “You need to understand one thing,” Thompson said. “The Aryan Brotherhood is not about white supremacy. It is about supremacy. And it will do anything to get it. Anything.”

A guard banged on the door. “I have to go now,” he said.

As he stood, he pressed his hand against the glass, and I could see something green on his left hand. I looked closer: it was the faint outline of a shamrock. Armed with that tattoo, Thompson had told me, a man could take over an entire United States penitentiary.

In the fall of 1994, a bus filled with prisoners arrived at Leavenworth, Kansas, a maximum-security federal prison built almost a century ago. Out stepped a tall muscular man with a black mustache. His arms were covered with tattoos, and he soon appeared in the yard without a shirt, revealing a large shamrock in the middle of his chest. He was immediately surrounded by a group of white inmates. Many went to the commissary and paid to have their photograph taken with him, which they carried around like passports. “If you . . . were able to show that picture, it was just like standing next to your favorite pop star,” one prisoner said.

The man’s name was Michael McElhiney, but everyone called him Mac. A reputed A.B. member, he had just come from Marion, where he had been housed with Barry Mills, the notorious Baron. Mills, who later testified in court on McElhiney’s behalf, said, “I look at him like a son.”

McElhiney, a convicted methamphetamine dealer who had conspired to kill a witness, was so charismatic that, according to authorities, a juror once fell in love with him. However, in private letters, which were later confiscated by prison officials, Mac spoke openly of “the beast” inside him and referred to himself proudly as “an angry rabble rouser.” An F.B.I. agent at Leavenworth described him as probably “a psychopath,” while a close friend put it this way: “He likes to have everybody know that he’s God.”

An Aryan Brotherhood presence had long existed at Leavenworth, which was known as “the hothouse,” because of its sweltering, catacomb-like cells. But McElhiney was determined to extend the gang’s reach.

Although the Brand maintained remnants of its racist ideology, it had increasingly sought, according to a declassified F.B.I. report, “to launch a cooperative effort of death and fear against staff and other inmates . . . in order to take over the system.” The Brand aimed, the F.B.I. warned, to control everything from drug trafficking to the sale of “punks”-inmates forced into prostitution-to extortion rackets to murder contracts behind bars. It sought, in short, to become a racketeering enterprise. The council member Clifford Smith had told authorities that the gang was no longer primarily “bent on destroying blacks and the Jews and the minorities of the world, white supremacy and all that poop. It’s a criminal organization, first and foremost.”

Using an array of white associates, who either coveted membership in the gang or needed protection, McElhiney set out to dominate Leavenworth’s underground economy. His men went from tier to tier, demanding a tax from the sale of “pruno”-prison wine that could be brewed out of almost any cafeteria fruit (apples, strawberries, even ketchup). At the time, a man named Keith Segien was running a friendly poker game in the prison’s B unit. One night on his way to his cell, Segien later testified in court, Mac was waiting for him. He told Segien to sit down.

Segien hesitated. “What’s this about?” he asked.

“If I wanted you killed,” Segien recalls him saying, “you’d have been dead by now.” Then Mac added, “Someone told me you don’t want me . . . to run the poker game, and I’m here to make money. I’m going to run the poker game.” He asked if Segien had a problem with that.

“I said no,” Segien testified. “That was the last day I ran the poker game.”

Mac soon had gambling rackets operating in nearly every unit, on nearly every tier. As with the sale of pruno, inmates say, the guards often turned a blind eye, perhaps to mollify a seething population. Some guards, it seemed, had come to consider the Aryan Brotherhood presence as inevitable, and even used its leaders as surrogate power brokers. In one instance, a guard at Leavenworth went to McElhiney to get the O.K. before he released another prisoner in the yard. One longtime A.B. member compared the illicit operations in maximum-security prisons to bootlegging during Prohibition and to the high-roller tables in Las Vegas.

Currency is not allowed in prison, and inmates typically paid their smaller debts to the Brotherhood by offering free contraband or items from the commissary: cigarettes, candy, stamps, books. At the high-roller tables at Leavenworth, where imprisoned drug lords could place bets in the thousands of dollars, participants were allowed to play for a month on credit. The man in charge of the table kept a tally of wins and losses. At the end of the month, inmates say, Mac’s men would collect the losses; usually, gamblers would pay up by having a relative or a friend send an untraceable money order to a designated A.B. person on the outside. If an indebted inmate didn’t have the money mailed on time, internal prison records show, he was typically “piped”-beaten with a metal rod. McElhiney later acknowledged that he was funnelling the proceeds to his mentor Mills and to other reputed leaders of the Aryan Brotherhood, with whom he had “a pact” to take over the “gambling business.”

McElhiney, who presided over the yard wearing sunglasses, his nails often stained yellow from chewing tobacco, then decided to focus on drug smuggling. In the past, the Brand had sought out almost anyone who could bring in its merchandise. In one instance, several inmates involved in a scheme told me, the gang offered to protect Charles Manson, and even conspired in a failed bid to help him escape; in return, Manson’s cult of women on the outside helped to smuggle dope into prison for them.

According to authorities and court records, Mac now started to canvass the population for the most vulnerable inmates-those who were drug addicts or in debt to the gang or simply scared, and could therefore be forced to serve as “mules.” One such person was Walter Moles, a drug user who was terrified of the gang. His father, who was terminally ill with emphysema, was planning to travel to Leavenworth to celebrate his son’s birthday. According to Moles’s later testimony, Mac instructed him to have his drug contact on the outside send Moles’s father six balloons filled with heroin. Using coded language on the prison’s tape-recorded pay phones, Moles then persuaded his father to transport the package.

Weeks later, when his father arrived, he sat beside Moles in the visiting room, under the guards’ scrutiny. He carried the package in his underwear. Moles instructed his father to go into the bathroom, place two of the balloons in his mouth, then return and spit them into Moles’s cup of coffee. His father said he couldn’t do it. The heroin wasn’t in six balloons. “It’s in one big one,” he said.

“How big?” Moles asked.

“A Ping-Pong ball.”

Eventually, his father managed to drop the balloon into his son’s coffee cup. Moles tried to swallow it, but it got stuck in his throat.

His father started to panic. “Son, just give it back to me,” he begged. “I’ll send it back to where it came from.”

“No, Dad, I can’t,” he said. He explained that the heroin wasn’t for himself. “These guys I’m bringing it in for want their stuff.”

His father didn’t seem to understand: Who were these people?

Moles saw a guard’s attention wander, and said that he had to say goodbye.

“Is it the end of the visit?” his father asked.

“If I’m going to do it, this is my only chance,” Moles said. While his father distracted the guard, Moles untucked his shirt and forced the drugs into his rectum. After he got past the guards, he said, he gave “the stuff” to one of Mac’s henchmen.

The next morning, Moles waited behind the bleachers in the yard for his cut. Suddenly, he felt something hard against the back of his head, and he collapsed to the ground. “I tried to get up,” Moles later testified, “but I kept getting kicked.”

Mac’s men told Moles to stay down.

“What did I do wrong?” Moles asked. “What did I do wrong?”

Afterward, when an A.B. associate asked Mac why he had assaulted Moles and taken his share of the dope, Mac reportedly replied, “bleen the little punk.”

Heroin was now flooding into Leavenworth. According to authorities, inmates received more than twelve hundred positive tests for heroin during 1995. One prisoner estimated that forty per cent of the population was shooting up. “Heroin deadens everything,” an inmate at Leavenworth said. “Speed, man, you’re bebopping around and you’re doing more time than you would normally because you ain’t sleeping at night. . . . But the heroin, yeah . . . you’re feeling no pain.”

Because of the scarcity of supply and the unusually high demand in prison, authorities say, a gram of heroin that was bought on the street for sixty-five dollars was selling inside Leavenworth for as much as a thousand dollars. A former council member told me that the gang was bringing in anywhere from half a million to a million dollars a year from a single prison. As one F.B.I. agent put it, “You just do the math.”

With his empire expanding by the day, Mac seemed more and more “out of control,” as one former ally said. Although A.B. leaders were forbidden, under gang rules, to use heroin themselves, associates say that Mac would hole up in his cell with “a rig”-a homemade syringe typically constructed out of a needle stolen from the infirmary and a hollowed-out ballpoint pen. There, in what inmates describe as a heroin-induced haze, he would allegedly sit with A.B. henchmen and mete out his own form of justice, including murder.

McElhiney eventually became convinced that a snitch was trolling for evidence against him. Then one day, associates say, Mac sent word to his men that he had found the rat: Bubba Leger, a trusted associate who did most of the A.B.’s tattoo work and who only a few months earlier had posed proudly next to Mac for a photograph. In the rec cage one day, according to witnesses, one of Mac’s associates nicknamed Ziggy, who was purportedly eager to make his bones, pulled out a knife and started stabbing Bubba. “Why you doing this?” Bubba pleaded.With blood flowing from his chest, Bubba stumbled over to the steel door of the cage and pounded on it, trying to get the guards’ attention. In full view of the guards, Ziggy stabbed Bubba at least five more times. Bubba died moments later.

It was then, witnesses say, that they saw one of Mac’s men take another weapon, a sharpened toothbrush, and plant it near Bubba to make it look as though he had used it first. Afterward, McElhiney was said to have enforced a long-standing Aryan Brotherhood policy, which required all witnesses to perjure themselves. “ ‘I’m going to give you a choice,’ ” an associate said that McElhiney told him. “ ‘You can either lie or die on this one.’ ” In a note, McElhiney, who shaved his head after the murder, instructed Ziggy what to do: “The defense you’re going to have is self-defense.” He went on, “Hang tough, Stud. As soon as you get a lawyer direct him to me without further ado. . . . Got it? Stress to him that it’s a must he come see me ’fore you trust him-Our code word will be Mary Mary Quite Contrary.”

Ziggy received a twenty-seven-year sentence and later appeared with a tattoo of a shamrock on his leg, but authorities were never able to prove that McElhiney had ordered the killing (though they did later convict him for smuggling drugs). During the investigation, one unexpected fact emerged: Bubba had not been a snitch after all.

“This isn’t in the job description,” Gregory Jessner said. The Assistant United States Attorney was standing on a loading dock outside the Los Angeles federal courthouse, stacking onto an old wooden dolly boxes of transcripts for his case against the Aryan Brotherhood. There were thirteen in all, and as he worked a small circle of sweat appeared on his starched white shirt. The son of a mathematician, he had a slightly cerebral air. “I don’t really have a bulldog persona,” he said. “I’m not like Marcia Clark.” He had never read a John Grisham novel, and was known to pick up books by Cervantes and David Foster Wallace between trials.

After he wheeled the boxes upstairs, occasionally bumping into walls and doors, he arranged them on a long wooden conference table, and caught his breath. Then he said, “These deal with just one murder in the indictment. It’s nothing.”

Jessner had started investigating the gang in 1992. A convicted murderer was found strangled in his cell at a federal prison in Lompoc, California, and Jessner was assigned the case. Law-enforcement officials often dismiss such crimes as N.H.I.s-“No humans involved”-because the victims are considered to be as unsympathetic as the perps. Trying to break through a web of perjury, Jessner located several witnesses who claimed that the A.B. had murdered a fellow gang member for, among other things, falling in love with a gay prisoner. Although the Brotherhood had a long history of trafficking in “punks,” and although some of its members were known to receive sexual favors in return for protection, the gang considered open homosexuality a sign of weakness, a violation of the A.B. code. “The member made the mistake of kissing on the stairs,” Jessner said.

Jessner was able to prove that an A.B. recruit had gone into his associate’s cell, tied a bedsheet around his neck, and strangled him while an accomplice held his legs. Yet Jessner realized that he had done little to impede the gang; as with previous isolated prosecutions, he may have only strengthened it. The recruit was later said to have hung a photograph of his target on his cell wall, like an honorary plaque, and held a celebration with pruno on the anniversary of the murder.

As Jessner dug deeper into this violent subculture, he learned that there were no definitive statistics on A.B. crimes, because so few of them were prosecuted-and because so many associates from other gangs, including the Dirty White Boys and the Mexican Mafia, did its bidding. More general statistics on inmate violence provided a glimpse of what one sociologist once described as “the upsurge of rapacious and murderous groups” inside American prisons. According to the most recent Justice Department census, fifty-one inmates were murdered in prisons in 2000. Moreover, there were more than thirty-four thousand reported assaults by inmates on other inmates, and nearly eighteen thousand on staff. Rape is common; one study of prisons in four states estimated that at least one in five inmates has been sexually assaulted.

Jessner eventually started to dig into hundreds of violent crimes linked to the Aryan Brotherhood. Working with an officer from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms named Mike Halualani-a half-Japanese, half-Hawaiian agent who was as brash as Jessner was genteel-Jessner attempted to devise a strategy to break the gang’s stranglehold. But the more he investigated the more it seemed that the gang defied any conventional notion of a prosecution. Jessner told me that he kept asking himself, “How do you stop people who see a murder rap as a badge of honor? How do you stop people who have already been stopped by the law and sentenced to life imprisonment?”

By the nineteen-nineties, authorities, hoping to create at least some deterrent, and to protect other inmates, had relocated nearly all the Aryan Brotherhood’s top leaders, including the Baron, to what were then a new breed of prisons, called “supermaxes.” These prisoners were held in single cells, locked down nearly the entire day, without, as one gang member put it, “seeing fresh earth, plant life, or unfiltered sunlight”; they exercised alone in an indoor cage, were fed meals through a tray slot, and had little, if any, human contact.

In the case of Silverstein, who was already serving multiple life sentences when he killed the guard Clutts, in 1983, the Bureau of Prisons had established a separate unit for him at Leavenworth, where he was held in a Hannibal Lecter-style cage. Though Silverstein continued to sketch, he was for years not permitted to have a comb or a hairbrush, and when the reporter Pete Earley visited him, in the late eighties, he had long wild hair and a beard. “They want me to go crazy,” he told Earley. “They want to point their fingers at me and say, ‘See, see, we told you he is a lunatic.’ . . . I didn’t come in here a killer, but in here you learn hate. The insanity in here is cultivated by the guards. They feed the beast that lingers within all of us. . . . I find myself smiling at the thought of me killing Clutts each time they deny me a phone call, a visit, or keep the lights on. I find it harder and harder to repent and ask for forgiveness, because deep inside I can feel that hatred and anger growing.”

Jessner told me, “Within the gang’s lore, Silverstein has become its Christ figure.”

Even under these conditions, which some civil-rights groups considered a violation of human rights, the Aryan Brotherhood continued to flourish. Its members developed elaborate ways to communicate. They dropped notes through pipes that were connected to nearby cells; they tapped Morse code on prison bars; they forced orderlies to pass kites; they whispered through vents in “carnie,” a convoluted, rhyming code language. (“Bottle stoppers” meant “coppers.”) In addition, the leaders had developed a devoted coterie of women on the outside who had fallen in love with them through visits and correspondence and could serve as couriers, relaying messages back and forth between members. One woman who coöperated in the gang’s illegal businesses later claimed she had Stockholm syndrome.

With the help of prison authorities, Jessner began to intercept a series of covert messages. Portions of the letters appeared to be blank, as if someone had been interrupted. After analysts applied heat with an iron and placed the paper under ultraviolet light, letters would appear, revealing “a secret message,” as the F.B.I. wrote in an internal report. Cryptographers analyzed the “ink” of one such note, and discovered that the message was written with urine. The message itself was baffling; it had been scrambled into a code. “They have certain words that mean a certain thing,” one former member said. “If they tell you that ‘somebody’s going to build a house in the country,’ the prevalent word . . . is ‘country,’ because . . . that means ‘murder.’ ”

Jessner and his team spent hours breaking sentences apart and reconstructing them. He started to see patterns in the messages: “baby boy” meant yes, and “baby girl” meant no. One day, prison authorities intercepted a note sent by T. D. Bingham, the A.B. commissioner, to the Baron. It said, “Well I am a grandfather, at last my boy’s wife gave birth to a strapping eight pound seven ounce baby boy.” Jessner feared that the reference to the baby’s weight was code for 187, the California legal statute pertaining to murder; the fact that the baby was a boy suggested that a hit had been approved. Then analysts noticed that several of the letters had squiggly marks, almost like tails, on them. The words “eight pound,” for instance, had curlicues on the letters “e,” “g,” “n,” and “d.” It appeared to be a code within a code.

After scrutinizing the letters, authorities determined that the note was in fact written in a biliteral cipher, a method invented by Sir Francis Bacon, the seventeenth-century philosopher. It involved using two distinct alphabets, depending on how the letters were drawn. An unadorned “c” referred to alphabet A, whereas a curlicued “c” represented alphabet B. Investigators went through the note, categorizing each letter by alphabet until they had a cluster of letters that all seemed to be a play on the initials of the Aryan Brotherhood:

bbbaaaaabbabaaabababbabaaababaaabaaabb- bababbaabbaaabbaabbabbbaabb . . .

It still made no sense. But after analysts broke the letters into clusters of five, Jessner says, they started to realize that each cluster represented an individual letter. Thus “ababb” was an “A,” “abbab” was a “B,” and so on. They had finally cracked the code; now they went through the letter again. It said:

Confirm message from Chris to move on DC.

Officials knew that “DC” meant the D.C. Blacks, a prison gang against whom the Aryan Brotherhood had recently declared war. But, by the time authorities decoded the letter, two black inmates had been found dead in their cells in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania: one was stabbed thirty-four times, the other thirty-five.

The Brotherhood began developing murder schemes that could succeed even in maximum-security environments. They started to befriend their foes, so they could one day “rock them to sleep.” At Pelican Bay, where friends could apply to be cellmates, they sought to room with the very men they wanted to kill. “Deception was key,” one member who strangled his cellmate acknowledged. Between 1996 and 1998, A.B. members at Pelican Bay murdered three inmates, and were suspected in at least three additional slayings.

In many cases, officials in the correctional system seemed powerless to stop the gang. At Folsom prison, after A.B. leaders were sequestered from the general population, the gang’s associates protested by indiscriminately stabbing rapists and child molesters until the leaders were released. A few prison officials actually facilitated the Brotherhood’s activities. At the supermax prison in Colorado, a guard was accused of becoming an Aryan Brotherhood disciple; at Pelican Bay, two guards were discovered encouraging the beatings of child molesters and sex offenders by gang members. A local prosecutor warned that officials at Pelican Bay were unable to stop a “reign of terror.”

By the mid-nineties, Jessner says, the gang had evolved to the point that it had to appoint members to lead different branches of its operations-such as the “department of security” and the “department of narcotics.” Though the Aryan Brotherhood’s profits never rivalled those of the Italian Mafia or outside drug lords, its reputation for violence did. The gang had some of the most highly trained and ruthless hit men in the country. And inside the prison system the Baron had so grown in stature that he overshadowed the imprisoned head of the Italian Mafia, John Gotti. According to authorities, in July, 1996, after a black inmate attacked Gotti at Marion prison, bloodying his face, the Mafia leader, who seemed ill prepared for the explosion of prison violence, sought the Baron’s help in murdering his assailant. The Brotherhood seemed receptive to the idea-the Baron allegedly used sign language to communicate the price of the hit to an associate-but Gotti died before the hit could be executed.

It was around then that Jessner decided that the only way to take down the gang was the way authorities had taken down the Italian Mafia-by using the rico statutes, which allowed the government to attack the entire hierarchy of a criminal organization rather than just one or two members. The goal, as Halualani put it, was to “cut off the head, not just the body.”

In an audacious move, Jessner decided to pursue the death penalty for nearly all the gang’s top leaders. “It’s the only arrow left in our quiver,” he told me. “I think even a lot of people who are against the death penalty in general would recognize that in this particular instance, where people are committing murder repeatedly from behind bars, there is little other option.”

While Jessner was slowly trying to build a case, methodically flipping witnesses, decoding messages, and gathering forensic evidence, he had to be careful of “sleepers”-gang members pretending to coöperate with authorities in order to infiltrate the investigation. During a previous F.B.I. probe, agents reported that they were concerned that one snitch may “have in fact been a ploy by the A.B. to infiltrate the witsec program”-the witness-protection program-“and determine where all the government witnesses were housed.”

As the Brotherhood grew stronger, it developed ambitions that extended beyond prison walls. Though many leaders were serving life sentences without parole, some members were being paroled-an outcome that authorities had long feared. “Most of the A.B. will be paroled or discharged at some future date and, in view of members’ lifelong commitments, it would be naïve to think he would not remain in contact with his brothers,” a declassified F.B.I. report stated. “The rule of thumb is that once on the streets, one must take care of his brothers that are still inside. The penalty for failure to do so is death upon the member’s return to the prison system.” Given the gang’s ability to operate behind bars, the F.B.I. report warned of “what these gang members can do with little or no supervision.” Silverstein himself has said, “Someday most of us finally get out of this hell and even a rational dog after getting kicked around year after year after year attacks when his cage door is finally opened.”

On March 24, 1995, the door at Pelican Bay finally opened for Robert Scully, a reputed A.B. member and armed robber who had spent, with the exception of a few months, the previous thirteen years behind bars-many of them inside the Hole. For an Aryan brother, he was small: barely five feet four, and a hundred and forty-five pounds. But the thirty-six-year-old was known to work out obsessively in his cell, doing an endless routine of what the gang called “burpees”-standing one moment, then dropping to the floor to do a pushup, then hopping to one’s feet again.

Brenda Moore, a lonely thirty-eight-year-old single mother who had long corresponded with inmates at Pelican Bay-and, in the process, had become one of the gang’s female followers-picked Scully up at the prison gate in her truck. Scully wore powder-blue sweatpants, a sweatshirt, and a watch cap. He had two hundred dollars in his pocket. Scully had previously sent Moore a series of seductive letters. In one, written on pink paper, he said, “All extraneous subversion manifests itself when we connect.” In another, he wrote, “I will always be with you as you are one of me now. Our synergy is infinite.”

After leaving the prison, the couple drove to the beach, where Scully walked along the shore, collecting seashells. The following day, though, he found a sawed-off shotgun, and he and Moore set out for Santa Rosa, driving south along Highway 101. Six days after Scully’s release, they stopped near a saloon in the middle of the night. A police car pulled up behind their pickup truck. As a fifty-eight-year-old deputy sheriff approached with his flashlight, Scully leaped out with his shotgun. The deputy raised his hands over his head, but Scully shot him between the eyes.

The Aryan Brotherhood was now killing on the outside with as little hesitation as it had on the inside. Similarly, the gang was expanding its racketeering operation onto the streets. In letters written in 1999 to one recent parolee, the Baron said, “We especially need for some to step-up,” and, referring to the gang’s shamrock symbol, he urged, “start polishing the rock out there!!!” The gang allegedly enlisted paroled A.B. members and associates to become drug dealers, gunrunners, stickup men, and hit men. Some Pelican Bay inmates were discovered mapping out establishments to rob.

That same year, a reputed Brand member on the streets walked into the Palm Springs home of a drug dealer who wasn’t sharing enough of his profits with the gang. Witnesses told police that the A.B. member pulled out a .38 and unloaded five bullets into the man’s chest and head, telling everyone in the room that this was for “the fellows”-the Ayran Brotherhood-up north at Pelican Bay, and warning that new brothers were being released every day.

A year later, in a letter disguised as privileged legal mail, the gang spoke of plans to “buy a warehouse with offices on some large acreage.” The letter’s author, a member who was about to be released, added, “I’ll outfit it with a well-stocked law library, computer research desk, copy machine, iron pile, pool table, big screen TV, car and bike garage with tools, handball courts, etc. This will be the Brand Ranch. . . . This will be home base for us out there.”

Around the same time, a longtime reputed A.B. member confided to authorities that he had been approached at the supermax in Colorado by the gang and asked for technical help in making bombs. The gang, he was informed, was planning terrorist attacks on federal facilities across the United States. “It’s become irrational,” he told authorities after declining to help. “They’re talking about car bombs, truck bombs, and mail bombs.”

Just when the Brotherhood seemed poised to take a particularly violent turn, Jessner unleashed the United States Marshals. Nearly four decades after the gang was born, it found itself under siege.

The courthouse where one of the first trials against the Brand would take place was in the middle of a verdant forest in Benton, Illinois, about thirty miles from Marion prison. It had been built on the edges of a circular clearing, and stood not far from a dozen or so dilapidated brick storefronts. Some of the stores had been shut down; others had signs offering discounts, as if they would soon join them.

A single alleged A.B. murder, which was included in Jessner’s sprawling indictment, also fell under the jurisdiction of the United States Attorney in the Southern District of Illinois. The trial, which began last September, centered on David Sakahian, McElhiney’s most feared cohort, the man who had once reputedly had an inmate stabbed for bumping him during a basketball game. He was charged with ordering two alleged associates to murder a thirty-seven-year-old bank robber named Terry Walker during a 1999 race war at Marion. Sahakian, along with his two associates, faced the death penalty. The trial offered a glimpse of what will happen early next year in Los Angeles, when Jessner will begin to prosecute forty people, including McElhiney and the Baron.

Even though the Benton trial involved only one A.B. member and two associates, the United States Marshals walled off the entire building. For the first time in the court’s history, cement barricades had been placed around the exterior. To get inside, I had to pass through two metal detectors.

Nearly a dozen marshals, dressed in black suits and black shoes, led the defendants, whose wrists and ankles were shackled, into the courtroom. Sahakian wore gray slacks and a gray short-sleeved shirt. Everything about him was big: his hands; his stomach; his long, sloping forehead. Whereas in old photographs he had an unruly beard-it apparently had inspired his nickname, the Beast-now he had only a goatee, which made his face look even larger.

His wife was in the gallery, and he winked at her as he sat down. She told me that they had met twenty-five years ago, and that during twenty-three of those years he had been behind bars. Petite, with blond hair and a blue miniskirt that exposed well-toned legs, she gave off a strong scent of perfume. She sat right behind him, taking notes throughout the trial. At one point, she told me, “They keep saying he’s a boss of the Aryan Brotherhood and that he ordered everyone around. But I don’t believe it. He can’t even order me around.”

When a pathologist took the stand, the prosecution projected on a large screen a photograph of Walker’s body. It was stretched out on a metal table. There were bloodstains on his chest, his eyes were open, and his mouth appeared to be frozen midspeech. The pathologist described each stab wound. Then he pointed to a hole in the heart-it was the one that killed him, he said.

None of the defendants looked up at the screen, and, other than the marshals and Sahakian’s wife, the gallery was empty. Nobody from the victim’s family was there. Jessner had told me that most of these victims had already been cast out by society, and, when they were killed, few people, if any, cared. “I feel a certain obligation to defend those who have no one to defend them,” he had said.

After a break in the trial, the defendant who had purportedly held the victim down during the attack refused to come out of a holding room. The judge ordered the marshals to forcibly carry him out. Sahakian leaped to his feet and said that that wasn’t necessary. “If I go back there,” he said in a commanding voice, “he’ll come out.” At last, a marshal went out to the holding room and escorted the defendant into the courtroom. He walked with pointed slowness and stared at the prosecutor. “What the bleen you looking at!” he yelled.

Six marshals quickly hovered around him. As he sat down, he slammed his chair into the groin of one of the agents. Eventually, order was restored, and, when an inmate who had helped stab several black inmates took the stand as a government witness, Sahakian rubbed his fingers along the arm of his chair. Each time the witness made allegations against Sahakian, he seemed to grip the chair more tightly. His knuckles turned white. Finally, he glanced toward me in the gallery and said, “Don’t believe a word he’s saying. He’s nothin’ better than a poop-house rat.”

“Don’t use that language, honey,” his wife said.

“Metaphorically speaking,” he said.

Several inmates who had told authorities that they were prepared to come forward had also said that they were frightened to do so. One said that since he had turned on the A.B. his family had been threatened. Another, who had provided evidence, was staying in his cell, clutching his rosary beads. He said, “I’ll say my prayers that I don’t get about seventy-five holes in me.”

Jessner was sitting at his desk at his headquarters in Los Angeles, preparing pretrial motions. While he was awaiting a verdict in the Benton trial, which was expected as early as this month, he needed to get ready not just for one trial but for potentially five or six-since not all forty defendants could be held safely in one courtroom. Security was already a challenge; most of the inmates, including the Baron and McElhiney, were being held in single cells at the West Valley Detention Center, outside Los Angeles. Some defendants had been found with drugs and concealed razor blades.

Fearing that the gang might turn on its own, Jessner had placed a few A.B. members in other prisons. In a letter, the Baron had told another gang member, “It’s likely necessary for us to step-up and conduct a thorough evaluation of every brother’s personal character and level of commitment, as we currently possess some serious rot that is in fact potentially a cancer!” He added that it should be “a top priority to wipe them off the face of this earth!”

Jessner said he knew that the gang was trying to hold on to its operations, but he was optimistic about the upcoming trials. “I can’t say for sure if another gang will take the Brotherhood’s place, or if new leaders will replace the old ones,” he said. “But I know that if we succeed it will send a message that the Aryan Brotherhood can no longer kill with impunity.”

Jessner got up and started heading toward the courtroom, to attend a pretrial hearing. He was wearing a charcoal suit that seemed too loose for his small frame. I asked him if, as some feared, he had been “put in the hat”-marked for assassination.

He blanched. “I don’t know,” he said. He later added, “It’s a pretty big hat.”

The United States Attorney had arranged extra security for him, including a secure parking space nearby. One of his colleagues had declined to work on the case after his wife objected. “I worry,” Jessner admitted. “You can’t help but worry.”

He paused and looked at me. He wouldn’t feel right if he stopped, he said. “I don’t believe that because you rob a convenience store you should receive a death sentence. I don’t believe that our prisons should be divided into predators and prey.” As he headed into the courtroom, he added, “I don’t believe that that is what our system intended by justice.”

See also: Aryan Brotherhood; AB members & associates ; Aryan Brotherhood of Texas; Dallas Scott; Thomas Silverstein


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