Celebrated author Norman Mailer greeted paroled murderer Jack Abbott at JFK Airport in June of 1981, and Abbott was the toast of the town, appearing on the Today Show and in the pages of People magazine. As a proud practitioner of “radical chic,” Mailer now had a dangerous but “brilliant” protégé to showcase. Enthralled by Abbott’s prison manuscript, In the Belly of the Beast, Mailer and other celebrities pressed successfully for his release. But on July 18, just six weeks after his arrival in New York, Abbott stabbed a young restaurant employee to death when the man insisted that the restroom was not open to the public. In 1965, Abbott had stabbed a fellow inmate to death in Utah, and now in New York, he had reverted to form. Here was dramatic evidence that romanticizing and coddling felons was dangerous business.1

“In-house” prison murder is common since inmates can weaponize anything; a bar of soap in a sock becomes a club, a sharpened toothbrush a stiletto (which can be hidden in a hollowed-out Bible); in their hands, microwaved soup scalds, broken towel racks lacerate, and guitar strings strangle.2 Guards are targets too. On October 22, 1983, Thomas Silverstein, an inmate at the federal prison in Marion, Illinois, was being led in handcuffs from the shower to his cell. On the way, he was allowed to pause for conversation with fellow Aryan Brotherhood member, Randy Gometz, who was still in his cell. Gometz produced a stolen key and unlocked Silverstein’s cuffs. Silverstein then reached through the bars, grabbed a shank3 from Gometz’s waistband, turned on guard Merle Clutts, and stabbed him to death with 20 strokes.4 Similar horror stories could be found in abundance across the nation; for instance, in California between 1970 and 1973, 11 guards were murdered, and in 1972 alone, 32 prisoners were killed by their fellow inmates.5

Not all assaults are fatal. Prisoners routinely use the food tray hatches in their cell doors to douse the guards with garbage and human waste.6 And in Minnesota’s Oak Park Heights facility, when guard Bill Anthony carelessly revealed life details to inmate Marshall Walker, thugs on the outside made menacing calls to Anthony’s home, forcing him to cave to Walker’s demands.7 Whether lethal or not, the assaults have become so widespread that the U.S. Bureau of Prisons has begun to build “supermax” units,8 such as the one at Florence, Colorado, 90 miles south of Denver.9 Completed in 1994, it was built in direct response to the killings at Marion. As with other supermax prisons, Florence is designed to hold the “worst of the worst,” and some of its residents (e.g., 9/11’s Zacarias Moussaoui and “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski) are quite famous.10

Since many prisoners exploit their freedoms to engineer deadly plots, the supermax prisons minimize those liberties, notably confining the inmates to their single-occupant cells 23 hours a day.11 Furthermore, “The daily hour when inmates are out of confinement is usually spent in an enclosed and secure area, isolated again from human contact. Interaction with staff or other inmates is rare.”12 When guards are required to move them, prisoner restraints are maximal, including handcuffs, waist chains, leg irons, and anti-spit masks.13

Some charge that supermaxes “demonize” prisoners, treating them as “beasts,”14 but it is their own “demonic” behavior which has landed them in such prisons. And even the beasts of the field do not torture, maim, and kill for pleasure or perverse zeal. Of course, inmate-advocacy groups are incensed at the operation of these “control units,”15 and no doubt abuses occur, but the greater abuse occurs when others are exposed to the terrible presence of these ferocious men.

In a Western culture that increasingly finds it difficult to use the word “evil,” the truth is that the doctrine of human depravity cannot be ignored. As Natan Sharansky has poignantly said, “In dictatorships, you have to have the courage to fight evil; in the free world you need courage to see the evil.”16
 
Footnotes:
 
1  Mark Gado, “Jack Abbott: From the Belly of the Beast,” Court TV: Crime Library Website, http://www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/celebrity/jack_abbott/index.html (November 24, 2006). See also Michiko Kakutani, “The Strange Case of the Writer and the Criminal,” New York Times Book Review, September 20, 1981, http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/10/specials/mailer-abbot.html (accessed November 24, 2006). Also Bruce Jackson, “Jack Henry Abbott, 58,” Buffalo Report Website, March 2001, http://www.buffaloreport.com/020301abbott.html (accessed November 13, 2006).
 
2  James H. Burton, The Big House: Life Inside a Supermax Security Prison (Stillwater, MN: Voyageur Press, 2004), 66-68, 178-179.
 
3  A homemade knife.
 
4  Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, s.v. “Thomas Silverstein,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Silverstein (accessed November 24, 2006). See also “America’s Most Dangerous Prisoner?” BBC News, August 10, 2001, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1393970.stm (accessed November 24, 2006).
 
5  Sasha Abramsky, “Return of the Madhouse,” American Prospect, February 11, 2002, reprinted in America’s Prisons: Opposing Viewpoints, ed. Clare Hanrahan (New York: Thomson, Gale, 2006), 83.
 
6  Burton, 80.
 
7  Ibid., 110-111.
 
8  Also called “special housing units” (SHUs), “special management units” (SMUs), intensive management units (IMUs), “maxi-maxis,” and “extended control units” (ECUs). William Collins, Supermax Prisons and the Constitution: Liability Concerns in the Extended Control Unit (Washington: U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of Corrections, 2004), 5, http://www.nicic.org/pubs/2004/019835.pdf (accessed November 24, 2006).
 
9  “USP Florence ADMAX,” Federal Bureau of Prisons Website, http://www.bop.gov/locations/institutions/flm/ (accessed November 24, 2006).
 
10  The prison also holds “shoe bomber” Richard Reid, Oklahoma City conspirator Terry Nichols, and Atlanta Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph. Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, s.v. “ADX Florence,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADX_Florence (accessed November 24, 2006). See also “Richard Reid Arrives at Supermax,” Talk Left, February 5, 2003, http://www.talkleft.com/new_archives/001680.html (November 24, 2006).
 
11  Collins, 6-7.
 
12  Burton, 37.
 
13  Ibid., 81.
 
14  “Florence, Colorado: The Proposed Nightmare Becomes a Reality,” Walking Steel, the newsletter of the Committee to End Marion Lockdown, September 22, 2006 (Fall, 1995), http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~kastor/walking-steel-95/ws-florence.html (accessed November 24, 2006).
 
15  Prison Activist Resource Center Website, http://www.prisonactivist.org (accessed December 6, 2006).
 
16  Natan Sharansky, quoted on the dust jacket of Melanie Phillips’, Londonistan (London: Gibson Square, 2006).

from Kairos Journal
First Baptist Church of Perryville, 4800 West Pulaski Hwy., Perryville, MD  Cecil County