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The Marion pen: The toughest prison, the worst prisoners

By SAMUEL O. HANCOCK

MARION, Ill. -- It is called 'The New Alcatraz,' 'The House of Pain,' and 'the end of the line.' By any name or measure, the federal penitentiary at Marion is the toughest prison in the federal system.

It is the only correctional institution of the 45 in the federal system with a security classification of Level 6. That means it gets what prison officials say are the most unmanageable inmates in the entire federal system.

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Marion has also become the focus of national attention by prisoners' rights groups, the courts and Congress.

In his soft Georgia drawl, warden Jerry Williford explains that complaints by prisoners got him into the corrections field as a case worker at Atlanta after he graduated from Georgia State. Now, some two decades later, Williford is hearing plenty of prisoner complaints.

Williford, 42, who had served as executive assistant to the Marion warden in 1977, came back as warden April 17, 1984, and into a hotbed of controversy stemming from a lockdown imposed at the prison Oct. 27, 1983, after two guards and an inmate were stabbed to death within five days.

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U.S. Magistrate Kenneth J. Meyers, who held hearings on a request by inmates for a preliminary injunction against the lockdown, said i a report Aug. 2 the lockdown was necessary. His report and recommendations are subject to review and a final decision by U.S. District Judge James L. Foreman, chief judge of the Southern District of Illinois. Foreman has not indicated when he will give his decision. The federal Bureau of Prisons says the maximum security side of Marion houses some 340 of the most disruptive, assaultive and escape-prone inmates of the 34,000 in federal prisons. About one-third of the prisoners at Marion were convicted of crimes in states, and are are boarded under contract with the federal government.

Marion's K Unit, sometimes called the 'Director's Unit' because Bureau of Prisons Director Norman Carlson says who goes in and who comes out, has a handful of high-profile inmates.

They include white supremacist Joseph Franklin; former CIA agent Edwin Wilson; Jack Abbott, whose letters author Norman Mailer turned into the prison life book 'In the Belly of the Beast'; spy Christopher Boyce, the 'Falcon' in the box-office smash 'The Falcon and The Snowman;'' jet hijacker and escape artist Garrett Brock Trapnell, and Michael Thevis, known as the 'Porno King.'

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Gary Gilmore was quartered at Marion as a state prisoner from Oregon until he was released on parole in April 1976, less than a year before Gilmore was executed by a firing squad at Utah State Prison for murdering a hotel clerk early in his parole. ---

Most Marion inmates, serving an average sentence of 40.5 years, spend 22.5 hours a day in their cells under the lockdown. The prison is rimmed by eight guard towers and double chain-link fences with coils of razor-wire atop and between them.

'Marion has realized its mission to replace Alcatraz and houses a much more hard-core offender than it did back in 1977,' Williford said. 'It was basically an open institution at that time.'

In contrast, across a blacktop road to the west is the unfenced Level 1 minimum-security Marion Prison Camp, where 160 inmates serve average sentences of 2.5 years for non-violent offenses. They include bankers, doctors and lawyers who live in dormitories and have access to a baseball diamond, tennis courts, gymnasium and garden plots.

Marion, some 320 miles south of Chicago, opened as a prison camp in 1963, the same year Alcatraz closed, and gained full prison status the following year.

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But Marion did not become 'The New Alcatraz' until 1979 when it received the Level 6 classification. Between 1962 and 1979, unmanageable prisoners were spread among such institutions as Marion, Atlanta, Leavenworth, Lewisburg and Terre Haute.

The Bureau of Prisons began sending the worst behavior cases to Marion so other prisons could be operated in a more open fashion, officials said.

Williford defends the lockdown as necessary for the safety of inmates and staff alike, and believes it will survive the current court challenge. He said lockdown conditions are being relaxed gradually. 'We are easing restrictions but not security,' he said.

Nancy Horgan, attorney for the Marion Prisoners' Rights Project, accuses the Bureau of Prisons of 'stonewalling' attempts to obtain an independent investigation of the way Marion is operated.

Horgan, who also is representing inmates in a permanent injunction action and a class action suit seeking monetary damages against prison officials, says any decision that does not relax the lockdown will be appealed.

She argues that 'when you lock people down, the potential for future violence is tremendous.'

In hearings held at Marion on the lockdown case, more than 80 witnesses for the prisoners and the government gave conflicting testimony about alleged indiscriminate beating of inmates by guards.

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The hearing also aired prisoner complaints about rectal searches, religious freedom restrictions, restrictions on visits and telephone calls, the amount of time they are confined to their cells and the use of handcuffs and leg chains when inmates are moved from their cells. They also complained about the lack of education and job programs.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Ralph Friederich, in closing arguments, listed 110 cases of assaults, including several killings, from 1979 until the lockdown was imposed in October 1983.

John L. Clark, executive assistant to the warden, said he did not have figures on the decline in assaults since the lockdown began 'but I can almost remember all of them.' He said there have been only two deaths -- one inmate was fatally beaten by another inmate in April 1984 and another inmate was stabbed to death last June 6.

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