¹ Report to United Nations Economic and Social Council from Political Prisoners Coalition, 5 July 1972, Folder 8, Box 24, Jessica Mitford Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, Texas (hereafter Mitford Papers). There does appear to be some question over when this meeting took place. All of the primary-source materials collected (including the source listed above) claim that the meeting occurred in 1962, but Alan Gómez states it was 1961. See Alan Eladio Gómez, “Resisting Living Death at Marion Federal Penitentiary, 1972,” Radical History Review, Fall 2006, 62.

² Edgar H. Schein, Brainwashing, Dec. 1960, at https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/83028/14769178.pdf (accessed 19 Oct. 2020).

³ “Federal Prisoners’ Coalition,” 25 Feb. 1973, Box 53, Folder 10, Philip G. Zimbardo Papers (SC0750), Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Archives, Stanford, CA (hereafter Zimbardo Papers).

⁴ “Behavior Modification, Experimentation, and Control in Prison,” Chicago Connections, supplement 1, n.d., Box 53, Folder 68, Zimbardo Papers. Many of the “sociopathic individuals” identified by Bennett had actually been incarcerated for their involvement in political protest outside the prison walls or had become involved in protests while incarcerated.

⁵ “Muslim Negroes Suing the State,” New York Times, 19 March 1961, 1.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ E. U. Essien-Udom, Black Nationalism: A Search for an Identity in America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1962), 71, 192. Estimates for the NOI's membership in 1958 varied between 3,000 and 12,000; approximately 5% of the membership were incarcerated by 1960.

⁸ For other examples of government concern over the NOI's expansion inside prisons see, for example, “Muslims a Problem in Prison,” Trenton Evening Times, 1 Nov. 1962; “Muslims Studied in Jersey Prison,” New York Times, 8 Nov. 1962, 20.

⁹ “Muslim Negroes Suing the State.”

¹⁰ On the history of the NOI inside penitentiaries see Losier, Toussaint, “For Strictly Religious Reasons’: Cooper v Pate and the Origins of the Prisoners’ Rights Movement,” Souls, 15, 2 (2013), 19–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Colley, Zoe, “All America Is a Prison: The Nation of Islam and the Politicization of African American Prisoners, 1955–1965,” Journal of American Studies, 48, 2 (May 2014), 393–415CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Colley, , “The Making of Eldridge Cleaver: The Nation of Islam, Prison Life, and the Rise of a Black Power Icon,” Journal of Civil and Human Rights, 6, 1 (Spring 2020), 61–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Garret Felber, Those Who Know Don't Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

¹¹ Eric Cummins, The Rise and Fall of California's Radical Prison Rights Movement (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994).

¹² It is important to note that psychology as a distinct profession had not fully evolved by the 1960s. Many psychiatrists viewed psychology as an upstart that was meddling in matters that were not its concern. It was quite common inside penitentiaries for there to be both a psychiatrist and psychologists; the former was concerned with assessing a prisoner's state of mind and diagnosing mental disorders, while the latter provided group and individual therapy sessions.

¹³ Ellen Herman's The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (Stanford: University of California Press, 1995) is a crucial work of research that pieces together why psychologists assumed such influence in the 1950s and 1960s. However, the criminal-justice system is not one of the areas covered by Herman. While there are a number of relevant studies, the role of psychologists and psychiatrists specifically inside correctional institutions has not been explored in any great depth by historians.

¹⁴ Jessica Mitford, Kind and Usual Punishment: The Prison Business (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 118, 125. Marion was not the first federal penitentiary to use forms of behavioral modification. In 1964, the federal government allocated $1.8 million in funding to the Draper Correctional Facility in Alabama. In a report to the government, a Draper official described “the behavior-changing process, [which] involves the force of the warden's personality and his use of both negative and positive reinforces.”

¹⁵ Cummins, 128–50.

¹⁶ Dan Berger, Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). Also see Berger, The Struggle Within: Prisons, Political Prisoners and Mass Movements in the United States (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2014).

¹⁷ On California see Cummins; and Berger, Captive Nation. On Texas see Robert T. Chase, We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners’ Rights in Postwar America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019.) On New York see Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (New York: Vintage Books, 2017). On Maine see Chard, Daniel S., “Rallying for Repression: Police Terror, ‘Law and Order’ Politics, and the Decline of Maine's Prisoners’ Rights Movement,” The Sixties, 5, 1 (2012), 47–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On North Carolina see Donald F. Tibbs, From Black Power to Prison Power: The Making of Jones v North Carolina Prisoners’ Labor Union ( New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012). Also see Naomi Murawaka, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016); Robert Chase, Caging Borders and Carceral States: Incarceration, Immigration Detentions, and Resistance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019).

¹⁸ Chard, 48–49.

¹⁹ Thompson, Blood in the Water.

²⁰ Ann Thompson, Heather, “Lessons from Attica: From Prisoner Rebellion to Mass Incarceration and Back,” Socialism and Democracy, 28, 3 (2014), 153–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²¹ On Rockefeller's role in pursuing a law-and-order strategy and advancing the War on Drugs see Julilly-Kohler-Hausmann, , “‘The Atilla the Hun Law’: New York's Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Making of a Punitive State,” Journal of Social History, 44, 1 (2010), 71–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²² In contrast to the paucity of academic research on Marion, those who experienced the horror of Marion have produced some of the most important literature. See Griffin, Eddie, “Breaking Men's Minds: Behavior Control and Human Experimentation at the Federal Prison in Marion, Illinois,” Journal of Prisoners on Prisons, 4, 2 (1993), 1–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Raúl R. Salinas, raúlrsalinas and the Jail Machine, ed. Louis G. Mendoza (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006).

²³ Stephen C. Richards, “USP Marion: The First Federal Supermax,” Prison Journal, 88, 1 (March 2008), 6–22.

²⁴ David A. Ward, “From Alcatraz to Marion: Confinement in Super Maximum Custody,” in John W. Roberts, ed., Escaping Prison Myths: Selected Topics in the History of Federal Corrections (Washington, DC: America University Press, 1994), 81–93. “Marion Federal Penitentiary and the 22-Month Lockdown: The Crisis Continues,” Crime and Social Justice, 27 (1987), 237.

²⁵ On the START program see Bureau of Prisons Operations Memorandum, 25 Oct. 1972, Carton 53, Folder 10, Zimbardo Papers. Robert B. Levison, “The Behavior Modification Programs in Federal Prisons: The Clockwork Orange Issues,” New England Journal on Prison Law, 167 (1974), 167–79; Freedom of Expression Committee, Federal Prisoners’ Committee, 25 Feb. 1973, Box 53, Folder 10, Phillip Shapiro Papers, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Archives, Stanford, CA (hereafter Shapiro Papers); “Out Your Mind,” Chicago People's Law Office, n.d., Box 27, Folder 3, Mitford Papers.

²⁶ Lisa Guenther, Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2013).

²⁷ Gómez, “Resisting Living Death,” 58–86.

²⁸ See Raul Salinas Papers (MO774), Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Archives, Stanford, CA. Shapiro was a prominent Bay Area psychiatrist and human rights activist, who campaigned on behalf of prisoners’ rights. See Phillip Shapiro Papers (MO928), Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Archives, Stanford, CA. Zimbardo was a psychologist who conducted extensive research on the prison environment and campaigned for reform. See Philip G. Zimbardo Papers (SC0750), Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Archives, Stanford, CA. Mitford was an author and prison activist who conducted extensive research on prison activism for her book Kind and Usual Punishment. See Jessica Mitford Papers (MS-02864), Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, TX.

²⁹ Marie Gottshalk, The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 108; Karl Messenger, The Crime of Punishment (New York: Viking Press, 1968), 231–32.

³⁰ Messenger, 235–36.

³¹ Shelley Bookspan, A Germ of Goodness: The California State Prison System, 1851–1944 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), xi–xix.

³² Thomas Murton, The Dilemma of Prison Reform (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1976), 1–27. For a more recent study see Bookspan.

³³ Mitford, Kind and Usual, 104.

³⁴ Quoted in ibid., 105.

³⁵ Messenger, The Crime of Punishment, 151–52.

³⁶ Quoted in Mitford, Kind and Usual, 105.

³⁷ Coleman, Lee, “Prisons: The Crime of Treatment,” Psychiatric Opinion, 11, 3 (June 1974), 5–16Google Scholar.

³⁸ Letter from Thomas Clark, 6 July 1970, reprinted in Eve Pell, ed., Maximum Security: Letters from Prison (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1972), 35, Clark's italics.

³⁹ On the role of liberals in the War on Crime and the subsequent mass incarceration of African Americans see Hinton, From the War on Poverty; Murawaka, The First Civil Right.

⁴⁰ This term comes from Heather Ann Thompson, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History,” Journal of American History, 97, 3 (Nov. 2012), 703–34, 706.

⁴¹ “Prison Psychiatrists: The New Custodians,” Health/PAC Bulletin, May 1970, Box 28, Folder 1, Mitford Papers, 6–8.

⁴² Edward Option and Fay Stender, “A Clockwork Orange at UCLA?,” 14 Feb. 1973, Box 53, Folder 10, Zimbardo Papers.

⁴³ Bromberg, Walter and Simon, Frank, “The Protest Psychosis: A Special Type of Reactive Psychosis, Archives of General Psychiatry, 19, 2 (1968), 155–60CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

⁴⁴ “Behavior Modification, Experimentation, and Control in Prison,” 459.

⁴⁵ Jonathan Metzl, The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2011), 100–1.

⁴⁶ Ibid., 108.

⁴⁷ Michael Staub, Madness Is Civilization: When the Diagnosis was Social, 1948–1980 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011). Also see Herman, The Romance of American Psychology; Metzl.

⁴⁸ Coleman, “Prisons: The Crime of Treatment,” 10. Letter from the Federal Prisoners’ Coalition at Marion to the UN Economic and Social Council, 5 July 1972, Box 24, Folder 8, Mitford Papers, italics in original.

⁴⁹ Mitford, Kind and Usual, 108.

⁵⁰ Jessica Mitford interview with Harvey Powelson, 21 July 1971, Box 26, Folder 1, Mitford Papers; Mitford, Kind and Usual, 110–11.

⁵¹ Opton, Edward Jr., “Psychiatric Violence against Prisoners: When Therapy Is Punishment,” Mississippi Law Journal, 45, 3 (1974), 605–44Google ScholarPubMed.

⁵² James V. McConnell, “Criminals Can Be Brainwashed – Now,” Psychology Today, 3, 11 (April 1970), 14, 16, 18, 74; McConnell, “A Psychologist Looks at Crime and Punishment,” quoted in “The Day Has Come,” Inside Out, Box 53, Folder 68, Shapiro Papers.

⁵³ “Entombed,” New York Times magazine, 17 Feb. 1974, 14, 21–22, 24; “Prolixin: Better Brutality through Chemistry,” Penal Digest International, Jan. 1972, 38.

⁵⁴ National Prison Center presentation to National Lawyers Guild conference, Feb. 1973, Box 53, Folder 68, Shapiro papers.

⁵⁵ “Chemical Colonialism in America's Prisons,” Inside Out, n.d., Box 53, Folder 68, Shapiro Papers.

⁵⁶ “Scaring the Devil Out,” Medical World News, 9 Oct. 1970, 29.

⁵⁷ “Aversion Therapy,” Check Out Your Mind, n.d., 30, Box 27, Folder 3, Mitford Papers; “Scaring the Devil Out,” 29.

⁵⁸ Griffin, “Breaking Men's Minds,” 8.

⁵⁹ Committee to End the Marion Lockdown; Fay Dowker and Jerome Ganlett, “From Alcatraz to Marion to Florence: Control Unit Prisons in US,” 1991, at www.freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/DOC3_scans/3.alcatraz.marion.florence.1992.html (accessed 13 Oct. 2020); letter from Political Prisoners’ Coalition, 5 July 1972, Box 24, Folder 8, Mitford Papers; Richards, Stephen C., “USP Marion: A Few Prisoners Summon the Courage to Speak,” Laws, 9 (2015), 91–106CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁰ Griffin, 15; “Behavior Modification,” June 1973, 4–6, Box 53, Folder 68, Zimbardo Papers.

⁶¹ Letter from Political Prisoners’ Coalition.

⁶² In a letter to the editor-in-chief at Harper's Magazine, Schein complained about how his research had been portrayed. He claimed that he had simply described his findings in the 1962 meeting. He continued, “if my descriptive accounts … have aided prison wardens in making such blackmail more potent I want to go on record as strongly deploring the use of such techniques for such purposes.” Letter from Edgar Schein to Robert Shnayerson, 8 Aug. 1973, Box 28, Folder 1, Mitford Papers.

⁶³ Griffin, 3, 17.

⁶⁴ Ibid., 2.

⁶⁵ Eddie Sanchez, “Mind Control Units,” n.d., Box 53, Folder 68, Shapiro Papers, 15.

⁶⁶ Griffin, 14.

⁶⁷ Ibid., 18.

⁶⁸ Gómez, “Resisting Living Death,” 76.

⁶⁹ Letter from Lanier Ramer to Sandra, n.d., Box 24, Folder 8, Mitford Papers.

⁷⁰ Griffin, 3, 8–11.

⁷¹ Gómez, “Resisting Living Death,” 58–59.

⁷² Ibid., 58.

⁷³ Tom Wicker, “Prisons: Can They Be Remade?,” New York Times, 2 Jan. 1973, 35.

⁷⁴ Gómez, “Resisting Living Death,” 74–75.

⁷⁵ Freedom of Expression Committee, Federal Prisoners’ Coalition, 23 Feb. 1973, Box 53, Folder 10, Zimbardo Papers; Prisoners Rights Project, 4 April 1973, Box 53, Folder 10, Zimbardo Papers.

⁷⁶ Gómez, “Resisting Living Death,” 72–73; Salinas, raúlrsalinas and the Jail Machine, 290–93.

⁷⁷ Ibid., 296.

⁷⁸ Ibid., 290–306.

⁷⁹ Sanchez, “Mind Control Units,” 15–16.

⁸⁰ “Freedom of Expression Committee,” 10.

⁸¹ Gomez, “Resisting Living Death,” 76–77.

⁸² Sanchez, 15.

⁸³ Adams v. Carlson, 368 F. Supp. 1050 (E.D. Ill. 1973), at https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/368/1050/1802535 (accessed Dec. 28 2020).

⁸⁴ Gomez, 77–78.

⁸⁵ Marion Brothers News Report, May 1978, Box 6, Folder 2, Raúl Salinas Papers, M0774, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, CA (hereafter Salinas Papers).

⁸⁶ Ibid., Griffin, “Breaking Men's Minds,” 18.

⁸⁷ Richard Aynes, “Behavior Modification: Winners in the Game of Life,” Cleveland State Law Review, 422 (1975), 422–62.

⁸⁸ Lanier Ramer, “The Day Has Come,” Federal Prisoners’ Coalition, Marion Penitentiary, March 1973, Box 6, Folder 2, Salinas Papers; “Mind Destroying Facilities,” Rough Times, Dec. 1972, Box 24, Folder 7, Mitford Papers, 19.

⁸⁹ Scott Anderson, “Inside Marion: Strong Voices Emerge,” St Louis Argus, 7 Sept. 1978.

⁹⁰ Dowker and Ganlett, “From Alcatraz to Marion to Florence.”

⁹¹ One of the best overviews of Marion during the lockdown is Richards, Stephen, “USP Marion – The First Federal Supermax,” Prison Journal, 88, 1 (2008), 6–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The Committee to End the Marion Lockdown (CEML) produced a narrative of Marion's history after the work strike. See Nancy Kurshan, “Out of Control: A 15 Year Battle Against Control Unit Prisons,” The Freedom Archives, 2013.

⁹² Solitary confinement was the toughest feature of life in Marion during the lockdown. It also served as an example of administrative segregation. Most penitentiaries had disciplinary segregation, where prisoners who had violated prison rules were sent. This was usually after a hearing and conviction. In contrast, it was possible for a man or woman to be transferred to administrative segregation without even the pretense of due process.

⁹³ “Prison Torture,” Stinger, 24 Jan. 1972, Box 54, Folder 31, Zimbardo Papers.

⁹⁴ Keramet Reiter, “The Path to Pelican Bay: The Origins of the Supermax Prison in the Shadow of the Law, 1982–1989,” in Chase, Caging Borders and Carceral States, 305; Richards, “USP Marion,” 6–22.