United States Penitentiary Marion

The United States Penitentiary, Marion is a medium-security United States federal prison for male inmates in Illinois. It is operated by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, a division of the United States Department of Justice. The facility also has an adjacent satellite prison camp that houses minimum security female offenders.USP Marion in Southern Illinois is approximately 9mi south of the city of Marion, Illinois, 300mi south of Chicago, and 120mi southeast of St. Louis, Missouri.HistoryConstructionUSP Marion was built and opened in 1963 to replace the maximum security federal prison on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco, which closed the same year. The facility became the nation's first control unit when violence forced a long-term lockdown in 1983.Birth of the "control-unit" prisonUSP Marion was originally constructed to hold 500 of the most dangerous federal inmates, mostly transfers from Alcatraz. Prison administrators aimed to maintain a safe and orderly environment and rehabilitate the inmates while avoiding the high-profile abuses which occurred at Alcatraz. They implemented a behavior modification program named Control and Rehabilitation Effort (CARE) in 1968. Inmates in the program spent most of their time in solitary confinement or in "group therapy" sessions where they were berated for their deviant behavior and urged to change. In 1973, the first blocks of "control unit" cells were created. Inmates assigned to the control-unit would spend 23 to 24 hours a day in one-man cells which were specifically designed to severely limit or eliminate the inmate's contact with other people inside the prison and the outside world.