The Quiet Revolution

Reinventing Probation

Boston experienced seventy-five homicides and 5,920 aggravated assaults in 1987. In 1988, it rose to ninety-five homicides and 6,291 aggravated assaults. By 1990, homicides reached a high of 152 and 6,960 aggravated assaults were reported to police. People on probation committed a high percentage of the violence.
There was mounting criticism of the police from the minority community. Probation officers worked independently of police, and curfews were not commonly imposed by the court and were difficult to enforce primarily because probation officers worked behind a desk in their offices from nine to five, Monday through Friday. Offenders on probation were well aware of the limited supervision capabilities of the probation department and thus took full advantage of the situation.
In response to those problems, a few probation officers met informally with a few police officers to discuss ways of addressing the gang-related problems in the city. In 1992, police received a call of a shooting in the Dorchester area of Boston. Two probation officers were on a ride-along with the police, and they arrived at the scene where a large crowd of young people was standing around the wounded body of a fifteen-year-old victim. The police stepped out of the car, and no one left the scene because there was no crime in standing around a crime scene. However, when the two probation officers stepped out of the backseat of the car, the crowd immediately began to disperse.
The victim and several of the onlookers were or had been on probation and supervised by one of the officers. They knew that being at the scene likely violated their probation. The crowd dispersal indicated that probation could exert greater control on probationers if they knew they were being watched. It also allowed many onlookers to avoid peer pressure to stay at the scene by providing them an excuse that probation officers were checking for curfew violations or area restrictions.
Out of this ride-along Operation Night Light was born. In 1993, the Boston police established a special unit to address gang violence. The unit works with the probation department, and four nights a week, teams of police and probation officers visit the homes of high-risk probationers. Churches, schools, and other community groups are part of the partnership. One positive result is that Night Light helps parents establish parental control.
If the school reports that a certain offender is falling behind in classes and isn’t doing assigned homework, the parent usually says it’s because the kid is out at all hours of the night. Because of strict curfew checks, the offender is not only more likely to remain at home, but it also provides him an excuse to his friends to avoid peer pressure to engage in criminal activities.

Prisons: A New Mission That’s Working

Because many consider prisons incompatible with a free society (except for the most violent), it seems that nothing they do can fully redeem their usefulness. They’re called “violent schools of crime,” but when they clamp down on violence, they become more oppressive in the eyes of critics.
On October 22, 1983, inmate Thomas Silverstein, a member of the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang, was released from his cell in the control unit of the US penitentiary Marion to take a shower. He was shackled, but as he passed in front of another cell, an inmate slipped him a shank and an improvised handcuff key. After freeing his hands, Silverstein attacked Officer Merle Clutts and killed him by stabbing him forty times.
Later that same day, another Aryan Brotherhood member, Clayton Fountain, used the same method to kill another Marion correctional officer, Robert Hoffman. The back-to-back murders sent shock waves throughout the Bureau of Prisons. I was working at the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary at the time, and the news cast a pall of gloom that lasted several days.
The Marion Federal Penitentiary was the most secure prison in the country and had replaced Alcatraz after it had closed in 1963. The Marion control unit was like a maximum-security unit within a maximum-security prison. It housed the most violent offenders in the system--the worst of the worse.
Thomas Silverstein and Clayton Fountain were exactly the types of inmates the unit was designed for. In 1981, they were charged with killing a black inmate at Marion by strangling him to death. Silverstein and Fountain then killed a friend of the murdered inmate who had sought to avenge his death. They reportedly stabbed the inmate sixty-seven times and then dragged his bloody corpse up and down the prison tier so other prisoners could see their handiwork.
Through these murders, Silverstein and Fountain were sending a message on behalf of the Aryan Brotherhood that no matter where you locked them up, they’d get to you. It should be noted that there was no federal death penalty at the time of these murders, and Silverstein and Fountain were already serving life sentences for murder. The Bureau of Prisons clearly got the message.
The bureau consequently locked down Marion, meaning that all inmates would be locked in their cells twenty-three hours a day. Marion thus essentially became the nation’s first super-max prison. The response from angry inmate advocates was swift and expected. The Bureau of Prisons (BOP) was hit by a wave of lawsuits claiming cruel and unusual punishment.
The BOP eventually prevailed in court and set out to build a new institution specifically designed as a super-max facility. The states, meanwhile, were watching and waiting to see what would happen once the dust settled.
In 1994, the BOP announced the opening of its new administrative maximum (ADMAX) facility in Florence, Colorado. Silverstein and Fountain, meanwhile, were transferred to other federal prisons. Fountain died of a heart attack in 2004, and Silverstein is now housed at the ADMAX. Critics have been decrying the use of solitary confinement since super-max prisons began proliferating after the BOP successfully fended off all initial lawsuits.