Resource: Resisting Living Death at Marion Federal Penitentiary, 1972

This essay examines the origins of behavior modification and the CU in the United States, as well as the CU’s relationship to radical political struggles, by focusing on the contradictions inherent in the dialectic of prison rebellions and repression. I locate the CU in the context of the military origins of the medicalization of prison administration, while emphasizing the torturous logic underlying behavior modification as directly related to the suppression of black Muslim prison activists and the emergence of the prison rebellion years.