Out of Control: A Fifteen-Year Battle Against Control Unit Prisons

The men held captive in the Marion control unit lived in an 8 x 10 foot cell for about 23 hours a day, seven days a week. There was no contact with other human beings. There was no way to know when it would end. Days, months, years would go by... Out of Control: A Fifteen-Year Battle Against Control Unit Prisons tells the inspiring story of the Committee to End the Marion Lockdown (CEML). Founded in 1985 to organize against control unit prisons and related inhumane practices at the notorious federal prison in Marion, Illinois, the committee's work and influence spread nationwide, even as the practices at Marion became widespread in many other prisons in the U.S. and internationally. Written in a very accessible and eloquent style by Nancy Kurshan, a CEML co-founder and leading activist throughout its history, the book recounts how the committee led and organized hundreds of educational programs and demonstrations in many parts of the country and sought to build a national movement to expose and abolish 'end-of-the-line' prisons. Along the way the Committee wrote thousands of pages of educational and agitational literature, and developed new ways of analyzing and fighting against the 'prison industrial complex.'