Norman Carlson, Forceful Head of U.S. Prisons, Dies at 86

Mr. Carlson devised the supermax system after the infamous murders of two corrections officers by two different inmates in the same prison on the same day in 1983. The killers were members of the Aryan Brotherhood, a white supremacist organization based in prisons.

“No event caused him more personal anguish than what happened October 22, 1983, in Marion, Illinois, then the highest security federal prison in the nation,” Pete Earley, a former Washington Post reporter and author of “The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison” (1992), wrote in a recent tribute to Mr. Carlson.

To punish these killers, Mr. Carlson revived the concept of solitary confinement, which by then had fallen out of favor in the United States. (He renamed it “no human contact status.”) He converted the Marion penitentiary into the first modern all-lockdown facility, with prisoners isolated for nearly 23 hours a day. Shortly thereafter, the states, led by California, began building their own lockdowns based on the Marion model, though they were denounced by human rights groups.

“The renewed use of solitary coincided with the era of mass incarceration and the widespread closing of state-run mental-health facilities,” the journalist Mark Binelli wrote in 2015 in an article about the ADX in The New York Times Magazine. “The supermax became the most expedient method of controlling an increasingly overcrowded and psychologically volatile prison population.”

Mr. Carlson was credited with professionalizing the Bureau of Prisons. He disciplined officers who beat inmates, setting a policy of zero tolerance for prisoner abuse. Guards were to call themselves corrections officers, and assistant wardens were to wear suits and ties. He often ate with prisoners and brought along his wife and children, to show that prison food was good enough for his own family.

And he was a stickler for cleanliness.

“Mr. Carlson viewed a dirty prison as a sign of poor management; consequently floors were highly polished and walls kept painted,” Mr. Earley wrote. He said that one warden was so eager to please the director that when the snow outside had turned muddy and brown, the warden had his staff sprinkle flour on it to make it look whiter before Mr. Carlson arrived.

Norman Albert Carlson was born on Aug. 10, 1933, in Sioux City, Iowa. His father, Albert Noah Carlson, was an insurance broker, and his mother, Esther (Hollander) Carlson, was a homemaker.