Stan Moody

POB 240
Manchester, ME 04351
207/626-0594
www.stanmoody.com

Prison Myth No. 5: “You Don’t Understand What

We Are Up Against!”

January 23, 2010

Maximum security prisons are designed for three purposes – to keep

prisoners safe, to protect the public and to carry out a strategy of
“Corrections.” The problem arises when administrators and staff cross that
very thin line of adding punishment to their responsibilities and make
personal judgments on the basis of a person’s crime. Punishment is the role
of the courts; safekeeping and rehabilitation are the roles of prisons.
Who could object to the sparkling, antiseptic Maine State Prison (MSP)
in Warren, ME, where prisoners queue up and respond in brisk fashion and
those who fail to do so disappear down to segregation for an attitude
adjustment along with the more incorrigible? It has all the appearance of
order and efficiency. It speaks volumes, however, that the numbers of
inmates in segregation at any one time are roughly the same as are in the
Prison Industries program designed to teach job skills.
It looks so great, with flowers and fresh-mowed grass in the summer
and fresh paint everywhere, it is almost impossible to understand why
anyone would think otherwise. It has, however, shifted much of the human
element over to process and procedure – rats in a maze. It diminishes
humanity. Splitting hairs over semantics allows for all sorts of variations on
the ugliness of solitary confinement.
The Department of Corrections asserts that less than 20 inmates are in
solitary confinement at any one time within the Special Management Unit
(SMU). The remaining 110 are in “segregation” there, implying that 23 hours
of daily lockup anywhere for months at a time with no official end in sight
can be anything other than callous abuse. Segregation offers the ability to
be heard through the cell next door or through an electrical outlet raceway
up through the cell wall.
There are 3, 2-story wings in the SMU. The A wing is the mental health
wing, divided into A1 and A2, one housing the most severely mentally ill
prisoners and the other the less severely ill. The B wing is for the most
incorrigible offenders. B1corridor is reserved for the worst offenders in the B
wing. The B1 corridor (B117) was where they found Sheldon Weinstein, a
64-yr old wheelchair-bound inmate, on April 24, 2009, bled out from a
beating and being housed there “for his own protection.”
C wing is for the last of the stretch in segregation before going back
out into general population for another whack at the system. C wing also
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houses Protective Custody inmates (sex offenders and marked prisoners)
who are in segregation for discipline purposes.
Every attempt to advocate for prison reform or pass legislation
intended to correct some perceived human rights violation runs into 4
objections. First, if the information comes from a prisoner or prisoner’s
family member, it is presumed to be suspect, and reasonably so. Second,
Department of Corrections officials are quick to say that whatever they do
there, it is “consistent with widely accepted practice.” Weinstein’s widow,
having been told that her husband died of “natural causes” will, I suspect,
take serious issue with the notion that her treatment was “consistent with
widely accepted practice.” She buried his ashes, only to find out 6 weeks
after the autopsy that his death had been a homicide. Nobody had bothered
to tell her anything other than how to retrieve his ashes.
Third, Corrections officials point out that whatever is happening in
Maine is different from prisons everywhere else because MSP is a “country
club” by comparison. Last, and the subject of this article, “You do not
understand what we are up against,” popularly characterized in song as,
“Nobody knows the troubles I’ve seen!”
It is a great defense; it works; it cuts the legs out from under any
abstract idea put forward by citizens and legislators, and it maintains the
status quo by building a fear-based culture that keeps the public nervous
and detached. I have been there during a sanitized legislative tour, and I
can say without reservation that legislators have no idea of the human
interaction encountered within the system on a daily basis. Yet they are
charged with passing laws that impact tens-of-thousands of lives and are
rapidly building corrections toward the largest budget item in the State.
Some of the most brilliant people it has been my pleasure to know are
prisoners there. On the other hand, some 40% are illiterate, and some 80%
have substance abuse problems
What the Department of Corrections is up against has far less to do
with the danger it likes to talk about and more to do with fear on the part of
staff – job insecurity and too little focus on the pubic good that can be had by
reducing the 58% rate of repeat offenses and probation violations in Maine.
Corrections has been saddled with the leftovers from a mental health system
in Maine that has broken down, it is true. In order to fix these problems,
however, they need the public input that they will never get so long as they
are committed to stonewalling every effort to understand and improve the
system.
Is it possible that it is the Maine Department of Corrections itself that
does not realize what they are up against? The winds of change are blowing.
The public has had enough of paying enormous sums of money to hide away
the failures of Education and Human Services. Legislative leaders are fast
becoming yesterday’s news, thanks to term limits and public disdain of big
egos.
There is little to fear at MSP so long as everyone – staff and prisoners
alike – are treated as fellow human beings, firmly and fairly but consistently.
I invite the Department of Corrections to join this growing movement
toward prison reform in Maine, admit where it has failed and keep its
fingerprints off every attempt to initiate change.
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