The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

A prison is by definition a totalitarian kind of place, where control is a way of life. Still . . .

“Dino was brought down here more than a week ago . . . and ever since then Mental Health has cleared him off this [suicide] watch at least three times that I know of. Every time he’s cleared either the Chief of Security or the Deputy Warden put him back on. While he’s on this watch he cannot have visits, phone calls, mail, or write letters out. He’s completely stripped out except for a security dress to cover himself. He’s not allowed his reading glasses or a book to pass the time. Officers won’t let him sleep more than 15 minutes at a time before they bang on his door to make sure he’s ok. Dino has stopped eating and taking his medication because of this treatment.

“Dino is not suicidal! This is the Prison’s way of restricting his access to the outside world and especially the media. Just last week all newspapers in the entire prison were confiscated, and no newspapers were allowed back into the prison for about five days. . . .

“[The Supermax officers] have perfected the art of what I call ‘No Touch Torture.’ Noise is the weapon of choice, and unless an inmate breaks down and gets placed on medication he’s not getting more than 30 minutes of sleep at a time.”

“If this is true, it is deeply disturbing,” says Shenna Bellows, the Maine Civil Liberties Union director. “Courts have found sleep deprivation to be an Eighth Amendment violation.” The Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution prohibits “cruel and unusual punishments.”

Officials shut the gate
A year after beginning my series on the Supermax — officially, it is the Special Management Unit or SMU — I am still writing about the same subject, the torture of prisoners, although now it is combined with the subject of the denial to the press of access to prisoners — and the refusal of officials to answer questions. (See sidebar, “Stonewalling is normal,” for more examples of official obstruction.)

The author of the above letter wrote me to explain why I haven’t been allowed contact with Deane Brown. His letter, dated November 6, was sent by way of another correspondent, since he assumed mail to me would be confiscated by prison authorities. The Phoenix is granting him anonymity to protect him from repercussions from them.

The authorities maintain that outgoing mail isn’t read unless it’s from a list of inmates who are suspected of criminal activity. Incoming mail isn’t read, they say, though it’s screened for contraband. But while Brown was on suicide watch, he did not receive mail I sent him, he says. Other letters I have sent prisoners asking for a reply have not had a response, so I assume some of my letters or theirs have been confiscated. The prison has not responded to my query asking if any of them were.

On November 13, around the time I received the above letter, Brown was shipped out to a maximum-security prison in Maryland. Maine Department of Corrections commissioner Martin Magnusson says, vaguely, Brown was a threat to prison security. Brown believes his transfer was in retribution for his activism. (See “Baldacci’s ‘Political Prisoner,’” November 24, by Lance
Tapley.)

Put yourself again in the shoes of a reporter: should I discount what the above letter-writer says, on the reasonable-sounding assumption that criminals are not to be trusted?

In confirmation of his description of Deane Brown’s treatment, however, I have letters from two other current Supermax inmates. They paint the same scene of what many people would perceive as torture — especially, for a man officially deemed suicidal. They describe also the same intention by prison officials to deny Brown access to the press — namely, to me.

Isolation chamber
Providing many more details, Brown himself sent a letter from his Maryland cell to his best friend, Bethany Berry, of Rockland, giving a chronology of what happened to him. He reports these highlights of his recent treatment in the Maine Supermax:

— “I was kept under constant watch with no clothing, bedding, soap, toothbrush, or toothpaste. Only a thin mat and security blanket.”

— His daily menu was “two sandwiches, two apples, and four pieces of celery or carrot three times a day, no liquids except water from the dirty tap, no cup.”

— Especially, the experience was “torture because my hands were required to be visible at all times, and it was freezing cold in there, with rain flooding my floor.” He confirms he was denied his eyeglasses. As a result, “I was suffering headaches to the point of vomiting.”

Why was he put on suicide watch? As he explains in a letter to me, “The night I was hauled off to [the] SMU (again!), I was of the mind-frame of ‘This is it; I’ve done all I can do. Someone else can carry the ball. By killing myself I will keep the heat on the situation’!”

And so he threatened to kill himself, even sending me a suicide note via another prisoner. He had earlier told me, “If I end up in another stint [in the Supermax], it’s going to kill me.” He hadn’t been in it in over a year.

But then, he says, he saw he could carry on the fight, that he still could be useful. He sees his human-rights activism as “redemption” for his past crimes. He abandoned his suicide plans and decided he could be an investigator within the Supermax. He had been a weekly prison “correspondent” by phone for a Rockland radio station as well as a source for the Phoenix.

Specifically, he wanted to see “what Ryan Rideout went through before he died.” Twenty-five-year-old Ryan Rideout, a severely mentally ill man in prison for robbery, committed suicide by hanging himself from a sprinkler head in a Supermax cell. (See “Death in the Supermax,” October 11, by Lance
Tapley.) His suicide — as well as several others in the Supermax in recent years — had upset Brown greatly (he has been imprisoned since the mid-1990s). He thought Rideout’s treatment on suicide watch might have driven him to kill himself.

(Brown may have been mistaken about Rideout’s status in the Supermax. Warden Jeffrey Merrill has said publicly that Rideout was not considered a suicide risk, despite a long history of suicide threats.)

Brown apparently outfoxed himself: prison officials used his suicide-watch status to deny him access to the outside world, in spite of my requests to see him, while they prepared to send him 500 miles from family and friends — in spite, also, of being “cleared by five different mental-health people,” he says. It turned out he couldn’t get off suicide watch in Maine, though he was taken off suicide watch in Maryland. He had told me several times of threats from prison authorities to send him out of state.

Long investigations
Actually, this drama is more complicated, murky, and bizarre (welcome to the weird world of covering a prison). Brown says he was put in the Supermax on October 24 because he was mistakenly connected by prison authorities with an inmate, Gary Watland, 44, a murderer, whose wife, Susan Watland, has been charged with attempting to bring a gun into the prison on that day to help her husband escape.

Brown’s letter to Bethany Berry suggests the prison’s connection of him with Watland was made because of bad luck and judgment on his part and bad will on the part of prison officials. He says that on the previous day he had obtained what he believed to be proof of mail tampering: that the prison was opening and scanning prisoners’ outgoing mail without a search warrant or consent, which he thought to be a federal crime.

(Here, too, he may have been mistaken. The postal service gives prisons the right to “open, examine, and censor” mail, if the prison rules allow it, according to postal regulations.)

Brown says an inmate gave him the address of an Internet server that the inmate said contained Department of Corrections files, including copies of prisoners’ mail. Brown writes that he wanted to get this information to me so I could “get it to a federal prosecutor.” From his words, it appears that Brown never accessed the server. He believes some inmates cracked “the DOC mainframe.”

But Brown made the mistake of bragging to two correctional officers on October 24 — at a time when he didn’t know about the alleged breakout plot, he says — that his next “news release” would be “an atomic bomb.” That evening he was placed in the Supermax “pending investigation,” he writes.

There is certainly more to be discovered about these events. But I — the Phoenix, the press — can’t fill in some details because I have not been allowed access to Brown for weeks, and the Corrections Department refuses to explain Brown’s Supermax incarceration or his transfer from Maine other than in hazy words about security threats.

Brown’s argument that the prison made an erroneous connection with Watland would seem to be bolstered by the unlikelihood that he would have been shipped to another state if he were under investigation, although Magnusson says “we can bring him back if we need to.”

Preventing dissent
Brown sums up the investigation, his Supermax stay, and his transfer to Maryland as payback by the officials and a means to shut him up. His extended Supermax suicide watch he sees as, partly, torture to extract a false confession of involvement in the Watland affair. His pro bono lawyer, Lynne Williams, calls him a “political prisoner.” He says he is now locked in a Maryland cell 23 hours a day, as he was in the Maine Supermax. “They sent me here to die,” he writes.

But shouldn’t I discount what Brown writes, since he, too, is a criminal? In this case, a man serving 59 years for a long string of burglaries. Yet he supplied me with a great amount of disturbing information that did indeed check out. And he demonstrated courage, now at great cost, in defying the prison. Truth and bravery are a lot more than I get from some prominent Maine politicians in my other journalistic role as a political reporter. In fact, nothing I have been told by any inmate about prison conditions has been proven false.

“He’s a good man,” says Camden attorney Christopher Maclean, who once briefly represented Brown. “Obviously, the authorities have singled him out to punish and shut him up.”

Nevertheless, a reporter should be able to closely question Brown and other prisoners in person on their claims. But for a month and a half corrections officials have kept me out of the prison, declaring all but one of the prisoners I want to see off-limits, for various reasons. For a long time, they didn’t even bother to respond to my e-mail messages listing prisoners I wished to visit. For weeks, they did not send me the new paperwork they said was necessary for a media visit to the one prisoner they said they would permit me to see, the brother of suicide victim Rideout. Like Deane Brown, I suspect retribution.

The latest stonewalling by prison officials is an e-mailed form with some new restrictions added specifically for me as a result of my reporting work. These new rules require I be monitored by prison staff while interviewing inmates, and would bar me from asking prisoners questions about other inmates. Beyond that, I would have to agree not to publish certain information — determined by prison authorities — even if the inmate said it in the interview. And I would have to agree to have my notebook confiscated if it contained information “not authorized” by prison officials. No respectable journalist would ever agree to these conditions.

Other states control reporters’ access to prisoners, especially Supermax inmates. For example, Massachusetts and New Hampshire require interviews be monitored or observed, but neither state attempts to control the subject matter or content of media interviews — or news stories written based on them — and neither demands to review notes or recordings from an interview, though both reserve the right to search notebooks or equipment for “contraband” items.

Governor John Baldacci was asked to respond to these restrictions on reporting, but he did not reply.

So the Baldacci administration has effectively banned me from the prison.

Obstructing the press
.
And now that Magnusson has sent Brown out of state (the commissioner says he personally made the decision), I have discovered that officials of the Maryland prison system, run by Mary Ann Saar, a former Maine associate corrections commissioner, won’t return my calls or e-mails to set up a visit to see Brown.

In other words, obstructions to coverage have been erected at every turn.

According to Denise Lord, associate commissioner, the Corrections Department won’t discuss individual prisoners because of “confidentiality” — even though, in Brown’s case, I have a signed release from him — and because of the ongoing investigations of the Rideout suicide and the alleged breakout attempt. Actually, her first words to me on Brown’s transfer were, “We’re not going to share information” about why he was sent to Maryland “because we’re not going to.”

Recently, my request to the department to see documents pertaining to Supermax policies and several inmates and employees, made under Maine’s Freedom of Access (freedom of information) law, have been almost totally denied by an assistant attorney general, Diane Sleek. To take the next step to try to see these documents, I would have to sue in Superior Court.

Ryan Rideout killed himself on October 5. Authorities at first suggested the investigation would take only a short while. Several weeks ago, State Police Lieutenant Gary Wright said the investigation had been “pretty much complete” for some time. But it lingers on, and its report remains undisclosed to the public. Recently, phone messages left for Lieutenant Wright went unanswered.

Williams, Brown’s attorney, says of such a delay by authorities: “They have a right to preclude the media during a limited period of time. These investigations should be done by now, and they should be allowing reporters back in.”

Now I feel I know a little of what it is like working as a reporter in a totalitarian state.

Control is a disease
In Maine, the lonely job of preventing torture to these outcasts, and gaining public access to them and their environment, rests largely with a few lawyers, particularly the very few who defend indigent prison inmates for a taxpayer-paid $50 an hour.

“The idea that you would prevent suicides by being concerned about the mental health of prisoners is not something they consider,” says attorney Joseph Steinberger, of Rockland, about correctional officials. The alternative they have chosen, putting mentally ill, suicidal people in solitary confinement, he finds simply “crazy.” To the prison mentality, “suicidal behavior is punishable behavior,” he says with amazement.

A self-proclaimed “radical lawyer” and a Ph.D. psychologist, Williams, of Bar Harbor, is a key person in Maine in the struggle against what she suggests is the totalitarianism of the corrections system. “The goal in a totalitarian regime is silence and no dissent,” she notes.

She says she intends in January to sue the Department of Corrections, in a federal civil-rights action, with the support of the National Lawyers Guild, a 6000-member, left-wing group, over the department’s denial of Brown’s First Amendment rights. She wants to bring Brown back to Maine and allow him access to the press.

“Prisoners have a free-speech right to communicate with the outside world, whether family, friends, or reporters, about prison conditions,” Williams says. “And the outside community surely has a right to that information.”

Maine School of Law professor Orlando Delogu comments: “The tendency in the bureaucracy is to think that people don’t care about [prisoners] and they can do whatever they want with them. The reality of the law is they may be bad people but you still don’t get to do whatever you want. They have constitutional rights, with safeguards and limitations.”

Few would dispute that very strict security is needed in a prison, but allowing a facsimile of a totalitarian system to reproduce within its high walls is not only constitutionally unjust to prisoners, it allows harshness, including physical and psychological abuse — up to and including torture — to grow and metastasize. In the 1980s, after writing exposés of abuse at the state’s Baxter School for the Deaf and Pineland Center for developmentally disabled people, I used to say to my friends, “Show me any institution where people have great and unsupervised power over others, and I will show you great abuse.”

It is perhaps sadly normal, too, for a prison bureaucracy to want to exercise the same control on those without its walls as it does on those within. These officials are in the business of control. Nationally, politically active prisoners are regularly punished for their speech, and reporters find their access to prisoners cut off, says Paul Wright, editor of Prison Legal News: “It happens all the time. This is the standard playbook from around the country.”

Despite promised reforms — a few of which, to the department’s credit, have begun to be implemented — the Maine State Prison and its Supermax remain, a year after the beginning of the Phoenix’s series, a mostly closed, arbitrary, super-harsh world in which officials appear now to want to apply stern rules to reporters as well as to prisoners.

Email the author:Lance Tapley: ltapley@adelphia.net .
Copyright © 2006 The Phoenix Media/Communications Group http://www.thephoenix.com/Article.aspx?id=29730&page=2

FROM: pvg@riseup.net
Subject: Injustice in the Maine State Prison (alleged torture and political persecution)

Hello friends and fellow Victory Gardeners,

We are sending out this quick email to notify you about information recently released to the public regarding serious allegations of human rights abuse and politically motivated persecution in the Maine State Prison.

Over the past year, Portland based journalist, Lance Tapley, has written a series of articles investigating evidence of torture and other gross violations of human rights in the Maine State prison. Some of the most serious abuses against prisoners include:

- Stays for long periods of time (often naked and blind-folded) in metal "restraint" chairs.

- Sleep deprivation

- Persecution of politicized, activist prisoners-- putting them in solitary/supermax and in the recent case of Deane Brown, transferring him suddenly to a notoriously violent prison in Maryland.

In two articles in this week's edition of the Portland Phoenix, Lance Tapley explains how his attempts at investigating these matters has been very difficult, due to the lack of cooperation from prison officials and the administration of Governor John Baldacci.

While this news may not be surprising to those already familiar with America and Maine's prison systems-- it may come as a shock to others. We are after all, lead to believe in school and on TV that these type of things don't happen in "the land of the free."

This public exposure, however, presents us with a good opportunity to further expose the prison system as a cruel enforcer of economic injustice, class oppression, and racism.

We are asking people to read the December 14, 2006 Portland Phoenix article "Lockdown" (also see the sidebar "Stonewalling is normal"), and write to Governor John Baldacci and Corrections Commisioner Martin Magnusson demanding that they bring Deane Brown back to Maine, and cease the use of "restraint chairs" and other torture techniques.

Also, a new legal collective is forming in Maine to address these problems in an ongoing manner. They will be holding legal trainings and their first meeting in Augusta in early Januray. It is open to anyone who is interested. For more info, please email davidbidler@yahoo.com.

Please direct correspondence to:

Governor John Baldacci
1 State House Station
Augusta, Maine 04333-0001

Phone: (207) 287-3531
Fax: (207) 287-1034
Email: governor@maine.gov

and

Commissioner Martin Magnusson
Maine Department of Corrections
Central Office
25 Tyson Drive 3rd flr
111 State House Station
Augusta, Maine 04333-0111

Telephone: 207/287-2711
Fax: 207/287-4370
TTY: 207/287-2360

FROM:
Portland Victory Gardens Project
PO Box 1992
Portland, Maine 04104
(207) 761-1504