The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

Lively, young-looking, a colorful dresser, Dawson, who is single, was born in West Virginia and came to Maine from Florida in 2001. In an interview at a picnic table in Augusta’s Capitol Park, not far from the Department of Transportation building where she now works, she emotionally reveals — “Write this down!” she orders, jabbing at a reporter’s notebook with a finger — that she has been a foster child, a drug addict, homeless, and on welfare.

But life forced her to confront what she had become. She found herself pregnant and unmarried at 29 and gave up her baby for adoption. “I had brought this person into my hell with nothing to give her,” she says. “But she saved my life. Sometimes I feel pain can be a blessing.” Dawson stopped destroying herself. Her home now in postcard-pretty Camden is a universe away from what she once experienced.

So she knows it’s possible to redeem yourself: “That’s why I wanted to work at a prison” — to help people change their lives.

“I know from experience what it feels like to be looked upon as a menace to society,” she wrote Baldacci in her poignant letter. Even in her new life in Maine, she wrote, “In some ways I feel like I am a prisoner” because of the lack of racial diversity here and the lack of understanding of what minorities have gone through.

“She’s a brilliant woman, and she’s been through everything,” says Dewey Fagerburg, of Lincolnville, a retired minister and former advisor to the prison chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “In that letter she wrote the governor, she tells the truth about what’s going on at the prison.”

In the 950-man prison, rehabilitation is utterly ignored, Dawson says. Even if the officials wanted to help the prisoners, they’d have a hard time because there isn’t enough staff. As examples of those who get little help, she describes the mentally disabled and the mentally ill inmates. “There are some very, very ill people at the prison,” she says, “like the ‘cutters’” — prisoners who repeatedly cut their own flesh.

She has worked in the 100-man Special Management Unit, the “Supermax,” where the cutters and others with the biggest self-destructive and aggressive urges are kept in solitary confinement — which, studies show, damages prisoners further, perhaps permanently. It’s also where prisoners suffer the most abuse from guards. It seems obvious to Dawson that the more the guards provoke the mentally ill inmates, the more they will do what the guards don’t want them to do. But the prison administration, she says, prefers guards “who are degrading to a prisoner.”

Her descriptions fit with the results of the Phoenix’s two-and-a-half-year investigation of the prison, which has revealed physical, sexual, and mental abuse of inmates. On the national level, a 2004 Human Rights Watch report found that, in a typical American prison, “a culture of brutality has developed in which correctional officers know they can get away with excessive, unnecessary, or even purely malicious violence.” In a 2006 report, the private, blue-ribbon Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons found that “Better safety inside prisons and jails depends on changing the institutional culture, which cannot be accomplished without enhancing the corrections profession at all levels.”

Human rights complaints
After the harassment incidents, Dawson filed a discrimination complaint with the Maine Human Rights Commission. Then, prison “sergeants and captains” retaliated because of her complaint, she recounted to Baldacci. They continued “to target and scrutinize me and my character by looking for ways to terminate me.” So she filed another complaint with the commission, this time invoking the state Whistleblower’s Protection Act.

In her letter, she added: “I had lost my spirit as a correctional officer. There is a culture of abuse among the guards at the prison.” Its major effect, she suggested, is on the prisoners: “Any guard who treats the prisoners with respect and a desire to rehabilitate them is targeted by the other guards, who call them ‘care and treatment providers.’ This term is used by guards to say, ‘You’re not a corrections officer.’”

She’s not the only guard to say this. A well-respected sergeant, George Mele, quit his job at the prison in 2006 and left behind a frank “exit interview” leaked to the Web site “Supermax Watch.” It contains a harsh critique of the prison’s management, including: “When you begin to talk to prisoners you are labeled an inmate lover and chastised for it . . . to be polite to a prisoner is to show weakness.” He adds: “This job gives someone a great opportunity to help someone. I mean the prisoners. If the officers were encouraged to do this more and chastised for not doing it, the relationship between the prisoners and staff would improve.”

The prison’s cultivation of an us-versus-them attitude is one reason the guard turnover rate is so high, Dawson wrote in her letter. Those who don’t go along with the punishment program, “the best guards,” are “lost to the hazing and mistreatment by veteran guards.”

Staff shortages plague the prison. Corrections Commissioner Martin Magnusson told the Bangor Daily News that on one shift in 2007 the prison had 29 vacancies. The guard turnover rate is about 20 percent a year, while the national rate of 16 percent was considered high by the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons. Peter Lehman, a former Maine State Prison inmate who is a PhD sociologist, says the well-meaning people among the prison staff “are pretty much defeated at every turn.” The prison, he says, manages its employees with degradation — “the same way they manage the prisoners.”

Dawson says she didn’t yell and scream at inmates: “I treated them the way they wanted to be treated.” In return, they saw her as a role model, she says, and they wanted her approval. She recalls some of them saying to her: “‘Officer Dawson, are you mad at me?’”

“I enjoyed them,” she says, smiling. “I learned a lot from them.”

The attitude of many guards and their supervisors, including racist expressions, is basically shaped by a “lack of accountability” and, she says, by ignorance; some white Maine people, for example, are ignorant about how to act with blacks. The state’s population is 97 percent white, the highest proportion of any state, with less than one percent African American. Prison guards lack diversity, too. Although African Americans account for about seven percent of the state prison’s inmates, when Dawson worked there only one other officer was black, she says — a male sergeant — out of approximately 275 guards.

Other complaints of racism have recently surfaced at the prison. Michael Parker, the African-American leader of the prisoners’ NAACP chapter, has said the group’s officers have been “targeted and harassed” by prison staff.

The guards’ negative attitudes, Dawson says, are exacerbated by the dead-end quality of their jobs in rural Knox County, where few employment opportunities exist. “For a lot of officers there, that’s all the work they know,” she says. “They’re angry, frustrated with their position in life. The prison gives them the opportunity to control someone who has less than they have.”

She read an article in a local weekly newspaper, she says, in which a guard complained that prisoners were getting a chance at a college education while his daughter couldn’t afford it. But Dawson doesn’t believe it’s a guard’s role “to hold grudges against prisoners for what they get.” That especially shouldn’t occur on the issue of education, which she believes is the key to rehabilitation. Many prisoners are illiterate and many don’t have a high-school diploma or GED, she says, adding: “I would propose that getting a GED be mandatory as part of probation or before they leave prison.”

As it is, only a few of the prison’s inmates take college courses, and then only by correspondence or television. In the 1990s, Congress eliminated almost all federal aid for higher education of inmates, most of whom are too poor to pay college tuition. Yet prisoner education has been shown to reduce the return to crime, and, in general, “Highly structured [rehabilitation] programs are proven to reduce misconduct in correctional facilities,” said the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons.

Other things wrong
Dawson is angry about a particular instance of what she sees as the prison leadership’s coldness to both prisoners and guards. She was “the girl at the desk” — the prison receptionist — on the day in 2006 that convicted murderer Gary Watland had arranged for his wife to bring a gun into the prison. If his scheme had been successful, she thinks she might have been the first correctional officer killed. But an inmate squealed on Watland, and his wife was arrested with a loaded gun in the prison parking lot.

The inmate who revealed the plot “did something that saved my life and perhaps a lot more other people,” she says. “It’s not every day that an inmate puts himself on the line for guards. It was moving for me.”

There should have been more given to him by the Corrections Department “in acknowledgement for what he did,” she says, than to ship him to an out-of-state prison where his life was immediately put in danger. The department did nothing to hide his identity from the prison grapevine and possible revenge by Watland or by others who believed he had broken the “code” that requires a prisoner not to tell on another prisoner, even though he may have saved the lives of prisoners’ wives and children; Watland had allegedly planned to take them hostage in the visitors’ room. (See “Stabbed in the Back: Officials Reward a Prison Hero by Endangering His Life,” by Lance Tapley, September 14, 2007.)

There are many other things wrong with the prison culture, Dawson says. One example she described to Baldacci: “I caught a sergeant going through the security [gate] with two brown paper bags stuffed with currency. Shortly thereafter I filed an incident report about the issue. The warden said that he didn’t think there was a problem.” She suggested the officer might have been involved with gambling inside the prison.

Other guards have publicly complained about the prison’s “hostile work environment,” as a guard described it to a legislative Labor Committee meeting earlier this year, where there was criticism of the prison management for favoritism, insufficient guard training, and retaliation for reporting wrongs.

The administration of the prison and the Department of Corrections is so entrenched in its ways, Dawson believes, that a clean sweep is needed: “They’re all in bed with each other.”

No response from Baldacci
Dawson says she has been given legal advice not to discuss the terms of her 2007 settlement with the state over her Maine Human Rights Commission complaints.

Not long after the settlement, she sent her letter to Baldacci. In it, she also related that she had originally applied for the job of prison guard after seeing a classified newspaper advertisement that read, in part: “If you enjoy the challenge of helping people change their behaviors, attitudes, and improve their lives and yours, the field of Corrections is for you!”

The ad deceived her, she told the governor.

“I invite you to meet with me in person,” she wrote him. She wanted to discuss how to make the prison a better place.

Her letter was never answered, she says — not even by an aide. There was “no reaction from anybody.”

As the Phoenix went to press, Governor Baldacci's office e-mailed us: "We received the letter and forwarded [it] to the Department of Corrections for review. . . . Ms. Dawson should have received a response to her letter from the Department of Corrections. She did not. That was an error." Earlier, Commissioner Magnusson had refused numerous requests for an interview on the issues discussed in this article and did not respond to e-mailed questions.

Dawson has a good job as an office worker at the Department of Transportation, she says, but she misses being a prison guard, despite the troubles she endured. The inmates thought of her as their sister or mother, she says. While some guards treated her poorly, “I had a lot of respect from the prisoners.”

She says: “I was meant to do that kind of work. It was a calling. I was honored to have that opportunity to lead and to teach.”

She is still an idealist. Even now, “I would like to be part of a team” to reform the prison, she says.

“At least I could try.”
http://thePhoenix.com/Boston/News/65237-Time-for-a-clean-sweep/