Torture Conference At Colby College
Colby College in Waterville will host an international conference, "Torture and Human Rights: The Challenge of Redress and Rehabilitation," on Saturday, November 19. Beatrice Mtetwa, a human-rights attorney from Zimbabwe, will give the lunch keynote address. A workshop entitled "New Tactics in Human Rights" will "provide practical skills for combating human rights abuses." Torture survivors, lawyers, scholars, and others will make up several panels.
The conference is open and free to the public. It's sponsored by Colby's Oak Institute for Human Rights. For more information, check out
www.colby.edu/oakAnother penal expert in Maine concurs, and he has more than academic expertise with the prison system. Peter Lehman, who has a doctorate in sociology and who formerly taught criminology at the University of Southern Maine, is himself on probation after spending five years at the former Maine State Prison, in Thomaston, and the nearby prison farm. Lehman was convicted, in 1998, of taking sexual photographs of four girls, aged 12 to 15, and having sex with a 15-year-old.
Talking with Lehman on the phone, I am struck by his extraordinary combination of practical and scholarly insights. I suggest we meet, which we do in an Augusta coffee shop.
He is a diminutive, bearded 60-year-old. He lives in the mid-coast and is trying to earn a living as an entrepreneur. The Internet-posted state registry of sex offenders makes earning a living difficult.
"I'll never get a job," he says.
He tends to become professorial when talking about his expertise.
"Most crimes are expressive, not instrumental," he asserts, using sociological terms. What he means is that it is an emotion, such as rage or fear, or the high of an addictive behavior, that drives many people to commit crimes, both outside of and within prison -- and not the calculation of benefits, not the view of the crime as a means to an end.
"Have you ever slammed a door when you're angry or frustrated?" he asks. "It feels good. It's not instrumental, but expressive."
He calls the Supermax "simply one end of a continuum in the prison system." How to stop Supermax inmates from throwing urine and feces? The "prison thinks the way to deal with that is punishment," Lehman says, "but [the inmate's action] is not a calculated, rational decision. This is an expression of rage."
Lehman believes prisons breed antisocial behavior: "Say an inmate borrows a magazine or a CD from someone else. One of the rules is 'no giving or receiving.' If person A is caught with B's CD and the officer wants to push it, both are subject to disciplinary action. People can actually lose [good] time for that. It could mean that you could lose privileges. You could actually lose your job or get sent to the Supermax."
He continues: "Now most of us as human beings would think it's a virtue to loan something to somebody to help them out." But in prison, this social behavior is penalized.
Despite these antisocial rules, Lehman says, "one of the most amazing things is how much [inmates] risk punishment to help each other. . . . But to be generous they have to lie, pretend, sneak around.
"Incarceration creates a situation where all of the kinds of issues that you have are very typically heightened -- trauma, degradation, lack of a sense of self. I'm not sure that I met more than a handful of men in prison who didn't have a trauma history. Prison deepens these kinds of issues and wounds.
"There is an arbitrariness about discipline. The rules are such that it is virtually impossible to avoid a situation where anybody can get busted at any time." Most guards mean well, he says, but they are stuck in a bad system.
McEwen agrees with Lehman's view that crime is mostly expressive. And he thinks Lehman's description of how the prison rewards antisocial behavior is "a great insight." The Supermax was basically designed to prevent cooperative behavior, McEwen says. By isolating people, supermaxes "don't socialize people to get along with each other."
Do We Want To Change Things?
The more cynical prisoners and civilians will tell you the prison "industry" is a big business that thrives on crime, recidivism, and severe, counterproductive punishment, as evidenced by the enormous prison building boom of the past 20 years, by the growth of large private prison corporations nationally (there are no private prisons in Maine), and by strong guard unions that contribute to politicians' campaign treasuries. There are many salaries and careers tied up in the caretaking of prisoners.
"Recidivism is money in the bank" for this industry, Supermax prisoner Deane Browne tells me.
Even the less cynical among political observers would tend to place government corrections budgets, like the budgets for the mentally ill, far down the funding-priority ladder.
And everyone to whom I asked the question agreed prisons are dumping grounds for the mentally ill.
"That's true of every [correctional] system," says Denise Lord, the associate corrections commissioner. Some estimates of the recidivism of mentally ill prisoners are as high as 80 percent. The state corrections department estimates that 85 percent of inmates in its system have mental illness or substance-abuse problems. Lord says that 40 percent of the state prison's inmates are on psychotropic drugs.
She also says Maine has a greater percentage of mentally ill prisoners than any other state. In chorus, both Commissioner Magnusson and Lord emphatically say they want to put more mentally ill prisoners into mental health facilities -- but there is no room for them because the beds at these facilities are all full.
It is almost a given in political circles that the public and its legislators are callous about what happens in the prisons -- though they are concerned about crime, especially when a notorious crime occurs and politicians can make hay over it.
"Society is ignorant of this stuff because they don't want to hear [about it]," says Chuck Limanni, a Supermax prisoner I interviewed, about prison abuse. "They don't realize this stuff is hurting them, too. The majority in here are getting out. Most of the time they're worse off than they were, and they create more harm. They learn to hate."
He adds: "While being punished, it would be good to learn a skill." Limanni says that the last time he was out of prison, he and his girlfriend had a $1300-a-day cocaine habit that needed to be fed, and for many addicts the only way to do it is to steal.
Bowdoin sociologist Craig McEwen comments on "the politicization of crime, fed by the media. We demonize certain types of criminal activity, reinforcing the notion that more punishment is better -- the language of 'toughness on crime' . . . it's politically profitable."
In analyzing "tough on crime" attitudes, both doctors McEwen and Lehman speak of "moral panics," which, according to one dictionary definition, is "a mass movement based on the false or exaggerated perception that some individual or group . . . is dangerously deviant and poses a menace to society. Moral panics are generally fueled by media coverage of social issues."
The relationship of legislation to moral panics is close, McEwen says. In the sociological community, "there is a good deal of agreement on the political momentum that builds from one or two well-publicized cases." He mentions the first President Bush's notorious "Willie Horton" TV ad from the 1988 presidential campaign that drove many state legislatures to wipe out parole for convicts. After one little girl was killed in a brutal way in New Jersey, states instituted "Megan's Law" sex-offender registries.
Even the Department of Corrections seems to agree, at least in part, with the moral-panic problem. Both Magnusson and Lord express concern about legislators in the coming session leading a charge to invent new crimes or establish tougher penalties for crimes -- arising, for example, from a trucker involved in a fatal accident while driving after license suspension. Or from national news about identity theft or methamphetamine manufacture.
But lack of concern may be a bigger obstacle to prison reform than panic is. Senator Bill Diamond, the Democrat from Windham who is chair of the state's Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee which oversees the state correctional system, has not had any problems expressed to him about mentally ill prisoners in the Supermax, he says in a phone interview.
There is a problem with funding, however, for the prison, he says. The Legislature required an extra $1.5-million cut in the corrections budget in the last session, he explains, and "I suspect there are funding deficiencies in all their areas." His party controls the Legislature.
Diamond, who has worked as a lobbyist for the Elan School, the Poland Spring facility that puts troubled young people through controversial therapy (it was investigated by the state in 2002 for alleged abuse of its clients) agrees that "there is not a lot of support" from the public for prison funding: "People have other priorities" -- such as, at the moment, he says, how to heat their homes when fuel-oil prices are sky-high. He did not seem terribly interested in the subject of Supermax
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