Treatment Abuse, Behavior Modification, Thought Reform > Elan School

Deane Brown - prison activist

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Troublemaker:
He should have defrauded banks. The sentence would have been lighter

http://atl.gmnews.com/news/2011-03-03/F ... k_fra.html

Troublemaker:
The money is better too

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/2 ... 81946.html

Ursus:
Here's the second installment of that loosely described "three part series" on conditions at Maine's Supermax prison, published the following week:

-------------- • -------------- • --------------

The Portland Phoenix
Reforming the Supermax (Pt. 2)

Obstacles abound for a Corrections Commissioner promising to make changes at Maine's state prison

BY LANCE TAPLEY | November 18, 2005

The bottom-line test

In the national boom in Supermax construction, "corrections got derailed for a period of time," says a federal official who has been contacted by the state for advice on how to improve conditions at the state prison's Special Management Unit. The Supermax boom, he suggests, came out of despair: "For a time, there was a thought that nothing worked."

The Supermax also was "the animal of public-policy makers," says George Keiser, head of the prison division of the community corrections unit of the National Institute of Corrections, which is part of the US Department of Justice. The Supermax idea, he adds, is "not one of our brightest lights."

At the Supermax's origins, too, he says, there was the "mind-set in control settings to strong-arm it."

The alternative, the new direction in corrections, he says, is "evidence-based policy and practice." By this approach, he means a system that lets people out of prison who will have less recidivism—be less prone to commit crimes. But there are other measures of improvement, such as fewer assaults in prison and less risk for guards.

The scientific evidence, he says, points away from punishment and toward treatment, toward changing behavior instead of warehousing prisoners.

For example, in the case of an inmate who is acting up, instead of "exerting force" on him, a prison officer might threaten him, Keiser says, by telling him that he will call his mother: "You might not think it would work, but sometimes it works."

Although this approach to corrections might seem classically liberal — reform oriented — as opposed to classically conservative — oriented to punishment — Keiser denies the liberal-conservative dichotomy.

"From a conservative point of view, we will save money. We will have fewer new crimes. We will have fewer victims."

It meets, he says, the "bottom-line" test.

— Lance Tapley[/list][/size]
In part one of this report ["Torture in Maine's Prison," November 11], based on interviews with six prisoners, I described conditions that could be called torture at the Maine State Prison's 100-cell Supermax, otherwise known as the Special Management Unit, a maximum security, solitary-confinement facility, in Warren.

In that piece Martin Magnusson, the state's corrections commissioner, acknowledged that conditions need to be improved at the Supermax. He said he intends to improve them in part by reducing the numerous brutal "extractions" of unruly prisoners from their cells in order to strap them into restraint chairs. A videotape I obtained showed a SWAT-like team in body armor and face shields dragging a naked, screaming, mentally ill prisoner in chains through the cellblock to the chair. The Supermax and the prison as a whole have large numbers of mentally ill prisoners.

Before last week's story was published, I recounted to several critics of the prison system what Magnusson, the former prison warden, had told me about Supermax reform. They were skeptical.

"Sometimes those in charge promise a fix, but five years later nothing has changed," said Barry Pretzel, a Rockland attorney whose clients have included a number of Supermax prisoners. "They're either out of office, or they’re hoping no one will call them on an earlier promise."

"It's hard to imagine reprogramming that physical space," said Craig McEwen, a sociology professor, academic dean at Bowdoin College, and a long-time critic of Maine's prisons.

I myself became a little skeptical when John Baldacci's chief aide, Lee Umphrey, sent me an email expressing the governor's commitment to reform — and he mistakenly left on the bottom of the message his email correspondence with Denise Lord, the associate corrections commissioner. The correspondence suggested that the commitment hadn't directly come from Baldacci and that my questions were being dealt with perfunctorily.

"Give me two sentences and I will be all set," Umphrey told Lord in the email.

In our conversations, even Magnusson sometimes sounded skeptical of reform. "I don't know a more humane way to deal with the situation when they're hurting themselves," he said, describing the use of the restraint chair.

But he pledged to bring a group to Maine next month from the National Institute of Corrections (NIC) — "some of the top people in the country . . . to review all our practices."

The NIC is a think-tank on prison issues. It's a part of the United States Department of Justice and was established after the 1971 Attica Prison riots in New York.

A top NIC official in Washington, DC, George Keiser, confirms that the Maine Department of Corrections had approached his agency for help in reforming the Supermax, but he says it is unlikely the NIC would send people to Maine, at least immediately. "We want to take three or four folks from Maine to the Colorado Department of Corrections," he says, to let them see an "effective" Supermax.

The timing of the department’s vow to reform also inspires skepticism. Both Keiser and Denise Lord of the corrections department say the arrangements with NIC were made only in the first week of November, and I interviewed Magnusson, laying out for him my story of alleged torture at the Supermax, on the Monday of that week.

But Magnusson says his department’s interest in reforming Supermax practices goes back a ways. For a long time "we've tried to figure out how to get them to stop throwing feces and cutting up," he says. Recently, he's been encouraged by the success he's seen at the Long Creek Youth Development Center, in South Portland.

There, the recidivism rate — the return to crime of released offenders — has plummeted from 50 percent to 10 percent in one year, he says. Magnusson guesses the state prison's recidivism rate is about 40 percent (he claims not to have hard numbers). The national recidivism rate is 55 to 60 percent, he says, and California's reaches 75 percent. The Warren inmates have been in prison an average of three to five times, according to Magnusson.

The youth-center reform was accomplished, he believes, through "much improved programming" at the facility. And now "community resources are stronger" for the young inmates. The staff did so much training in how to "de-escalate" use of the restraint chair — verbally calming down individuals instead of throwing them in the chair — that now the chair is "out in a warehouse getting cobwebs on it." At this institution, too, he says, a "progressive reward system" was successfully put in place.

The reforms at the youth center took place after years of intense public criticism. Amnesty International in the late 1990s accused the place of mistreating children. A former inmate claimed, in a 2001 lawsuit, that he suffered excessive solitary confinement and use of the restraint chair; the state settled out of court for $600,000. The youth center's superintendent was replaced in 2003.

Magnusson says he wants to bring in the NIC to help implement a rewards system at the Supermax and to create stages whereby an inmate can eventually be assimilated back to the general prison population. For example, a prisoner could earn more time outside the cell than the five hours a week now permitted.

The basic intent? "To go from a more punitive approach to more of a treatment approach," Magnusson says.

IT SOUNDS GOOD, BUT . . .

If Magnusson is sincere in wanting to reform the current system — and he switches in conversation from the Supermax to the entire prison system when he talks about reforms — he faces enormous obstacles.

The 2001 creation of the new Warren prison, which was built around the Supermax, caused big problems, and not much money has been provided by the state Legislature to deal with them.

While waiting to interview Supermax prisoners, I talked casually with several guards. They had little good to say about the new prison.

"Ninety-nine percent of the people here would go back to the old prison in a heartbeat," one tall, middle-aged guard told me, referring to both prisoners and guards. The old prison in Thomaston was "quiet," he said, unlike the new one: "There was a pecking order" among the inmates. A woman guard nodded agreement.

"You're right," Magnusson responds when told of these complaints. The "much more comfortable" old prison had 430 beds, he says, and the new one quickly filled up to its 1100-prisoner capacity, creating a host of adjustment problems, especially with the addition of hundreds of young prisoners from the Maine Correctional Center, in South Windham, and the overcrowded county jails. And the design of the new prison placed guards tensely "alone in a pod," or cellblock, with prisoners.

Assaults on guards and prisoners shot up, helping fill the Supermax, which is used to hold troublesome prisoners (according to state officials, the Supermax usually is at about 90 percent capacity). And so did the difficulty of recruiting and retaining personnel at the prison, which now has 428 employees. Magnusson noted that, while there are 600 more adult prisoners in the corrections system than there were in 1995, there are 100 fewer staff. Right now he is faced with a mandatory overtime pay problem because, he says, he can't understaff the prison.

The Legislature and the governor have been stingy in funding corrections (my characterization, not Magnusson's). The state prison budget has gone up in dollar figures, reflecting the increasing number of inmates from $21 million in 1998 to $32 million in 2004. The total corrections budget is $132 million this year. But Magnusson has been unable to hire more permanent staff for a long time, he says. (According to a printout he provided, it has been about four years.) He says the reforms he will undertake will not involve significant expenses.

Maine has the second-lowest crime rate in the nation, and the rate has been declining, as is happening nationally. Our state also has the lowest incarceration rate. On the flip side, prison populations have been shooting up for years both in Maine and across the nation. Magnusson says he "never saw this coming" — the huge increase in Maine's prison population and the resulting strains, including overcrowing in just about every facility. The incarceration rate in the state has more than doubled in the past 25 years. For the population increase, Magnusson largely blames mid-1990s changes in the sentencing laws and district attorneys who got plea bargains that sent prisoners to the state prison instead of to the congested county jails.

THE PROBLEMS RUN DEEP

The obstacles to prison reform are hardly Maine-specific. Most profoundly, they lie in the human psyche on the battleground between revenge and forgiveness, between hope and pessimism. Global opinion condemns the US for capital punishment (though Maine doesn’t have it), the nation's highest-in-the-world incarceration rate, and its supermaxes.

Many criminologists say the supermaxes and the prison system as a whole are demonstrably counterproductive, if one assumes the goal is to return prisoners who won’t commit crimes again to society. The high recidivism rate proves this, they say; the exiting convicts are not being "corrected" or reformed.

Arguably, the prison system is a success on another level, suggests sociologist and Bowdoin dean McEwen: the crime-rate may be going down in the US because 2.3 million of the most likely crime-doers are locked up — the number continues to climb each year — and the supermaxes "work" in a sense because they remove disruptive people from the general prison population.

But most citizens would prefer that the 90 percent of inmates coming out of prison don't continue their criminal activity. And "there’s a strong line of evidence and argument that punitive responses are not likely to be effective as deterrents" to the bad actions of prisoners or released prisoners, McEwean says.

Another 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 abuse.

THE SOLUTION TO THE SUPERMAX PROBLEM?

There are lots of things critics of the correctional system, including Commissioner Magnusson, say could be done to end what some people see as abuse or torture at the Supermax, and many of these ideas could apply to reform of the entire prison system: have more therapy and less punishment; make corrections more community-based; provide more pay for better-trained guards; stop putting mentally ill people in prison; give prisoners incentive to work their way out of the Supermax.

To solve the prison "problem" and the worst part of it, the Supermax, Peter Lehman believes, "We have to accept the fact that these are also social issues, not just individual ones. . . . We are unique [in the world] in refusing healing and redemption."

Does punishment not work, I ask Commissioner Magnusson point-blank?

"I would agree with that," he replies.

If Magnusson is right, the more therapeutic and compassionate practices at the Long Creek Youth Developmental Center show the way.

"If they re-thought, it would be a brilliant stroke," says McEwen of the state's corrections department — especially, he believes, if the Supermax could be shut down.

"They could take real leadership nationally."

So now we have Commissioner Martin Magnusson, prisoner Chuck Limanni, former sociologist and inmate Peter Lehman, and Bowdoin College dean and sociologist Craig McEwen agreeing that punishment doesn't work.

Perhaps they ought to be on a committee to reform the Supermax.

Lance Tapley can be reached at ltapley@prexar.com


Copyright © 2005 Phoenix Media/Communications Group

Ursus:
From the just above article, emphasis added:

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 abuse.[/list]

Does this not strike anyone as more than a lil interesting, that Bill Diamond, former so-called lobbyist for Elan, should "not seem terribly interested in the subject of Supermax abuse," when said subject has been brought to the public's attention in large part due to the efforts and reportage of a former resident of Elan?

Ursus:

--- Quote from: "Ursus" ---From the just above article, emphasis added:

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 abuse.[/list]

Does this not strike anyone as more than a lil interesting, that Bill Diamond, former so-called lobbyist for Elan, should "not seem terribly interested in the subject of Supermax abuse," when said subject has been brought to the public's attention in large part due to the efforts and reportage of a former resident of Elan?
--- End quote ---
Moreover, it is indeed quite possible ... that Bill Diamond even knew Deane Brown personally ... from back in those days. How many residents were at Elan during the late 1970s/early 1980s, at any given time?

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