Stan Moody

POB 240
Manchester, ME 04351
2207/626-0594
www.stanmoody.com

Your Neighbor in Prison

March 11, 2010

As I watched the facial expressions of legislators while I was testifying

on Maine’s so-called Solitary Confinement bill, LD1611, it was clear to me
that they were struggling with how to rephrase their staid corrections
mentality in the face of mounting evidence of its failure of logic and common
sense.
Dismissal of expert testimony on the adverse psychological and
emotional effects of the loss of human dignity in our prison system was
grounded in the rebuttal, “You have never visited our prisons.” That may be
true for some, but it is becoming increasingly possible that every person
reading this article has known or maybe been closely associated with a
convicted felon.
In less than a month after becoming a Chaplain at Maine State Prison, I
discovered to my surprise that I knew several prisoners there. Two of them I
had known since they were about 10 years old, one of whom had been raised
right behind me in an upscale professional neighborhood in Portland. He had
worn a path from his back door to ours over the years.
Why did I not know what had happened to him? The blunt fact is that,
like so many other suburbanites, I was so busy with my own life that I really
didn’t care. His presence within that prison is a constant reminder to me of
my own failure as a friend and neighbor.
It is such lack of caring about the welfare of others that is filling our
prisons with those who have fallen within the cracks of acceptable social
behavior and that has bred legislators who suffer under the illusion that they
are keeping the public safe by locking criminals up, callously disregarding
their civil rights and throwing away the key.
At the legislative Work Session on the bill, several of these folks
repeated a rehearsed mantra, “What about the victims?” In other words, to
demonstrate concern for basic civil rights for prisoners whose own families
are paying a severe price for their crimes is to betray the people they have
damaged. You have only to listen to a public debate on sex offender laws to
pick out those who have themselves been violated. They want to grind their
offending neighbor into the ground because of their inability to come to
terms with what their Dad or uncle or pastor had done to them.
I hate to break this to you, reader, but crime is our - the public’s –
problem. In Maine, we spend $40,000 a year to keep offenders out of sight
and put them under the jurisdiction of an Elizabethan system that insists that
punishment builds character. “Because Dad kicked me around, and I turned
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out so great, what these guys need is to be kicked around.” At Maine State
Prison, approximately 13% of all prisoners are in segregation at any one
time. It is likely that more than 50% have been in segregation at one time or
another during their incarceration. It is the new age way of keeping an
overcrowded prison under control.
By comparison, a complimentary 13% of all prisoners are in the Prison
Industries Program that produces knick knacks for the prison store in
Thomaston. A disproportionate number of those are lifers for whom skill
training is of dubious benefit to anyone, especially victims of crime.
Guess who are the keepers of the prison gate! More neighbors! Some
are there by the curious twists and turns of fate. Others are there because
they have a fascination with police culture. A number have higher
education; most have high school diplomas; some have G.E.D’s; some even
have criminal records, I am told by a private investigator. By and large,
though, it is a rather efficient and well run institution, albeit an inconsistent,
de-humanizing culture.
So the question lingers, “How do you keep your neighborhood safe
when some of your neighbors have been victimized by other neighbors who
are now being warehoused in larger and larger numbers by still other
neighbors?” How do victims become compensated by longer and harsher
sentences that strip people of their last shred of decency and destroy their
family units? Off hand, it seems like a self-perpetuating system – a zero sum
game.
Interestingly, it is not the general public that is cramming our prisons
full of drug offenders, OUIer’s, three-time losers and shoplifters, 60% of
whom are destined to head back for the same offenses within 2 years. It is a
legislature that thinks they represent a nation of vigilantes. To the contrary,
the public is very receptive to such preventive measures as intervention in
parenting and better drug treatment programs.
Yes, when it comes to sex offenders, rapists and gruesome murderers,
the death penalty, castration and hard labor are high on the public’s list of
options. The overwhelming majority of prisoners at Maine State Prison,
however, are there for non-violent crimes and are becoming hardened by
being perceived by their keepers as sub-human. In what way does this
compensate their victims – neighbor-to-neighbor?
My college professor son was out for a late-night walk in his South
Carolina neighborhood a couple of weeks ago. He was hit by a young lady,
thrown up over the hood of her car, smashed her windshield and was left for
dead on the side of the road. A half hour later, he came to and lurched from
mailbox to mailbox back to his home, was hospitalized and had surgery.
What has emerged from this experience is that neighbors saw him lurching
along the street badly hurt, assumed he was a drunk and pulled their
curtains shut – not a respectable drunk, me thinks.
There is no safety anywhere, including in our gated suburban
neighborhoods. Legislators who puff themselves up as protectors of society
are negligently cutting off alternative sentencing for non-violent crimes and
threatening transfer to private prisons with their 3 meals a day of peanut
butter sandwiches. Corrections employees, from the top down, are stuck in
a 19th Century failed prison culture of thinking that only a prison cop really
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knows how to handle “dirtbags.” I guess it is easy to be tough from an ivory
tower.
In the meantime, you and I – citizens and neighbors – are being sold a
bill of goods that the public can be protected by hiding away all those “bad
guys” for interminable lengths of time. At the rate we are going, it will not
be long before the “bad guys” outnumber the rest of us. I should like to
know how much drug and alcohol treatment and sex offender rehabilitation
you might get for $40,000 a year per person who might possibly earn
enough money to offer appropriate victim compensation.
All this goes back to a self-righteous notion that some neighborhoods
are better than others, some neighbors better than others and some
politicians and their absurd parties better than others. I have not found that
to be the case in my long years of experience in industry, prison and the
legislature.
We are all in it together, folks. Rage, impulse, anger and escape from
reality infect us all to one degree or another. What ever happened to,
“There but for the grace of God, go I”?
Neighbor-to-neighbor, is this really the best we can do?