TIME TO RESPECT ALL PEOPLE
Another insightful article by Lance Tapley (see "Falling Down," November 7), focusing on abuses to prison staff, as well as to prisoners. Employees of our prisons and jails deserve better wages and in-depth training. Overcrowding, oversentencing, minimal funding, and lack of oversight by Maine people and our legislators continue to damage the futures of our incarcerated men, women, and their children. There are many good intentions spoken in committees about slowing down Maine's incarceration rate and reducing recidivism through education, addiction treatment, and alternative sentencing, but almost no action.
Most Maine people have no idea how much we are paying in taxes to support the Corrections Department and the men and women housed in prisons for nonviolent crimes and probation violations. Thanks to Lance Tapley for turning a complex, seemingly unsolvable problem into an understandable, and, based on my experience, correct description. There are solutions! And these solutions are not difficult, though they require imagination and acceptance of all people as human beings — prisoners and prison and jail staff alike.
Judy Garvey
Volunteers for Hancock Jail Residents: www.jailvolunteers.org
Blue Hill
Related:
Three years and counting, How can those in the box think outside of the box?, Corrections changes, More 
- Three years and counting
For the past three years, Portland Phoenix contributing writer Lance Tapley has been the only reporter in Maine to pay attention to the appalling conditions suffered by inmates in the Maine State Prison
- How can those in the box think outside of the box?
I was disgusted on multiple levels with what the article revealed about the Maine State Prison.
- Corrections changes
Like a movie hero, the NAACP’s new, young national president, Benjamin Jealous, swept into the 900-inmate Maine State Prison in Warren on Monday, quelling protests among the prisoners and, at least temporarily, rescuing the organization’s prison chapter from being snuffed out by state corrections officials.
- Dangerous slurs
A heavily tattooed, self-described Satanist serving a life sentence for savagely murdering two people in Augusta in 1998 — his 16-year-old stepdaughter and his 87-year-old former landlady — inmate John L’Heureux, 39, is probably not the man Maine’s gay-rights groups would choose to represent their cause in the state prison, if they were inclined to choose anyone there.
- Screams from solitary
The 132-man supermax unit within the 925-man Maine State Prison is an expensive, taxpayer-funded torture chamber that for 18 years has sucked in mostly nonviolent, mostly mentally ill prisoners and ground them up by means of mind-destroying solitary confinement, officially sanctioned beatings, “restraint” devices resembling those in medieval dungeons, sexual humiliation, and psychiatric, medical, and legal neglect.
- Less than equal
This story has a bias. It’s in favor of human rights for all people.
- Prison in turmoil
Will reform have to wait for a new governor?
- Lockdown
If you were a reporter and you received a letter like the one excerpted below, what would you make of it? Lance Tapley discusses reporting the prisons
- Wave of reform
A wave of change is moving swiftly toward Maine’s jails and prisons. It could bring major reform — or a bureaucratic jumble.
- Lawmakers to probe prison
For years controversy has churned over the Maine State Prison's treatment of both inmates and correctional officers. For the first time, legislators have taken action.
- Corrections disobeys another federal court order
For decades, as it has with other court orders, the Maine Department of Corrections has apparently been breaching a 1973 federal court’s decree that forbids disciplinary solitary confinement at the Maine State Prison beyond 10 days for minor offenses, or 30 days for major ones.
- Less
Topics:
Letters
, Criminal Sentencing and Punishment, Prisons, Maine prisons
