News Features

Another Supermax hunger strike

Dungeon Watch

By LANCE TAPLEY | September 2, 2009

Protesting that nothing had been done by prison authorities to relieve the torture of prolonged solitary confinement, on August 17 inmates of the Maine State Prison’s 100-man Special Management Unit or “Supermax” reprised a hunger strike that had been abandoned last May after officials made promises, according to the inmates, to “work with” them to meet demands for radios or televisions.

Michel D’Angelo, a striker, wrote the Phoenix that the latest protest involved nine prisoners. “We are quite literally going crazy” from solitary confinement, he said. (Many Supermax inmates have mental illnesses to begin with. They often are put there as punishment for breaking the Warren prison’s rules.)

D’Angelo said Supermax prisoners are not allowed to participate in educational, social, or religious programs. He will be released soon, he said: “I’m scared. I know if I don’t clear my mind and get some help I will be a very real liability to society.”

Another Supermax inmate, Jesse Baum, who was not striking himself but acting as the strikers’ spokesman, echoed D’Angelo’s comments in another letter. When he’s let out of prison in November, he said, “I will have spent 17 months in solitary confinement,” and he feared being released “with no readjustment period.”

After conditions failed to improve following the May strike, Baum said, “Many inmates made suicide attempts.” He told of one prisoner who “started writing Bible scriptures in blood” on his cell walls.

Deputy state Corrections commissioner Denise Lord said on September 1 that the newest strike was “on again, off again.” She said “no more than four” prisoners skip a meal on any given day. She also said the prison had no “current intention” to provide radios or TVs to Supermax prisoners.

Limiting Supermax solitary
Representative James Schatz, a Blue Hill Democrat, has proposed legislation to tightly limit when prisoners can be kept in the solitary confinement of the 100-man Supermax unit of the Maine State Prison in Warren.
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.
Suspect speaks; victim’s family begins $1-million-plus lawsuit
The widow of Sheldon Weinstein, the Maine State Prison inmate who died in April several days after allegedly being beaten by inmates, has taken the first step toward filing a wrongful-death lawsuit against prison guards, Department of Corrections “policy-making personnel,” and prison medical-care providers.
Prison ‘troublemaker’ confronts racism, medical abuse
Vacillating between grit and despair — between aggressive lawsuits and suicide attempts — Deane Brown, the prisoner who in 2005 blew the whistle on the torture of mentally ill inmates at the Maine State Prison’s solitary-confinement “Supermax” unit, is struggling against prison conditions in Maryland, where he was exiled by the Baldacci administration.
A ‘moral victory’ against supermax torture
At times the legislative debate on LD 1611, the bill to limit solitary confinement of the state’s prisoners, became surreal.
Are doctors complicit in prison torture?
In the past few years an outcry has arisen over the involvement of military and CIA medical professionals and psychologists in torture. Some critics have even suggested criminal prosecution of the medical staff involved or, at least, revocation of their professional licenses.
Prison in turmoil
Will reform have to wait for a new governor?
Pressure rising
Four months ago, a Phoenix investigative series revealed abuses of inmates at the “Supermax,” a 100-bed, solitary-confinement, maximum-security facility inside the Maine State Prison in Warren; since our articles were published, several important developments have taken place.
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.
The cost of torture
In the end, whether mass solitary confinement continues at the Maine State Prison supermax may come down to an issue of money rather than right or wrong. And resolving that issue may come down to whether the state wants to pay more now to pay less in the long term.
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.
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