He says he has been working toward reforms for several months. His decisions partially implement recommendations of a National Institute of Corrections consultant who came to Maine in December from the Colorado prison system to evaluate the SMU, at the commissioner’s invitation. National correctional officials hold up Colorado’s Supermax as a model in which violence in dealing with prisoners has been greatly reduced. Magnusson also sent six of his prison staff to the Colorado State Penitentiary to study its practices. He will rely on them — they include two deputy wardens — to work up details of how to change the Supermax. He says the staff is enthusiastic about making changes.

Guard charged with assault
One subtle change may have already occurred in the difficult prisoner-guard psychology of the Supermax. Guards could become more careful in their treatment of inmates because, while prosecutions of prisoners for assaults on guards have been almost routine, for the first time in at least 25 years a guard is being prosecuted for an alleged assault on a prisoner.

In late December, after sitting on the case for over a year, Jeff Rushlau, the midcoast counties’ district attorney, charged former Supermax guard Darren Barbeau, of Benton, with using illegal force against prisoner Christopher Humphrey during an SMU extraction in November 2004. Rushlau also charged Barbeau and former guards Dennis Scott Plaisted, of Palermo, and Daniel Ross, of Woolwich, with “falsifying” evidence — attempting to destroy a videotape of the extraction. The cases are awaiting trial in Superior Court in Rockland.

Prison warden Jeffrey Merrill says that when the tape was recovered and he saw what had happened, he fired two of the three men and notified the DA. He suspended the third, Daniel Ross, for a week. Ross still works at the prison.

In over 25 years of employment in the district attorney’s office, as DA and as an assistant, Rushlau says he had never seen a prison guard prosecuted for assault on a prisoner. (Nationally, there are no figures on guard assaults on prisoners, correctional officials and critics agree.)

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His delay in bringing the charges, he says, occurred because of his heavy workload and because he had to weigh the reality that guards are allowed under the law to use physical force on prisoners in certain circumstances.

Barbeau, in a telephone interview, admits taking the videotape cassette and pulling the ribbon out of it. He took the tape to an investigator two days later, he says, to defend himself against the prisoner’s accusation of using excessive force.

“I made a mistake,” he says of what he did with the tape. “It wasn’t the right thing to do.”

He had taken it because other guards felt it was possibly incriminating, he says, adding that he hadn’t even looked at it. “It seemed like it was past practice,” he says. “They’ve gotten rid of tapes in the past.”

His defense to the charge of assault, he says, is that prison policy on the use of force “wasn’t clear cut.” There was “no training at all in extractions,” he says. “They were throwing you to the wolves,” speaking of the prison administration.

“They tell you to go in and use what’s necessary,” he says, “but they don’t tell you how to do it.”

Commissioner Magnusson says that there is training in cell extractions and that he is not aware of any other tapes destroyed.

From Barbeau’s perspective, the episode that resulted in the assault charge was “a regular extraction,” he says, among the 40 to 50 in which he was involved during the year he worked at the Supermax.

Because of his size (six-foot-two and 270 pounds), he was often the man “put on the shield,” he says, the first of the six-man team to charge into a cell to subdue a prisoner. A former Augusta policeman, he was once a state arm-wrestling champion.

If convicted of assault, Barbeau could spend up to a year in the prison system where he once worked. He is charged with misdemeanor assault, which is why his potential sentence is less than the felony-assault sentences possible for inmate Michael James. But a maximum one-year sentence is also possible if he is convicted of falsifying physical evidence.

Responses to the articles
“A lot of the staff was very upset” about the previous Supermax articles, says Warden Merrill.

Indeed, guards past and present and their family members, wrote letters to the editor or in other ways expressed in detail how difficult it is for guards in their dangerous, low-paid jobs — a subject they felt our series neglected. Most of the feedback received, however, was positive. Several prisoners, family members, and advocates for prisoners called and wrote pleading for coverage of injustices they believed had been done to prisoners other than those mentioned in the articles.

Yet as part of its accreditation process national ACA officials recently issued statements highly praising the prison. The Department of Corrections and Governor John Baldacci trumpeted them loudly in a press release — it received a good deal of attention in the daily papers — even though the prison still has another hoop of evaluation to go through before it actually receives accreditation.

“I don’t see how the facility can be accredited while this is going on,” Senator Nutting says, referring to the Supermax’s treatment of mentally ill prisoners.

Skepticism exists in other quarters about ACA accreditation. The Web site of the magazine In These Times lists accredited prisons where prisoners have rioted over conditions (www.inthesetimes.com).

Some former Supermax workers got in touch to say they don’t see how it can be easily reformed.

“The problem in the Max is so much more multifaceted than you could ever imagine,” says Anne Leidinger of Appleton, in an e-mail. She worked there for two years as a nurse. “And I would say to those who have not ever had first-hand experience in being in the Max day after day, that you cannot change just one layer of the problem. And the [restraint] chair is just one layer.”

But at the legislative committee meeting Commissioner Magnusson said changing conditions in the Supermax is now “my top priority.”

Email the author
Lance Tapley: ltapley@prexar.com