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Our state has a massive problem, one receiving little press outside of one investigative journalist at one small alternative newspaper in Portland.
The Portland Phoenix’s Lance Tapley has been the only journalist to write regularly about the Maine State Prison in Warren for most of the decade. Maine isn’t listening.
The Maine State Prison has been accused of a wide range of human rights violations. Deane Brown, a prisoner and would-be whistleblower, was relocated to Maryland because he had information that made him “a threat to the facility,” wrote Tapley. Ryan Rideout, a 24-year-old mentally ill inmate, committed suicide. There are a score of other allegations.
Brown, 45, is serving a 59-year sentence for multiple burglaries. According to a complaint filed by his lawyer, the inmate befriended two journalists while imprisoned at Maine State Prison. One was Tapley and the other was Ron Huber, a Rockland radio personality. In October 2006, prison officials filed paperwork to monitor Brown’s calls to the two journalists. The next day, Warden Jeffrey Merrill told Brown in a letter that he was erasing their numbers from his approved call list, warning him not to disclose “confidential information.”
Brown was then linked shoddily to an escape attempt when an officer heard him say “an atomic bomb is about to hit the place.” This was on the same day of an interview with Tapley, meaning the bomb in question could easily have been a reference to information that would appear in Tapley’s article. Brown had never met the inmate accused of the escape attempt, the complaint says. With no evidence, Brown was placed in solitary confinement.
On Nov. 8 of the same year, the complaint says that a corrections official received a call from Merrill. In an e-mail, the official wrote, “I received a call from Warden Jeffrey Merrill … who indicated that it is very urgent that we transfer [Brown] today or tomorrow at the latest.”
Brown was transferred days later to a Maryland prison. His lawyer and power of attorney were not contacted. He has been effectively exiled away from his friends in Maine. Gov. John Baldacci has been written, according to Tapley and Huber, but has chosen not to act.
As bad as the Brown case is, the death of Ryan Rideout could be perhaps the largest case of abuse the prison has been involved in.
Rideout was a 24-year-old man with a history of severe mental illness. He told Renee Ordway of the Bangor Daily News from a jail cell that he had tried to kill himself 13 times since the age of 12 and had been diagnosed with many mental illnesses as well as placed on and off several medications throughout his life.
He was serving a 17-month sentence for burglary. He was hard to handle on the part of guards, so he was placed in the solitary confinement, super-maximum security wing. Even after his suicidal history, he was deemed to be not at risk, according to Merrill in a Rockland newspaper.
On Oct. 5, 2006, Rideout hung himself by tying a bed sheet to a sprinkler head, wrote Tapley. There have been allegations by fellow inmates that a guard taunted Rideout, urging him to commit suicide.
Why is a small arts and culture paper the only paper reporting on this? Tapley should be commended for his underrated journalism.
This problem is an inconvenient one — it involves people who have proven they can’t handle outside life. Still, a prison must treat inmates with care and respect. Prison is about rehabilitation, not just storage.
I call upon Maine’s Legislature to conduct thorough investigations into the above problems and into the conditions of the prison in general. At Maine State, 40 percent of prisoners take psychotropic medication, according to one of Tapley’s articles. Many do not belong in prison — they belong in a mental health facility, where they can be attended to by mental health professionals on a full-time basis.
Merrill resigned this August. We’ll never know if Tapley’s allegations of wrongdoing played a part in his decision to resign. The fact remains he went down in a firestorm of problems. If we are truly a state mindful of civil rights, all of us — from students to the legislature — must demand answers.
Michael Shepherd is a columnist for The Maine Campus.
