Stan Moody

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

Stan Moody of Manchester, ME, former Maine State Representative and most recently a
Chaplain at Maine State Prison in Warren, is advocating for transparency and accountability in
Maine’s prison system…A prolific and published writer, Dr. Moody is pastor of the Meeting
House Church in Manchester and has been a speaker on human rights issues at conferences
around the nation…

Maine Department of Corrections: An Institutional Ghetto

July 23, 2010

The Maine Commissioner of Corrections once stated to me that his budgetary concerns
were so pressing that he had not been to a corrections conference in years. Yet, the Department
insists on comparing itself favorably with other prison systems with the sound bite, “We comply
with nationally-accepted prison standards,” referring to its American Corrections Association
accreditation, itself of dubious distinction.
The taxpayers of Maine have built a 21st Century box to house its education and social
services failures. “You can eat off the floor” is a common description of the new prison at
Warren. You may be able to eat off the floor, but to work there or to live there is another story.
Beneath the patina of spit, polish and efficiency is a culture that has not changed in 100 or more
years – boring, marking of time, paying mere lip service to rehabilitation, a heavy dose of human
warehousing, inconsistent discipline and nepotism.
To put it bluntly, staff views its task as keeping a lid on a potentially explosive system,
reacting in fear to every crisis. The primary goal of incarceration for these folks, long beneath
the thumb of paranoia, is to keep the public from asking embarrassing questions. They impose on
themselves rigid standards of performance that are tragically unrealistic. Even suspicious deaths
of prisoners become crises to be managed rather than lessons to be learned.
These are, for the most part, good, hardworking folks. They learned early on, however,
that their jobs depended on bending to an unfair and inconsistent system managed by people who
have deflected criticism by insisting that their jobs are more dangerous, more demanding and
more unique than anything anyone else is doing to make a living. Governors, legislators,
bloggers, friends and relatives have massaged these myths to a self-fulfilling prophesy. It has
become a ghetto of fear and ignorance, and no one seems to have any idea of how to break free
of its grip.
The fact is that being a prison staff employee ranks in danger right up there with being a
licensed driver. It doesn’t even make the top ten of dangerous jobs.
I received a plea from a mother whose son is a convicted sex offender in another State.
He is trying to get a transfer back home to Maine State Prison. She wanted to know what I
thought. Here is some of my response to her:
 In short, I cannot answer your questions. It is my opinion that the
systemic problems within the prison are not going to go away soon and that a new
warden will not change the entrenched mentality that prevails from the
Governor’s Office on down. The ethic at Maine State Prison is definitely one that
is dictated by a Department of Corrections that suffers from typical ivory tower
stonewalling against real, relevant feedback.
While the Maine Corrections Center at Windham seems to have a far
better track record than Maine State Prison, you cannot depend on being there for
long, as prisoners there are subject to being transferred elsewhere without notice
for minor infractions or to relieve overcrowding. Every Thursday sees a vanload
of prisoners transferred to Maine State Prison. Convicted sex offender, Sheldon
Weinstein, was transferred there after “falling” from his top bunk and breaking
several bones. Wheelchair bound, Weinstein later died in solitary confinement of
a ruptured spleen, spun by prison administration for 6 weeks as “natural causes.”

I have seen this kind of ghetto atmosphere in churches, in schools and in industry, where
clichés and sound bites sustain ignorance and misinformation for a long time. For most addictive
systems, however, the information age has crumbled the walls of secrecy. Maine State Prison,
within 1,100 acres of farmland, can control information in and out for the foreseeable future, but
not forever. The crushing financial burden and the efforts of clever prisoners will eventually
prevail. The taxpayers will learn the realities of what goes on in our prison system and how
much it costs.
In the meantime, staff members with sufficient ethical integrity and intestinal fortitude to
come forward are in short supply. Those who would quickly commend to you their own courage
in the face of danger show little when it comes to standing up for what is morally right.