Stan Moody

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

Maine Cop Culture Leads to Prison Abuse

Prison guards have difficulty holding the line between discipline and abuse. They receive
8 weeks of orientation and are subjected to 40 hours per year of professional development
courses; they are held to 6 months of probation, and they still can’t seem to get it quite right.
While the law-and-order public tacitly applauds the abuse, it holds prison guards (aka
Corrections Officers) in contempt.
They are in the no-win position of giving the public what it wants while failing to earn its
respect. The code of silence that stifles Maine’s prisons adds to the distrust and draws prison
reform advocates out of the woodwork. The truth is that being a prison guard is a crushingly
boring job with little support from prison management and a lot of pressure to feed the sex and
drug habit within our prison system.
Finland offers an interesting alternative.
Maine’s incarceration rate stands at around 350 per 100,000 of population, with its
recidivism rate at 58%. By comparison, Finland’s incarceration rate is 52 per 100,000 and its
recidivism rate below 30%. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, Finland boasted
one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. What happened?
It has been suggested that Finland’s low poverty rate and its homogeneous population
lead to a more secure society with less fear of change and thus less compulsion to commit crime.
Much the same might be said of Maine, however. The difference, I think, lies in the public
regard for its police officers.
The other day, my son was driving on his learner’s permit at the speed limit and with all
his paperwork. We passed a police officer. He tensed, and his hands froze on the wheel. I
thought to myself, “We are teaching these kids to be scared to death of police officers.” That
mindset has spilled over to prison guards, security guards and those officious federal employees
hired to keep you and me from bringing our Altoids into a federal office building.
We have become a culture of anger and fear, and, by Gawd, we are building an
institutional firewall to make sure we stay that way!
In 2003, the New York Times published an article on prisons in Finland.1 “In polls
measuring what national institutions they admire most, Fins put their criminal-coddling police in
the No. 1 position.” I am told that school teachers are right up there near the top.
Being a police officer is neither exciting nor dangerous. The truth is that it is rated as the
9th most boring job in America.2 As for danger, Forbes Magazine rates police officers and
sheriffs as the 10th most dangerous job at 21.4 deaths per 100,000, slightly higher than that of
licensed drivers.3 Prison guards, according to another poll, come in 18th.4 At Maine State Prison,

1
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/02/world/caught-red-handed-let-it-be-in-finland.html
2
http://listverse.com/2008/09/25/top-10-worst-urban-jobs-in-america/
3
http://www.forbes.com/2008/08/25/dangerous-jobs-fishing-lead-careers-cx_mk_0825danger.html
4
http://www.cardozaplayer.com/article_details.php?cid=40&contentType=1&typeSub=0
they are still talking about Warden Richard Tinker, who died of a stab wound to the neck on May
14, 1863.
By comparison, loggers and commercial fishermen, familiar occupations in Maine, are in
5x more dangerous jobs than are police officers.
What does Finland do that is different? For one thing, walls and fences, with their
pressure-sensitive barbed wire, have been replaced with camera surveillance and electronic alert
devices. There are no clanging cell doors. Guards are unarmed and wear either civilian clothes
or uniforms free of official emblems. Home furloughs are available near the end of a sentence.
For midterm prisoners, there are houses on the grounds where they can spend up to four days at a
time with visiting spouses and children, a policy observed in Canada as well.
Solitary confinement, a phrase unsuccessfully expunged by Maine Department of
Corrections, is sparingly used – 20 days for drug and fighting violations; otherwise 5 days. Here
may be the difference: “Finns credit their press and their politicians with keeping the law-and-
order debate civil and not strident. ‘Our newspapers are not full of sex and crime,’ Mr. Salminen
(Prison Services Director) said. ‘And there is no pressure on me to get tough on criminals from
populist-issue politicians like there would be in a lot of other countries.’''5
Bringing it back to our reality, it is time for police officers and prison guards to start
mixing with the public. The long, blue line of silence isn’t working for them and isn’t working
for us.

5
Ibid., nytimes.