Written by George Swanson, a folksinger and Episcopal priest, this unusual folk opera tells how Victor Valdez, a sickly, working-class immigrant from the Dominican Republic, died in 2009 in solitary confinement at the Maine State Prison – and how the causes of his death were covered up.
The state prosecutor ...
Bonnie Kerness: Pioneer in the Struggle Against Solitary Confinement
by Lance Tapley
In 1986, Ojore Lutalo, a black revolutionary in Trenton State Prison – now the New Jersey State Prison – wrote to Bonnie Kerness’ American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) office in Newark. His letter described the extreme isolation and ...
In 2008, within a supposedly high-security prison in the giant federal correctional complex in Florence, Colorado, Gary Watland, a “boarder” from Maine, murdered another prisoner, white supremacist Mark Baker.
After five and a half years – and after, probably, millions in taxpayer-paid legal costs, including for his defense team – ...
An almost-clean version of hell
by Lance Tapley
There was a stain of what looked like blood on the floor of the otherwise shiny-clean, empty Mental Health Unit isolation cell. “It’s Kool-Aid,” said my minder, a deputy warden. He smiled. But, as the saying goes, I hadn’t drunk the Kool-Aid. ...
Several weeks after firing Maine State Prison warden Patricia Barnhart on January 10, 2013, and two years after taking over the Department of Corrections (DOC), Commissioner Joseph Ponte appears determined to continue – and ramp up – his forceful program of reform.
In an interview at the DOC’s Augusta headquarters, ...
Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins is a key cosponsor of legislation that, among other provisions, would outlaw psychologically damaging solitary confinement for more than 500 chimpanzees caged for research in federally supported laboratories. In July 2012 the bill bipartisanly passed the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee on its way ...
Less than three months into his job, Maine’s new corrections commissioner, Joseph Ponte, has begun to dramatically reform the Maine State Prison’s long-troubled solitary confinement “supermax” unit.
He has cut its population by more than half.
He has stopped – so far, after several weeks under his new rules – ...
Book Review by Lance Tapley
Why did middle-class liberals, historically in the forefront of compassionate social reform, allow, with nary a peep, the construction of our prison colossus? A new book, Texas Tough, by Robert Perkinson, helps explain why liberals not only went along with this right-wing, racist project – ...
In Maine’s last gubernatorial campaign, the controversial Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation’s largest for-profit prison operator, spent $25,000 on behalf of Republican candidate Paul LePage, now Maine’s newly-elected governor. The money was given to the Republican Governors Association’s Maine political action committee, which spent heavily on LePage. No ...
“Exterminate all the brutes!”
– Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
“They beat the shit out of you,” said Mike James, hunched near the smeared plexiglass separating us. He was talking about the cell “extractions” he’d endured at the hands of the supermax-unit guards at the Maine State Prison.
“They push ...
