Prison Myth No. 1: “Prisoners Want toGo into Solitary Confinement!”

December 17, 2009 It is not news that public opinion is stacked against those who havebeen convicted and incarcerated for a crime – any crime. Check the Internetblogs on notorious cases in Maine, and you will see a marked trend toward“Lock him up and throw away the key.” Never do you read, “There but forthe grace of God go I.”Prisons are, very simply, designed to keep the presumed incorrigibleout of contact with the public in the interest of protecting both. In a world of law and order politicians and self-righteous citizens, the reality is one of spiraling costs and the expectation that when they come out they will beworse than when they went in.Do the math! The United States has more prisoners than China andenjoys a 65% rate of return (broadly referred to as recidivism) on itsinvestment. In Maine, the state with the lowest incarceration rate, what thatmeans is that within 8 years, it will cost every Maine family around $2,000 ayear to house its inmate population. The cost of housing our social servicefailures is fast outpacing the annual cost of our successes in education andsocial services.It’s a lose/lose proposition.Meanwhile, prisons have become very efficient campuses forhandling convicts. More than half the US prisons in use today have beenbuilt over the last 25 years. These facilities were designed to process peoplein and out of highly controlled work, cafeteria and recreational environmentswith an absolute minimum of management skill or ingenuity. They aresterile, military-type environments that require little of staff, expect little of inmates beyond obedience and demoralize both. They say that it all went down hill when Maine tore down the oldprison in Thomaston for the efficient facility in Warren. There’s a reason for that, I think. While we built a sparkling newprison, shined and spit-polished and administered to receive the coveted andexpensive American Corrections Association accreditation, we brought in thesame old team from top to bottom to run it. While the inmates eventuallyadapted, the old guard remains committed to a 19

century model. There are several myths as to why things don’t change in the prisonculture in Maine, none of which has much merit. I will be exploring thosemyths over the next several weeks, but the first one I want to address is themyth that insists that solitary confinement is OK because inmates like it. Youwill hear that myth being propagated by corrections officials and legislatorswho, ironically, themselves go into spasms of depression when faced withany kind of isolation. Take the attention away from a politician, and he or

she will inevitably do something outrageous to get it back.Some accuse me of that malady, and I have to admit there is enoughtruth in that accusation to cause me to constantly examine my motives andagendas when I become engaged in a crusade.Solitary confinement is as close to a 19

century Charles Dickensnovel as you can get. Maine State Prison was built only 34 years after theQuakers built the nation’s first prison, the Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia,in 1790. In 1829, the Quakers and the Anglicans expanded on the WalnutStreet experiment and built the Eastern State Penitentiary, like Walnut Streeta solitary confinement prison operating under the theory that isolation andsolitude inspire repentance. Eastern State closed in 1971 as a failed prisonmodel.In 1842, Charles Dickens himself visited the Eastern StatePenitentiary. He later wrote, "I believe it to be cruel and wrong. I hold thisdaily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worsethan any torture of the body."Eventually, high tech, maximum security prisons like the one inWarren, Maine, became the option of choice for politicians and correctionofficials needing to keep inmates off the front page of the newspapers andunder control. They were the modern means of satisfying the three-monkeydefense – see no evil; hear no evil; speak no evil. The public could now restin its pride of a modern facility and in its desire for ignorance of its innerworkings. Surrounded by 1,100 acres of farmland, Maine State Prison is off anybody’s radar – that is until the recent homicide/neglect of convicted sexoffender, Sheldon Weinstein.On my first trip as a Chaplain through the Special Management Unit(SMU), the modern term for solitary confinement, I was surprised to findinmates like Cal, Nick, Art, Troy, Mike, Ron, Dan, Jesse and many, manyothers who were working on breaking the record for the most months insolitary. One of them reached 20 months, as I recall. Somebody inmanagement failed to get the message from the 1960’s that isolation tendedto make people crazy – not better.It is very common when an inmate is within months of being releasedto let him serve out his last stretch in solitary and then release him to thestreets. One classic case was Jonathan Dix, a severely depressed blackinmate who went from months in SMU to Lewiston and was dead of anoverdose within 2 weeks. I pleaded with Jonathan to head straight to hisfamily in Brockton, MA, several of whom would have come to the prison topick him up.What I saw in SMU were broken people who had lost all sense of dignity and self-respect, which led them to act out and earn more “high risk”time in solitary. In January, 1998, CNN Correspondent Peg Tyre quotedDavid Levin of Prisoners Legal Services, who called excessive solitaryconfinement “death by incarceration.” She interviewed psychiatrist Dr.Henry Weinstein (unrelated to inmate Sheldon Weinstein who bled out froman unattended ruptured spleen in Maine’s SMU on April 24, 2009). Dr.